Tinker and Blue (7 page)

11

Haight-Ashbury, when they finally did stumble upon it, explained a lot to Blue.

“No wonder we couldn't find it. Look at the way these Americans spell Hate.”

No masquerade dance they had ever attended prepared them for Haight-Ashbury, and they had seen some weird costumes come out of the Halloween imaginations of the people back home.

“No doubt about it, Blue,” Tinker said. “This is the hippie mother lode. It's not so bad when you see them scattered all over the place, but a crowd of hippies like this looks like a grade one art class went crazy with their crayons and then the whole works came alive.”

They walked along through the swarm of people, nudging and pointing out for each other their own winning choices from among the braids and ponytails, ponchos and beads, the faces painted with peace symbols and petals, the clash of colourful clothes that had turned goodwill stores into the fashion centres of the decade, the shiny-eyed people sitting on the sidewalk smoking drugs and offering a drag to complete strangers. They walked through clouds of incense and marijuana and music spilling out of every window, Sgt. Pepper joining Bob Dylan and a dozen other performers in a mass jam session of albums, their popularity in competition with street musicians who played in front of a cap or hat sprinkled with a few coins and loads of encouragement from those passing by or stopping to listen.

“It would be nice to find out where they keep all that free love we keep hearing about,” Blue said, his own progress through the busy street peppered with winks at the prettiest girls. “There must of been a hell of a bonfire here when they all burned their bras,” he remarked to Tinker whose head was swivelling from one beautiful fantasy to another. “I may not think much of a guy who would burn his draft card but I got nothing but respect for a girl who burns her bra, boy.”

A boy in long, straggly hair approached them for a hand-out and when Blue apologized for having nothing to offer, he just sneered the word “Tourists!” at them and walked away.

“What the hell does he mean, tourists, Tinker? Do we look rich? Are we driving over the Cabot Trail? Hell, we're not even Americans! I've got a good mind to go back and clock that guy.”

They sat on a step and within a minute a voice from behind them said, “Hi.” They turned to see a girl in a granny dress, wearing round spectacles, standing in the doorway. “Would you like some soup?”

She brought them two bowls of soup, asking only that they think good thoughts of the earth that provided the vegetables for the soup while they ate, and to just leave the bowls behind when they were done. The soup was hot and tasted of things unfamiliar as they sat there spooning it into their mouths, letting the street's swirl of colours and music wash past them while they watched, Blue commenting that it was the biggest un-chaperoned teen dance in history. “These hippies are caught up in a Godless communism and they don't even know it, Tinker,” Blue said with a sad shake of his head.

“Kathy said there was no such thing as a hippie, Blue. What do you make of that? She said that's somebody else's word for something they don't understand.”

“Tinker, Tinker, Tinker, you're so easily led astray. I have to keep a close eye on you, boy. Look, there are Liberals and Tories, Catholics and Protestants, Cape Bretoners and the rest of the world, and hippies and us. Even Saint Thomas believed in Jesus once he put his hand into his side, didn't he? Well, how much proof do you need?”

“I don't know, but when I talked to Kathy, you know, like it was weird at first, but after a while she just got to be like another person. I didn't think about a hippie every time I looked at her even with the way she dressed or talked.”

“I bet you didn't, buddy. I know what you were thinking of. With Karma, eh, the more I got to know her the weirder she got, but the more I liked her anyway, but the one thing I know for sure, Tinker, is that she's a hippie. She'd blend into this street like flour into my mother's biscuits. Everybody belongs some place and she belongs here, but not us, old buddy, not us. If we belonged out here with these hippies, I'd be freezing my arse off in a river in Colorado right this minute.”

In the silence that followed, Tinker felt relaxed, as if the soup had soothed for a moment the gnawing in his stomach. He let his thoughts stop taking charge of him for a while, freeing them like children for the summer from the school of his own conflicts, and let them drift, forgetting about the poverty of their pockets and the war zone of their hotel. Inside his own silence the throbbing energy of the music and the flow of people on the street, moving as if life itself were something to be danced away joyfully, filled him with the ache of a stranger who did not know how to belong to a world not his own.

