The Gorgon Festival (21 page)

“Twelve or fourteen.”

“No deal. That’s six or seven hundred dollars out of my gate receipts.”

“Our gate receipts,” he reminded her.

“Don’t overvalue your contributions,” she snapped. “I can hire another sound engineer for less than two hundred dollars.”

So she had set his pro rata at .002 of gate receipts.

Ward triggered her paranoia.

“Another sound engineer might have problems. The amplifiers haven’t been connected. Eight electricians, working overtime at fifteen dollars an hour, might trace the conduits between now and Labor Day.”

As he had foreseen, she wriggled easily off that hook, and then she gaffed herself.

“I’ll buy a gas-driven generator, so you can write off your little conspiracy to take over the company.”

“Are you accusing me of piracy?” he asked.

“Precisely.”

“Very well, since you have no trust in me, I have no alternative to resignation.” He arose as he spoke. “Tonight I’ll sleep in the garage room, tomorrow I’ll complete the wiring and return to Palo Alto. Even as a fugitive I can get a better deal from Carrick for my formula, and he already has the international organization.”

“You forget, Mr. Alexander, that half the formula is mine.”

“You keep your half. Carrick and I can buy enzymes by the barrel from any nursery supply house.”

Fury in her eyes was replaced by avarice, which yielded to cunning, which softened into feminine loveliness, a transformation Ward recognized as a progression of affinities, before she said, “Sit down, Alex. I’m merely trying to teach a theorist how to negotiate. Of course you can have your motorcycle club. How do you contact the Patriots?”

“I couldn’t,” he said. “Miss Frost can.”

Smiling, Diana lifted the direct line. “Miss Frost, my program director suggested I retain the Orange County Patriots to maintain crowd discipline at the love festival… Who’s Dolores?”

Little Mama was back on the premises, now that he was gone, and contact would be made. Ward’s thoughts turned to Dolores.

Somehow, he would have to cut Dolores away from the herd to work her over without interference from her bodyguard. Without injuring her seriously enough to delay his schedule, he still must produce from her screams of an intensity that would carry at least thirty yards above the Brahms
Fourth
and a massed chorus of wolf whistles.

Cupping her hand over the mouthpiece, Diana asked, “What time should they report, dear?”

Ward considered for a moment. By noon, he should have assessed punitive damages from Freddie.

“Around midday,” he said. “The guard will direct them to their official parking racks, and Mr. Alexander will give them written instructions regarding procedures.”

Before he finished his answer to her, Ward had hit on a method of cutting Little Mama from the herd. The Patriot closest to her would be at the yoke of the peace symbol Y, fifty yards downhill and in the crowd. If he couldn’t outrun the man to the girls’ privy, he deserved to forfeit a crotch job.

“You theorist,” Diana chided him when she hung up. “Miss Frost predicts they’ll come for ten dollars apiece.”

“Good,” he smiled. “But your public relations man has suggested to your grounds supervisor that a canopied throne be erected on a carpeted platform ten yards above the upper circumference of the peace symbol circle to seat a Queen of the Malibu Love Festival, to be elected by popular acclamation.”

Late Sunday afternoon, September 5, Ward went alone to the oak knoll, taking a truck tire, a length of heavy rope, and a tightly capped bottle of gasoline wrapped in a T-shirt. He laid the bottle of gasoline among the boulders and swung the tire from the massive center trunk of the tree. After removing the guard rail, he could get a running start down the gravel path and launch himself, dangling by his shoulder from the tire, far out over the chasm to swing safely back onto the rocky knoll on the far side of the oak.

Finally he swung back onto the gravel path, hooking the rope over a protuberance on the east-running limb of the oak, and dangled the tire over the path. With a discus swing, he hurled the guard rail beyond the bushes and slope of the canyon wall to the bottom, forty feet below.

Walking back to the ranch house, Ward heard the girls singing as they marched up from their last rehearsal. In the pink sunset, their song filled him with peace and a warm nostalgia. They were singing an old Army song, “Violet Time,” and their voices rang in lark notes over the meadows of Malibu.

Labor Day dawned bright and clear from a mild Santa Ana breeze rolling in from the high deserts, a wonderful day for brush fires.

