Then in some garden hushed from wind,
Warm in a sunset’s afterglow,
The lovers in the flowers will find
A sweet and strange unquiet grow Rupert Brooke (Dust)
Miss Virginia said I should visit the Cliff Walk someday; learn about your roots, she said. According to her, the Damons had come over on The Mayflower. From that noble beginning, our Yankee genes had produced a whaler who hit it rich and a drug-addicted doctor – prominent and storied. The whaler summered on the Atlantic in Newport; the doc summered all the time in his head. As half-Irish whelps of a disowned daughter, the family connections on that side remained a tenuous mystery heard mainly in the labyrinth chatter of the mad dowager – “Oh, that Ellsworth Damon was drug-addled on laudanum or some such thing.” We latched on to these scraps while we sat on the piss-stained mattresses of the foster home and grew them to fit what we needed – I had the doc as an absinthe sipping poet, my little brother practiced harpooning with a broomstick. The whaler had once owned a house on the Cliff Walk; one of us had determined. The pull of the wealth, even a cockeyed idea of it, was undeniable as it had been for my old friend, Clyde Griffiths. Presently, as Dreiser would say, Newport offered a possible respite from The Process as I knew the ocean disrupted its signals, maybe I could gather my senses before the long drive west. Seeing Red, Miss Crimson’s driver, had thrown me off-kilter as I watched him haul Maureen back to her fiancé. Another reason – Sailor Dave, the flautist who had been the last to see the lovely Julie, had lived there once. I swung The Aspen out of Boston and headed for Rhode Island.
Thoughts of Dave the Sailor and sweet Julie’s blue eyes took me back to Virginia Beach in the summer of 1970; curtains flowed in and out of open windows with the scent of sandalwood and the tunes of youthful troubadours. The fabric of the curtains the same as the mini-dresses of the sirens who danced on the ocean’s edge and in the longhair music clubs. The Navy boys from the glum steel monoliths rocking on the waves just offshore looked in hungrily, feeling funny about their close hair cuts. Fools like me in Robert Plant poses decorated the cement wall of the boardwalk watching the play unfold, laughing from weed and sarcasm. Footballs and Frisbees punctuated sunsets without an old-timer in view. Julie rented a seaside cottage; the place had a faded white fence and a little porch where we gathered around candles. Same curtains, dresses, and music, but Julie’s ‘aura’ radiated something different – a timeless understanding of the lost souls that wandered in, souls dressed in only their need. For Julie’s warmth, there were no hairstyles, skin colors, clubs, assignments, or stations needed,
From my perch on the porch, I watched them come to the cottage, tentative like four-year-olds to the Santa House; I would shrug and say she’s inside, then get busy with the cooler capturing an icy Busch while the mendicant disappeared into the gingham swallows. The ocean would wash in beach characters with its crashing waves, the round orange cig glow among the iridescence and sparkles the tell-tale – all the stragglers stoned on something and or drunk; all of them looking for Julie, “Say, man, there was this girl…blonde…sweet chick…said she lived here somewhere?” One of us lucky monkeys sometimes would fuck with them, “everybody knows this is nowhere.” If they could take the abuse, they might get into the candle glow circle. If they were offering weed, they always got on, no matter the room.
The sea coughed up sirens too. Beautiful straight-haired college nymphets “looking for adventure and whatever comes our way,” nubile wenches as the brainy ones would say. The vaunted babes of Virginia, daughters of mountain men in from the western schools, and wanting in on the action. Some drawn in from along the seaboard. Joanna one of them, summering in the south. She and her friend Millie, a Navy captain’s kid sister, had come down from one of the ivy schools in Massachusetts. They got jobs pumping gas for laughs and for wild tales to trade over brie and merlot at the fall dorm room parties – “Really? How ghastly courageous.” Julie drew Joanna and Millie in, too; she gave them lessons in loving- how to see it in their eyes and how to keep them from getting inside your eyes.