Blue surveyed the scene with the eye of a survivor washed up on a foreign shore and who now must learn how to forage for food in an unfamiliar forest. Not much of what Farmer had taught him applied here, where the rules were not clear enough for Blue to manipulate to his own advantage. They were broke and he tried not to cast himself in the desperate role of the hippie who had asked them for money. Standing on a street corner bumming spare change was a wino's economy. Some of the winos back home were artists at that particular existence, setting up shop on John Beaton's Corner or some other high pedestrian traffic area like the Co-op parking lot, hustling people they knew with a new story every morning. But bumming was not Blue's field of expertise, nor did he want it to be. So he examined everyone and everything on the street looking for another point of entry until a wide grin of self-satisfaction erased the lines of concentration from his forehead.

“Come on, old buddy. We got work to do,” he said, ribbing Tinker from his reverie with an elbow.

Blue confided nothing to his friend as he led him back along the street, rushing past potters and leather workers, silversmiths and street artists, reaching the end of the hippie population and heading toward the skid row familiarity of their hotel.

In the room, Blue stood in front of the cracked bureau mirror running his comb in unfamiliar directions through his hair until it hung in the style Karma had once imposed; he had returned it to its customery ducktail upon departure from the Human Rainbow Commune. Picking up his guitar he turned to Tinker.

“Come on, buddy. We're going to infiltrate the enemy, to quote the other fellow.”

12

“Cripes, Tinker, I wish people would stop dropping drugs into my hat,” Blue complained as he shifted aside a couple of purple cigarettes and a small rabbitturd of hashish to count out a dollar and seventy-three cents in very small change. For three days, they had been propped against the brick wall of a building teaching Sgt. Pepper and Bob Dylan a few things about music. Blue, studying the trickle of change into his blue hat, read the tide of its ebb and flow, noting that Tinker's songs took in revenue at a rate of ten to one to his own singing. He finally settled back like what's-his-name, Brian Epstein, to chord and plot the course of their partnership which would take them all the way from their meagre beginnings in hippie Heaven to the golden halo of spotlight that fell on the stage of Ryman Hall. Destiny. Sometimes a man can feel it against all the odds.

Occasionally, Blue left Tinker to sing a cappella while he did a reconnaissance of the competition and concluded that they weren't doing any better or worse than most, except for a classical violinist who at his sidewalk location introduced Bach to the Beatles, where the two got along famously. The violinist had the unfair advantage of possessing only one arm, managing the bow with an ingenious contraption which he operated with his teeth. Why a guy who would have no trouble getting himself a disability pension would go through all the trouble of learning to play the violin with one arm and thirty-two teeth was a mystery to Blue, and he resented the pisspot full of money the fiddler's top hat was taking in. Despite the unfairness of that competition, Tinker and Blue averaged enough to eat, buy Blue's cigarettes, and put a few dollars toward another week of luxury in their home-sweet-home away from home. The profit margin beyond those immediate needs was assigned to their gas-money-home account, current balance: zero.

Tinker's repertoire didn't include a lot of the popular stuff sung in this particular corner of the planet. His renditions of Irish rebel songs, Scottish ballads, Cape Breton classics and select choices from the country and western charts disoriented those who stopped to listen. They said, “Wow!” a lot and walked away befuddled by this crack in their Universe where old wars were celebrated while the people on the street were trying to stop a current one. It broke the symmetry of this make-love-not-war neighbourhood.

To please his audience, Tinker pulled out of the air around him the melodies and words that appealed to him, practising what he could remember back in their room. “Pretty heavy into this love and peace business there, aren't you, Tinker?” Blue said in his review of Tinker's new material while acknowledging that it made them more money than “Molly Bawn.”

Tinker, as usual, chose the words he sang carefully. He didn't care if a song was sentimental or rowdy or filled with rage or warm with love so long as he believed the story. Unlike Blue, he had written no songs of his own that he needed to sing; they had already been written for him. What appealed to him here in San Francisco, and what he found in common with Cape Breton, was that music ran through the core of what newspapers called the counter culture just like it ran through the culture back home. People defined themselves with it, recognized each other through it. Music was really the only way into this counter culture, he realized. His hair hid all but his lobes now, and his red polka-dot handkerchief was tied around his thigh instead of poking a small pennant of itself from his back pocket, but without the music he wouldn't learn much at all about where he was.

Hoping he wouldn't offend the well-meaning gestures that rained drugs into his hat, Blue told the monied people who stopped to listen, “Thanks for the quarter, Mac, and listen, for another one you can have your choice of those purple cigarettes there.” It turned out to be a brisk trade once Tinker and Blue discussed its ethical implications, reasoning, like the hippie in the back seat of the Plymouth, that the quicker they got rid of the drugs the less chance they would have of getting arrested for them. According to Blue's high-school Economics class, they were simply unloading an inventory of commodities that their company had no interest in carrying. That argument carried them through a couple of days until Tinker woke up sweating from a nightmare of being arrested as a drug pusher, a profession which, unlike its first cousin, bootlegging, was universally scorned in Cape Breton. Blue had to call upon all his theological and business knowledge to assure his friend that there was nothing wrong with bartering the products that fell by chance into his hat.

“Listen, Tinker, you know a lot about motors but you don't know anything about running a business. I studied all about it in Economics and here's how it works. I have something and you want it. We make a deal. Transaction completed. Sure, sometimes it might be a little illegal but in business, if you don't get caught everything's okay. Even the Church will tell you that. Look at the Mafia, for God's sake. They're all Catholics right from Italy and you can't get any more Catholic than that, and the Mafia makes the most perfect Catholics of all because they're organized just like the Church. They go around cementing people to the bottom of rivers and all that, but it's just business, Tinker, because they still go to church every Sunday and give gobs of money to the priests and get forgiven.

“The Church understands this because when they used to go off on crusades and kill a couple of million pagans, well, it was just Church business. It had nothing to do with Jesus Christ or the Mass or anything the Church believes in. It was just business, buddy, looting and pillaging to build cathedrals to the greater Glory of God. They tell you to love your fellow man, but if you can't, they'll forgive you. That's what the priests are there for, to make everything all right.”

Tinker went back to sleep praying not to get caught and reminding himself that if he had to confess to being a drug pusher he had better do it here in San Francisco before he went back home where the priest always recognized his voice, called him Tinker, and told him to say three Hail Marys every night for the strength to stop indecently assaulting himself.

The next morning they went back to business as usual.

—

“According to Article One, Section Two, Paragraph Three of our union contract with this city, there will be no singing in the rain, Tinker,” Blue announced as he emptied the contents of his blue hat into his pocket, placed the hat on his head and snapped close the buckles of his guitar case while a scattering of rain peppered the sidewalk. Warm and refreshing in itself, they recognized it as a prelude to a more dismal downpour.

Tinker and Blue stood wondering about the nearest shelter when they saw her coming, carrying her own canopy of sky, twirling her umbrella into a dazzling swirl of meaningless colours. The abstractly painted umbrella was a living thing covering its semi-globe with joyfully unpredictable movements. The hypnotic spin of oranges and blues, greens and whites, flowing through each other like phantoms, was oddly beautiful in a city gone damp and dreary.

“Let's follow her,” Tinker said. A curiosity he couldn't explain rose like a road one will wonder about for a long time if it isn't followed.

Blue knew that it was a foolish idea to walk around in the rain following an umbrella, but he couldn't find enough conviction in himself to argue against his own curiosity. He decided this was as good a time as any to pamper Tinker's infatuation with hippies.

“All roads lead home, as the other feller says,” Tinker said with a Blue-mimicking shrug that started them off, re-enacting the boyhood pleasures they took in following the town's fire truck, or the First of July parade or some mumbling drunk, amusing themselves with mimicry. Fire trucks and parades were predictable fun, but following drunks was an unscripted adventure because the whole world was an obstacle to them. Sometimes they wore shoes, sometimes they went in the sock feet of a man who had just escaped from his wife through the bedroom window. Sometimes they pissed on the sidewalk, oblivious to the mid-afternoon audience shopping along the main street, sometimes they pissed in their pants. Sometimes they hummed to themselves, sometimes they snarled at the world. Always, it proved to be worth the effort because it usually ended with a story for them to tell their buddies.

They trailed the maddened rainbow past a cluster of hippies communing with the damper side of nature, along empty blocks vacated by the more sensible freaks, meeting nine-to-fivers scurrying for a roof to put over their heads. Soon they were beyond the influence of Haight-Ashbury and the world began to look more like it was supposed to look, streets and cars and people dressed liked people.