After a leisurely breakfast alone, Diana had to leave early for last-minute inspection of costumes. Ward signed a check on his Western Avenue bank to Freddie for one dollar. To the check he stapled his final statement:

For musical services rendered	$500.00
Less agency commission	50.00
450.00
Less overcharge for room, board and services previously billed to Miss Frost	449.00
$ 1.00

Ward put the check and the statement in an envelope which he tucked into a gray suit in his wardrobe, then took all his documents relating to Albert Atascadero below and put them in the side bag of his motorcycle.

At nine, dressed in a dark blue business suit, wearing his auburn wig and dark glasses, Ward went down to the shell, carrying a typed roll of orders for the Patriots and a list of songs for Freddie. If he got past the first crucial moments with the High Wheeler, Ward knew he would not be recognized, for he planned to project an image that would completely mislead Freddie.

He intended to assess punitive damages as well as financial; in Ward’s continuing dialogue with the young, it was imperative that Freddie be taught that honesty was the best policy, at least until one learned to cover his tracks.

Mustangs, dune buggies, hot rods, and Karmen Ghias of the pushers were already trickling into the parking lot. A few dealers were standing around before the shell. From the Daisy Chain, Ward recognized Won Lee, né Manuel Sanchez, from his Chinese robe. Lee was a connection and he was discussing the market with Henry Green, a dealer in imported gage, bedecked in a bright green dashiki beneath his green-dyed Afro. Little Mama knew them all and she would finger them for the Patriots, who would thus gain a monopoly on the festival trade.

Promptly at 9:30 Freddie’s lavender Cadillac nosed over the crest and stopped in the parking lot. At the distance, almost half a mile, the bass fiddle on Freddie’s back resembled a bale of cotton, but in ten minutes Freddie and his two fellow members of the Untannables were breaking out of the trees and swinging over the greensward to where Ward waited on the stage of the shell.

Ward didn’t wait for them to get within speaking distance before he was shouting, “Where are the banjos? You have no banjos! Which of you is Freddie?”

“Here, sir.”

“Mr. Alexander, here… You’re supposed to play early American traditional music, minstrel songs, and spirituals.”

“But, Mr. Ward said…”

“Mr. Ward! Mr. Ward! Where that gigolo of Miss Frost digs up you cheapies for a thousand bucks a show I’ll never know. Did he tell you to submit a repertoire?”

“Yes, sir.” Clambering onto the stage, Freddie extended a hand-lettered list of songs; “Feeling Groovy,” “Hound Dog,” “Snow Bird”… Ward glanced at the list, obvious distaste approaching near-apoplexy.

“This is all wrong. The theme of the festival is the development of rock, and you’re to represent its crude beginnings. Your repertoire wasn’t supposed to infringe on the dialectics of rock harmonics. You dig me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I figured Ward for a botch, so I prepared a list. Run through these thirty songs and select fifteen you can play.” Ward handed him his list. “You’ll notice the list runs pretty heavily to spirituals to show the historical development of soul. But the arrangements are up to you, understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You can take an old favorite, say, ‘Massa’s in de Cold, Cold Ground,’ and give it the warm McKuen touch. Here, ‘Birmingham Jail’ would predict the Gollenberger and Stein format to show the development of protest songs… You could solo ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ on the cello, using three strings, with a random plunk on the bass in the manner of that great artist Glamorgan.”

In a staccato voice, he shot suggestions and admonitions to the trio, with Freddie listening and nodding his head. Ward ended the tirade on an order.

“Gentlemen, I must hear ‘Sweet Afton,’ first, and make me hear the Scottish burr and smell the heather. I have this thing about Scottish girls.”

Waiting for “Sweet Afton,” Ward stood on the greensward listening to the struggle on the stage, shaking his head occasionally or kicking the grass in disgust, as the trio pooled its knowledge to recall the notes of the tune. When they began, Ward listened to the first four bars.

Holding up one hand for silence, clutching his hair with the other, he ran onto the stage crying, “No, no. On the fourth measure, Freddie, just before the coda, give me an interval of glissando on a subdominant chord.”

“Like this, sir?”

Freddie fingered the frets and strummed a riffle that deftly excluded the bass string. For all Ward knew, it was a perfect glissando on a subdominant chord, but he was shouting.

“No. No. No. That’s African soul. I want Scottish soul. Give me more burr in that diminuendo, not a Glasgow staccato but an Edinburgh lilt. I’ll stand right here until I smell the heather.”

After fifteen glissandos, Ward still couldn’t smell the heather.

“Listen, fellows,” Ward feigned desperation, “maybe I can help the tempo by alternating the volume on the amplifiers. Take the earphones, Freddie, and I’ll try to talk you into a synchronic pattern from the sound control booth.”

From the air-conditioned control booth, Ward continued the harassment, his disgust mounting as the amplifiers sent the sounds caterwauling over the grounds. Before the stage, the pushers were backing off, getting closer to the grove, but the amplifiers hedged them in.

“Look, Freddie,” Ward finally conceded. “Maybe Scottish evades you. Try a little African Scottish, a burr with a boogie-woogie beat…”

As Ward spoke, his earphones picked up a distant roar, growing in volume, becoming a rumble, which cast a terrifying double image onto his memory. Crouched in a snowy foxhole, he had heard the sound, before, in the Forest of Ardennes when the Tiger tanks of a German Panzer division had rolled toward his position.

“Hold it, Freddie.”

A glance toward the skyline reassured him. Only a trickling vanguard of music lovers were coming over the ridge. Reassured, he turned back to his sound equipment, but the rumble was growing. He cast another glance toward the ridge.

Over the saddleback a motorcycle appeared, then another, and another, moving slowly in ceremonial procession. The long black line was snaking over the crest and down the approach road. Chilled by apprehension, Ward watched, counting, as the line swung toward the eucalyptus grove, fourteen Patriots dressed in black. In the lead he saw Big Papa stroking his huge Schweinjaeger, and on the seat behind him, her platinum hair flowing from beneath the azure of Ward’s crash helmet, sat Little Mama.

Two hours ahead of schedule the Patriots had arrived, and the sound of their coming shook the hills. Coming early to stake out their claims to the pot trade.

Ward felt the anxiety of a man helplessly wounded as a python slithered toward him when the head of the line coiled out of the eucalyptus grove and swung south. Following instructions from the guard the Patriots would swing around and park at the ceremonial racks set fifteen yards below the privies and above the throne of the Queen of the Malibu Love Festival.

Diana’s orders detailing guard procedure for the Brahms and Beethoven promenades were in the desk before him, but it would take courage to walk up the hill and hand the orders to Big Papa.

Forcing a casual tone, Ward said into the phone, “Freddie, you’d better go back to your original repertoire. I’ll turn off the amplifiers so you can practice without being too conspicuous, but never again, please. No more music. The fire next time.”

Ward reached into the drawer before him and pulled out the official scroll, but his eyes were on the Patriots, circling now on the final leg of their entrance. In goggles with black helmets, black jackets, black boots, all they needed was a death’s-head insignia on their lapels and Ward’s conditioned fear of Nazi storm troopers might have overwhelmed him. But they had forgone the straw that might have broken his will to fight. Instead, they wore tiny decals of the American flag on their dress helmets.

With orders in his hand, Ward left the booth and walked across the stage, as marked by his Establishment dress as they by their uniforms. Warning himself against the truncated stride that might have betrayed him as the pussyfooter, he moved with the easy nonchalance of a Central Avenue black on Saturday night.

Above him the line was moving behind the racks, peeling off one at a time, and Big Papa was already parking in the position of honor at the far right of the line. At eighty yards the maximum leader looked formidable to the man who walked down the steps and up the graveled walk of the peace symbol toward the dismounting line of Patriots.

Only Little Mama had seen him in full light, Ward remembered, and she had been high. The Barber knew in detail the shape of his head, but the Barber’s lambency had flickered so swiftly over his skull that he doubted if the Barber could recognize it again without a phrenology chart. Still, he was twice vulnerable and as he ascended toward the line of men waiting impassively by their motorcycles, dark blue star-spangled billy clubs hanging from their belts, he felt again his old Normandy Landing Syndrome, the tongue-fuzzing dryness of mouth, the kidney pressure, the keying of fear to resolution.

To Ward’s left stood the officers, gold stars gleaming above their jacket pockets. Brazos was the two-star, now, but Arms, not the Barber, was the new one-star. The Barber stood in the ranks, next to Arms. Apparently he had suffered the fate of experts in any bureaucracy. He was too gifted to be promoted.