Sometimes the stakes got higher – those times when the acid man came by. We dumb porch bums took the cubes like milk wagon horses. The trips were shorty and spiky. The acid man for all his pretentions rarely delivered. His wares were low quality, and that was fine for those like me who wanted just a taste, not the full effect. Funny in those days, how we would question centuries-old institutions while accepting the word of street peddlers that the shit we ingested was perfectly okay and “far out.” On the acid man’s trips, the waves looked funny, and the sparkled water kept us in thrall for hours, but that was every night anyway no matter the intoxicant; it was a psychedelic safe harbor. One night, however, the acid man brought the real shit.
~
I watched the afternoon fade to evening, whiling away the time with a couple of hippies named Dave. We dodged the sun on Julie’s porch under a faded red parasol. I had bussed over from Norfolk and stopped for peanuts, cigs, and beer at the Garlands of Time; the guy there, Mike, a sun-baked graying crew-cut in jeans, sneered at the kids, but had renamed the place, added incense, thrown up some beads and stocked Zig-Zags. “Used to be Mike’s, but I didn’t want my name on selling this hippie shit.” The tinkle of his little bell on the door with the rattle of empties at the opening, and his old man mutterings as you left defined the place everybody called Mike’s anyway. Julie pinned up her hair and slung cocktails during the day at one of the swank hotels along the boardwalk. She let me hang at the cottage, a watchman of sorts, most days spent watching beach babes and rapping with wanderers like the Daves, usually about how to beat the draft and other assorted ways to get to The Man.
The porch started to fill as the sun dimmed – the east coast coeds, some sailors, Julie with a red, white and drunk salesman from the hotel, more beach freaks, and the acid man. Liquid contributions clinked into the silver box, and smoke rose from cigs, pipes, and a hibachi somebody fired. A fair lady minstrel’s song breezed from a speaker at the curtained window – I saw the singer sincere at a piano in some LA piano bar, a guy in black crawling around her legs fumbling with dials to make the sounds match her coiled words on the album the kids would all have to have. Across from me on the porch deck, the Navy officer’s kid sister sat cross-legged, free and easy wearing jean cut-offs with no panties. A white cat laced the partiers then disappeared into the window swell.
Julie’s clear motherly blues caught my greens eye-balling the snatch, so I turned to the acid man who held court from the sand. He was thin, dark-haired, and ferret faced dressed in black with a cape-like some Poe impostor. His sweeping cape accented the stringy silver clouds on the pink horizon. Gulls swooped behind him shadowed like, well, ravens. He spoke in Victorian flourishes, “Ladies and gentlemen, imagine yourself in the company of angels, riding the sky in freedom with the grace of the Lord to sustain you and fill you with glory.” From under the cape, he produced a gilded gold case that he opened and held out; inside an assortment of white disks. “Meet The Lord, the heavenly host. For a pittance, the glory of eternity can be yours. For only one dollar, ten pieces of thin silver, the stairway to heaven is yours to climb.” He wormed the crowd taking dollars in one hand and offering the magic wafers from the other. I pulled a fiver from the tight pocket of my dirty blue jeans. I signaled the ersatz poet that the next four were on me – the next four turned out to be the Daves and two black guys, “spades” in hippie parlance, that they knew from weed peddling on the dangerous end of the boulevard. The blacks argued about taking the stuff.
“I ain’t taking no shit from some devilish lookin’ motherfucker in a cape.”
“He’s cool, my man Dave knows him.”
“Both those motherfucker’s named Dave. What’s that? You don’t know which Dave told you what.” He was thin and very dark with an inch deep styled Afro. He wore a perplexed look. Both of the blacks wore uptown clothes, shiny, soft polos over flared bellbottom dress slacks. Their high-glossed sharp-toes boots seemed incongruous as they shifted in the sand and crabgrass of the shabby sun-worn cottage. His friend had the same hair, only red-tinged. He had a freckled saturnine face that projected a seriousness, a manager’s demeanor. Their heads bobbed as the leader countered the reluctance. The black-garbed bard patiently held out the tray with two wafers as the Daves and I chewed. “The Lord be with you, brothers.”
“Why’s he got to call that shit the Lord?”
“Don’t pay no attention to that. He got his demons, but, man, we’ll party with these cats for a while then head back uptown. I have business here. Ain’t all bad, neither.” He shot a look past me gapward, where Julie bent talking to the college chicks. “See what I’m saying.”
