Andersen, Kurt (32 page)

Knowing you’re going to die and therefore grabbing for gusto can go two very different ways. I alternated between both. Life did seem precious, each bite of burger and each cigarette drag perfectly delicious, every touch of Chuck’s an unparalleled pleasure, music more electric, movies more intense and profound. But time felt in short supply. Which amped up an eighteen-year-old’s natural impatience and inclined me to take risks I wouldn’t have dared take before. Carpe diem: life is beautiful. Carpe diem: fuck it, life is short.

“You really think it’s safe?” Alex asked from the backseat of Chuck’s mom’s Impala.

“Safer than driving this car,” Chuck said.

“Those clouds are so dark,” Alex said.

“They’re moving away, out over the lake. You can see up ahead, it’s already stopped raining. And this was
your
idea in the first place.”

“I don’t know, Chuck. I don’t want to die for a silly reason.”

“We’re not gonna die. Don’t be a pussy.”

It was a Saturday in late June. The next day I was headed for New York City and my summer job, and Alex would be leaving soon for Eastern Europe and his student cultural conferences. It had been raining all afternoon. We were driving up the Edens Expressway, on our way to the Palwaukee airport. Alex had never flown with Chuck.

The plane was small. “It’s only got one engine!” Alex said. “What if it conks out?”

“Then I glide in.”

The rain stopped, the clouds were blowing east, and we could see a widening bar of blue on the western horizon.

We each put on headsets and took off. The trick was to keep the low late-afternoon sun behind us and fly east, over the lake, toward the rain—but then to circle back before we reached the cloud bank.

I was the first to spot one.
“There!”

“Where?” asked Alex, who disliked not being first to see or hear or know anything.
“Where?”

“There, at four o’clock,” Chuck said. “No,
down.
”

Alex gasped. “Oh my
God.
I didn’t know you could even see one from
above.
It’s like being an angel. It’s like a God’s-eye view.”

Alex and I stared out the right side of the plane at the stripe of red fuzzing into a stripe of orange fuzzing into yellow, green, blue, darker blue, and purple. We were dumbfounded by the rainbow, unaware of everything else.

Until Chuck banked sharply left.

Alex screamed. I wet my pants a little. Chuck grinned as he finished the turn and leveled off, heading back toward the afternoon sun.

We didn’t see another rainbow during our next four passes. As Chuck prepared to turn away once again from the vast cliff of dark, dark gray, he said, “This time, before I bank, close your eyes.”

“It’s okay,” I said, “I’m used to it now.”

“No, close your eyes. It’s an experiment.”

We did. We felt the sharp left turn.

“Keep your eyes closed.”

“What are we waiting for?” I asked.

Alex started humming “Somewhere over the Rainbow.”

“Okay,” Chuck instructed finally, “I’m done with the turn, but keep your eyes closed. What direction are we going now?”

“West,” we both said.

“Open your eyes.”

Alex screamed again. I grabbed my right armrest with both hands and held tight, as if to keep myself from falling. The plane was tilted left at a shocking angle, and in front of us, the cloud wall to the east looked darker and more filled with menace than ever.

“I lied. We’ve been banked thirty degrees this whole time, flying in a circle. And now your eyes are lying to you. You felt me going into it, and you can feel me coming out of it”—he started leveling off and straightening out, back toward the sun—”but you can’t
feel
the angle when you’re
in
the turn.”

A few minutes later, when we turned east again, we were pointed directly into the center of a rainbow that stretched over our entire field of vision.

“Whoa,”
Chuck said.

We could see the whole thing, the complete arc, the top and both ends—and there was a second rainbow encircling the first, but in a mirror image, with purple on the outside and red on the innermost arc. Against the nearly black clouds, the colors of the double rainbow were super-brilliant, like neon. It looked fake.

“Could we fly through it?” I asked.

“Let’s fly through it!” Alex said.

“You can’t. See, it just keeps moving away. You can never reach it. We’d get to the rain—rainbows are
made
of raindrops, right?—and then it’d just … disappear.”

I thought of God, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen. It had never occurred to me before that He’s a trickster.

After we landed and Chuck parked the plane, I asked, “What would happen if we
had
just kept flying straight through? The rainbow would disappear, and then what?”

“We’d be inside the thundercloud. We might’ve gotten hit by lightning.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Alex said.

“You’re safer getting hit by lightning up there than down here. The problem would be these big currents inside the thundercloud, these intense winds in there, updrafts and downdrafts. They can tear you apart.”

I grinned and kept grinning. Which was weird. But we were safe and sound, sneakers squishing and squeaking on the wet tarmac, walking under a blue sky toward a red Impala washed shiny clean by the rain. We were eighteen.

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.

My parents agreed to let me spend the rest of the summer in New York City because I was staying in a dorm room at Barnard with an older New Trier girl whose parents they knew. I’d gotten a volunteer job in a tiny new organization trying to drum up support inside the Democratic Party for dumping President Johnson and nominating an antiwar candidate in 1968. When I got to New York, I discovered it wasn’t much of an organization at all, but a few devoted typists and collaters and phone answerers devoted to one guy, a lawyer and politician who seldom came to the office. But the office had a Xerox copying machine, so the operation seemed sophisticated and legit.

I became best buddies with one of the other interns. Sarah Caputo had grown up the youngest of six kids in Camden, New Jersey, where her dad worked as a welder in a shipyard. She had (still has) a voice like Judy Holliday’s, roomed with an aunt and uncle in Queens, and worked nights as a waitress. She was about to start at NYU on a full scholarship. Sarah was the first person I ever met who’d gotten 800 on both SATs, and who used the words “preppy” and “broad”—after we became friends, she told me that at first she’d taken me “for some rich preppy folksinger broad.” Sarah was also the first person to whom I was completely honest about my years of tortured pining for Chuck Levy.

We met some of the SDS kids from Columbia, who had a summer project to enlist regular New Yorkers, nonstudents, preferably black, into the Movement. The Columbia kids argued constantly over the relative merits of antiwar education and antiwar protest and antiwar “resistance.” Whenever they used the words “resistance” and “struggle,” which they did a lot, their already serious voices got quieter, deeper, grave.

I was afraid they’d think I was a silly, ignorant midwestern girl if I asked,
What exactly do you mean by “resistance”?
Instead, I mentioned that my boyfriend’s uncle had been in the armed Jewish resistance in Palestine in the 1940s.

Israel’s Six-Day War had taken place a few weeks earlier. “ ