Things Will Never Be the Same Page 18

  “Young lady,” said Dix. “You don’t seem to realize what serious trouble you’re in.”

  “What are you going to do?” asked Ginny, looking the principal square in the eyes. “Castrate me?”

  I answered some questions about the fire escape that used to be on the south side of the building. “They fell on a community college student one day four years ago,” I said. “Good thing we never had to use them.” We were outside again.

  “Over there was the gym. World’s worst dance floor, second worst basketball court. Enough sweat was spilled there over the years to float the Big Mo. We can’t go in, though, they now use it to store visual aids for the Parks and Rec department.”

  There was the morning when Dix had us all go to the gym for Assembly. His purpose, it went on to appear after he had talked for ten minutes, was to try to explain why the Armed Forces recruiters would be there on Career Day, along with the realtors and college reps and Rotarians who would come to tell you about the wonders of their profession in the Great Big World Out There. (Some nasty posters had appeared on every bare inch of wall in the building that morning questioning not only their presence on Career Day but also their continuing existence on the third rock from the sun.)

  He was going on about how they had been there, draft or no draft, war or no war, every Career Day when a small sound started at the back of the ranked bleachers. The sound of two stiffened index fingers drumming slowly but very deliberately dum-dum-thump dum-dum-thump. Then a few other sets of fingers joined in dum-dum-thump dum-dum-thump, at first background, then rising, louder and more insistent, then feet took it up, and it spread from section to section, while the teachers looked around wildly. Dum-Dum-Thump Dum-Dum-Thump.

  Dix stopped in mid-sentence, mouth open, while the sound grew. He saw half the student body—the other half was silent, or like the jocks led by Hoyt Lawton, beginning to boo and hiss—rise to its feet clapping its hands and stamping its feet in time—

  DUM DUM THUMP DUM DUM THUMP

  He yelled at people and pointed, then he quit and his shoulders sagged. And on a hidden passed signal, everybody quit on the same beat and it was deathly silent in the gym. Then everybody sat back down.

  I think Dix had seen the future that morning—Kent State, the Cambodian incursion, the cease fire, the end of Nixon, the fall of Saigon.

  He dismissed us. The recruiters were there on Career Day, anyway.

  I’d almost finished my tour. “One more place, not on the official stops,” I said. I took them across the side street and down half a block.

  “Oh wow!” said someone halfway there. “The Grindstone!”

  We got there. It was a one-story place with real glass bricks across the whole front that would cost $80 a pop these days. The place was full of tools and cars.

  “Oh, gee,” said the people.

  “It’s now the Skill Shop,” I said. “Went out of business in 1974, bought up by the city, leased by the community college.”

  Ah, The Grindstone! A real old-fashioned cafe/soda fountain. You were forbidden on pain of death to leave the school grounds except at lunch, so three thousand people tried to get in every day between 11:30 and 12:30.

  One noon the place was packed. There was the usual riot going on over at UT ten blocks away. All morning you could hear sirens and dull whoomps as the increasingly senile police commissioner, who had been in office for thirty-four years, tried dealing with the increasingly complex late twentieth century. Why, the children have gone mad, he once said in a TV interview.

  Anyway, we were all stuffing our faces in the Grindstone when this guy comes running in the front door and out the back at 200 miles an hour. Somebody made the obvious stoned joke—“Man, I thought he’d never leave!”—and then a patrol car slammed up to the curb, and a cop jumped out. You could see his mind work.

  A. Rioter runs into the Grindstone. B. Grindstone is full of people. Therefore: C. Grindstone is full of rioters.

  He opened the door, fired a tear-gas grenade right at the lunch counter, turned, got in his car and drove away.

  People were barfing and gagging all over the place. There were screams, tears, rage. The Grindstone was closed for a week so they could rent some industrial fans and air it out. The city refused to pick up the tab. “The officer was in hot pursuit,” said the police commissioner, “and acted within the confines of departmental guidelines.” Case closed.

  “Ah, The Grindstone,” I said to the tour group. “What a nice place.” A wave of nostalgia swept over me. “Today, shakes and fries. Tomorrow, a lube job and tune-up.”

  I was so filled with mono no aware that I skipped the picnic that afternoon.

  The Wolfskill Hotel! Scene of a thousand-and-one nights’ entertainments and more senior proms than there are fire ants in all the fields in Texas.

  A friend of mine named Karen once said people were divided into two classes: those who went to their senior proms and went on to live fairly normal lives, and those who didn’t, who became perverts, mass murderers or romance novelists.

  If you were a guy you got maybe your first blow job after the prom, or if a girl a quick boff in the back seat of some immemorial Dodge convertible out at Lake Travis. The hotel meant excitement, adventure, magic.

  I hadn’t gone to my senior prom. A lot of us hadn’t, looking on it as one more corrupt way to suck money from the working classes so that orchids could die all over the vast American night.

  There were some street singers outside the hotel, playing jug band music without a jug—two guitars, a flute, tambourine and harmonica. They were fairly quiet. The cops wouldn’t hassle them until after 11 p.m. They were pretty good. I dropped a quarter into their cigar box.

  You could hear the strains of the Byrds’ “Turn! Turn! Turn!” before you got through the lobby. The entertainment committee must have dropped a ton o’ bucks on this—they had a bulletin board out front just past the registration table with everybody’s pictures from the yearbook blown up, six to a sheet.

  It was weird seeing all those people’s names and faces—the beginnings of mustaches and beards on the guys, we’d fought tooth and nail for facial hair—long straight hair on the women—names that hadn’t been used, or gone back to three or four times, in the last twenty years.

  I paid my $10.00 fee (like in the old days. Dance Tonight! Guys fifty cents Girls Free!).

  Inside the ballroom people were already dancing, maybe a hundred, with that many more standing around talking and laughing in knots and clumps, being polite to each other, sizing up what Time’s Heedless Claws had done to each other’s bodies and outlooks.

  Bob and Penny were already there. He was in a bluejean jacket and pants and wore a clear plastic tie. Penny was stunning, in a green velour thing, beautiful as she always is early in the evenings, before alcohol turns her into a person I don’t know.

  I was real spiffed out, for me: a nice sport coat, black slacks, a red silk tie with painted roses wide as the racing stripe on a Corvette.

  There were people there in $500 gowns, $300 suits, tuxes, jeans, coveralls. Several were in period costumes; Hoyt had on another, much better than this morning’s nightmare, but still what I describe as Early Neil Young. He was, of course, with a slim blonde who had once been a Houston cheerleader, I’m sure.

  I saw some faculty members there. They had all been invited, of course. Ten or so, with their husbands or wives, had come. Even Mr. Stoat was there. It hit me as I looked at them that most of them had been in their twenties and thirties when they were trying to deal with us on a daily basis, much younger than we were now. God, what a thankless job they must have had—going off everyday like going back up to the Front of WWI, trying to teach kids who viewed you as The Enemy, following along behind everything you did with the efficient erasers in their minds! Maybe I’m getting too mellow—they had
it easier with us than teachers do now—at least most of us could read, and music was more important than TV to us. Later, I told myself, I’ll go over and talk to Ms. Nugent who was always my favorite and who had been a good teacher in spite of the chaos around her.

  There were two guys working the tapes and CDs up on the raised stage. I didn’t recognize the order of the songs so knew they weren’t playing one of my tapes. On the front part of the stage were a guitar and bass, a drum set and keyboards.

  So it was true,and seemed the main topic of conversation, although as I passed one bunch of people I heard someone say, “Those assholes? Them?”

  Barb showed up, without a date, of course. She took my hand and led me toward the dance floor. “Let’s dance until our shoulders bleed,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am!” I said.

  I don’t know about you, but I’ve been hypnotized on dance floors before. Sometimes it seems as if the tune stretches out to accommodate how long and hard you want to dance, or think you can. The guys working the decks were switching back and forth between two cassette players and the music never stopped—occasionally songs only I could have recorded showed up. I didn’t care. I was dancing.

  (I’ve seen some strange things on dance floors in my life—the strangest was people forming a conga line to a song by the band Reptilikus called “After Today, You Got One Less Day To Live.”)

  “Ginny’s here,” I said to Barb. Barb looked over toward the door where Ginny Balducci’s wheelchair had rolled in. One weekend in 1973 Ginny had gone off for a ski weekend with an intern, and had come back out of the hospital six months later with a whole different life. “I’ll say hi in a minute,” said Barb.

  We danced to the only Dylan song you can dance to, “I Want You,” “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” Buffalo Springfield, Blue Cheer, Sam and Dave, slow tunes by Jackie Wilson and Sam Cooke, then Barb went over to talk to Ginny. I was a sweating wreck by then, and the ugly feeling from the night before was all gone.

  I started for the whizzoir.

  “You won’t like it,” said a guy coming out of the men’s room.

  The smell hit me like a hammer. Someone had yelled New York into one of the five washbasins. It was half full. It appeared the person had lived exclusively for the last week on Dinty Moore Beef Stew and Fighting Cock Bourbon.

  A janitor came in cursing as I was washing my hands.

  I went back out to the ballroom. Mouse and the Trapps’ “Public Execution” was playing—someone who doesn’t dance recorded that. Then came Jackie Wilson’s “Higher and Higher.”

  “Dance with me?” asked someone behind me. I turned. It was Sharon. She must have Gone Borneo that afternoon. She’d been somewhere where they do things to you, wonderful things. She had on a blue dress and seamed silk stockings, and now she had an Aunt Peg haircut.

  “You bet your ass!” I said.

  About halfway through the next dance, I suffered a real sense of loss. I missed my butthole-length hair for the first time in ten years. The song, of course, was “Hair” off the original Broadway cast recording, Diane Keaton and all, and Joe Morton’s wife Patricia, who had never cut hers, it grew within inches of the floor, suddenly grabbed it near her skull with one hand and whipped it around and around her head, the ends fanning out like a giant hand across the colored lights above the stage. Joe continued his Avalon-ballroom-no-sweat dancing, oblivious to the applause his wife was getting.

  Then they played the Fish Cheer and we all sang and danced along with “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die-Rag.”

  Then the lights came up and the entertainment director, Jamie Younts-Fulton came to the mike and treated us to twenty minutes of nostalgic boredom and forced yoks. The tension was building.

  “Now,” she said, “for those of you who don’t know, we’ve got them together again for the first time in nineteen years, here they are, Craig Beausoliel, Morey Morkheim, Abram Cassuth and Andru Esposito, or, as you know them, Distressed Flag Sale!”

  It was about what you’d expect—four guys in their late thirties in various pieces of clothing stretching across twenty years of fashion changes.

  Morey’d put on weight and lost teeth, Andru had taken weight off. Abram, who’d been the only one without facial hair in our day, now had a full Jerry Garcia beard. Craig, who came out last, like always, and plugged in while we applauded—all four or five hundred people in the ballroom now—didn’t look like the same guy at all. He looked like a businessman dressed up at Halloween to look like a rock singer.

  He was a little unsteady on his feet. He was a little drunk.

  “Enough of this Sixties crap!” he said. People applauded again. “Tonight, this first and last performance, we’re calling ourselves Lizard Level!”

  Then Abram hit the keyboard in the opening trill of “In-a-Gadda-da-Vida” for emphasis, then they slammed into “Proud Mary,” Creedence’s version, and the place became a blur of flying bodies, drumming feet, swirling clothes. The band started a little raggedly, then got it slowly together.

  They launched into the Chambers Brothers’ “Time Has Come Today,” always a show stopper, a hard song for everybody including the Chambers Bros., if you ever saw them, and the place went really crazy, especially in the slow-motion parts. Then they did one of their own tunes, “The Moon’s Your Harsh Mistress, Buddy, Not Mine,” which I’d heard exactly once in two decades.

  We were dancing, all kinds, pogo, no-sweat, skank, it didn’t matter. I saw a few of the hotel staff standing in the doorways tapping their feet. Andru hit that screaming wail in the bass that was the band’s trademark, sort of like a whale dying in your bathtub. People yelled, shook their arms over their heads.

  Then they started to do “Soul Kitchen.” Halfway through the opening, Craig raised his hand, shook it, stopped them.

  “Awwww,” we said, like when a film breaks in a theater.

  Craig leaned toward the others. He was shaking his head. Morey pointed down at his playlist. They put their heads together. Craig and Abram were giving the other two chord changes or something.

  “Hey! Make music!” yelled some jerk from the doorway.

  Craig looked up, grabbed the mike. “Hold it right there, asshole,” he said, becoming the Craig we had known twenty years ago for a second. He leaned against the mike stand in a Jim Morrison vamp pose. “You stay right here, you’re going to hear the god-damnedest music you ever heard!”

  They talked together for a minute more. Andru shrugged his shoulders, looked worried. Then they all nodded their heads.

  Craig Beausoliel came back up front. “What we’re gonna do now, what we’re gonna do now, gonna do,” he said in a Van Morrison post-Them chant, “is we’re gonna do, gonna do, the song we were gonna do that night in Miami . . .”

  “Oh, geez,” said Bob, who was on the dance floor near Sharon and I.

  Distressed Flag Sale had gone into seclusion early in 1970, holing up like The Band did in the Basement Tapes days with Dylan, or like Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys did while they were working on the never-finished Smile album. They were supposedly working on an album (we heard through the grapevine) called either New Music for the After People or A Song to Change the World, and there were supposedly heavy scenes there, lots of drugs, paranoia, jealousy, and revenge, but also great music. We never knew, because they came out of hiding to do the Miami concert to raise money for the family of a janitor blown up by mistake when somebody drove a car-bomb into an AFEES building one 4 a.m.

  “It was a great song, man, a great song,” said Craig. “It was going to change the world we thought.” We realized for the first time how drunk Craig really was about then. “We were gonna play it that night, and the world was gonna change, but instead they got us, they got us, man, and we were the ones that got changed, not them. Tonight we’re not Distressed Flag Sale, we’re Lizard Level, and
just once anyway, so you’ll all know, tonight we’re gonna do ‘Life Is Like That.’”

  (What changed in Miami was the next five years of their lives. The Miami cops had been holding the crowd back for three hours and looking for an excuse, anyway, and they got it, just after Distressed Flag Sale made its reeling way onstage. The crowd was already frenzied, and got up to dance when the guys started playing “Life Is Like That” and Andru took out his dong on the opening notes and started playing slide bass with it. The cops went crazy and jumped them, beat them up, planted heroin and amphetamines in their luggage in the dressing rooms, carted them off to jail and turned firehoses on the rioting fans.

  Everybody knew the bust was rigged, because they charged Morey with possession of heroin, and everybody knew he was the speed freak.

  And that was the end of Distressed Flag Sale.

  It was almost literally the end of Andru, too. What the papers didn’t tell you was that, as he was uncircumcised, he’d torn his frenum on the strings of the bass, and he almost lost, first, his dong, and then his life before the cops let a doctor in to see him.)

  That’s the history of the song we were going to hear.

  Notes started from the keyboard, like it was going to be another Doors-type song, building. Then Craig moved his fingers a few times on the guitar strings, tinkling things rang up high, like birds were in the air over the stage, sort of like the opening of “Touch of Grey” by the Dead, but not like that either. Then Andru came in, and Morey, then it began to take on a shape and move on its own, like nothing else at all.

  It moved. And it moved me, too. First I was swaying, then stomping my right foot. Sharon was pulling me toward the dance floor. I’d never heard anything like it. This was dance music. Sharon moved in large sways and swings; so did I.