“Alright, I ain’t blind, just get me on up out of here before the clubs close.”
A sprinkle of fresh rain fell from a fat dark cloud that blew over the beach, one of the brief ocean rains that faded quickly. I slipped into the sand to enjoy the shower; the Daves joined me. We watched the big drops duel with the wisps of sand as they futilely tried to soak them, the water slipping through the tiny stones. The spades replaced me on the porch and engaged Julie and Miss Muff in earnest conversation. Edgar Allan split, spreading the good news to other porches and circles of fire. “This town would be dreaming tonight,” opined a Dave. The other coed sidled up to me. She wore her brown hair long parted in the middle; all of them did. She had pink skin, a sweet round face with tiny blue eyes that waxed sincere, interested. She smelled of rose soap, honeysuckle, and gasoline.
“I’m Joanna,” she said.
“Did you take it?”
“What? Are you missing something?”
“The acid from the poet.”
“Yes, we all did except Julie.”
“You’ve done it before?”
“No.”
“You better stay with me then.” Oh, the wan world-weary one offered his hand to guide the maiden through never-never land; he had three or four cheap mescaline trips under his belt; in that era, I had real credentials. Worked like this – if you had hair on your shoulders and you spent your idle time discussing the minutia of drugs, then you were the guy to take an inexperienced innocent through what could well be a terrifying psychological episode of their life.
An angry pink sky ribboned the ocean’s edge. At its onset, I knew the Lord’s trip would be like no other; if the shit I had taken before was roller skates, then this was a skyrocket motorcycle. I tasted something metallic and swallowed hard. The swallow rocked down to my toes that drummed the sand like a dancing caterpillar. Laughter pealed from the porch deck, and we gave each other that peeping out the space capsule look that defined the decade. One of the spades said, “Lord, have mercy,” and those words hung in the sky flapping behind the psychedelic bi-plane that maybe only I saw. Blacklight beams shot from the decks of imagined tramp steamers, and lost German U-boats illuminated the garish words as the sea gathered its orphans.
“Every grain is its own mountain,” I said as the girl and I coasted to the water’s edge.
“I know,” she said in that way that meant as she climbed the stair steps of her imagination, and if you had a way to describe it for her, then she would happily agree. Something with sails bucked on the darkening distance. “Look, a Nicean bark of yore?” This witticism initiated a laughing fit. We fell back on the sand, begging for mercy. I promised not to mock the poet, but the words “bark” and “yore” would take us back. In tears, we managed to get upright and walk into the water. The evening tide swelled and washed froth around our legs like swaddling cloth. Cut off mid-calf; we looked like skating peg-legged pirates. We looked back to the lighted porch where the misfits swirled around the buxom babes like that bar scene in every pirate movie, the music lacing into the wave crashes, the sounding sea, as the youngster warbled the tale of Eleazar over a plodding electric piano from behind the speaker cloth. The caped acid man stood at the edge with arms outstretched and declaimed Annabel Lee. No one paid attention to him now that his mission was complete. More folks swelled the cottage. The music turned up full, but in the manner of the times, the newest record kept getting spun. Hence, the California crooner’s tale of the Masada wrapped itself into the declamation, mountain fortress suicide, and seaside sepulcher.
“I’m so afraid,” Jean said. I tried to explain the hyper-reality of what she might see and that we had come near the downside where the paranoia usually hit, something I read in a pamphlet somewhere.
“We can go back to the party and try to do something normal, eat or drink maybe. Don’t think you’re alone. It’s much worse if you think that way.” The water swirled below our white pins. On the shore, chirps of sand crabs, and the stirrings of creatures underfoot clicked on the edge of the night stories.
“I see Luke everywhere in this water,” she said.
“There was a death?” I asked from the way she made it sound.
“Yes, it was too terrible. I don’t want to see it again.”
“Tell me; it will be better. Get it out and face it. I’m here to help.”
“He fell from the boat. Out on our lake. We were sixteen, both of us. A birthday. Now I see him everywhere. I didn’t see him fall. He was just not there. Now he’s here, I see him in every stage of life. Like one of those drawings – infant, boy, man, old man in a circle. Don’t you see it too?”
I saw the ghost circle in translucence, as she described. This Luke dressed in tee and jeans; his hands outstretched like the acid man’s with a look of exasperation that suggested, “Look what I could have been.” Luke sweetly young like a dime-store Jesus, round blue eyes cast heavenward, peachy white-boy skin and neat, clean long hair flowing. I tugged her arm and headed to the chittering sand. “You need to leave the water.” Little crab eyes like dimming match-heads followed our progress.
The young black sat on a log glass-eyeing the night. His friend arrived as we passed and asked him, “ Is you crazy?”
Joanna tightened her grip around my waist. “Don’t worry; he will come down soon. You’re not crazy either, and I believe what we’ve seen we carry for a reason. The ghosts are our guides. I believe that there are causes that you would lie down and die for – a moral war, a desperate love. Your Luke might have been there to tell you to see life on the whole. Every being a precious life. You could say he was showing you this cycle to blame you in some way, but why would a ghost care about retribution? I think he showed you the cycle for that very reason. A spirit is free of our temporal restraints. He came to tell you that you can be free too.” On the downward slide of the trip, the acid had a speed effect.
Julie appeared on the edge of the cottage light, “You don’t have to talk like that to get some. Jesus, ‘he wants you to be free,’ ‘temporal,’ you sure know how to get into a girl’s pants.” The party had burgeoned to include the regular assortment of beach bums that flocked to the beautiful woman with the welcoming eyes. In her presence, they felt no shame or fear, only a peace that the warring jealous world could not offer them. Joanna and I felt the paranoia fade with its wicked illusions as she greeted us. “Do you guys want some bread?” She held a bowl with freshly baked biscuits from a can, and nothing has ever smelled or tasted so heavenly. She broke them in half to make them last the group. Someone handed Joanna a glass of orange juice. Voices fell off as the music went soft, and heads bowed as she sang of a mystical presence who could see right through her.
Julie’s pickled paramour returned and broke the silence as he blustered in with greasy fingers wrapped around a sweating quart of beer. “The hotel’s got free tacos most nights, folks.”
The Daves, the spades, and the bared belle of the ivy headed out to catch an uptown bus for drugs, clubs, or a combination of both. With a look at that group, I had no doubt as to whom would have the wildest tale to relate at the fall mixers in Massachusetts. Julie kindly told the besotted salesman to “Go on home now. Time for this night to be over for you.” A weak moon drifted over a sea, now mewling with the distant creaks of Navy ships, cries of sea life, and the hails of boat-bound partiers. I sat on one of the porch’s stuffed chairs with Joanna and talked her down from the acid like a false prophet should. A pink candle dwindled a strain along with the colored streaks that coated the cheap wine bottle on the weathered wooden stand on the little porch as the tired attendants watched the night drown light. A stillness came over them.
I gave up tripping after that episode. I left the shopping for instant epiphanies up to the spirit wanderers that flitted throughout the decade. It was a time of truth-seekers selling the new and improved version of some path or another. I preferred the simpler expressions and took my wisdom with biscuits and gravy. Joanna slipped away into the world of gold-rimmed crystal, slick confidence, and blunted regrets of the real world’s quiet owners. A place where you let the likes of the unlucky Luke dance in your imagination; it’s only make-believe and nothing you can take to the legacy bank – the proles are there for your amusement and, for God’s sake, do not marry one! There had been a small block of time when visions of a fair, free, and happy world were communal, soon swallowed by numbing nights of fear. The laughing ocean dashed hard against the rocks below the sea walk. Camera clicks and chatter, gull squawks, and the swish of bicycles were only minor notes to the screaming wind and waves. I saw him approaching, a hulking figure carrying a flute case. Could he still haunt the cliffs as he despoiled Julie? The ache of loss returned. As Joanna had seen Luke on the water, I saw the trampled flower of the essence of that distant sweet dream. I heard she found her freedom in the sea. ‘That the wind came out of the clouds by night’ and took her like Annabel Lee. But I had my doubts. I guessed that now I would get his side of the story.
danielewalsh 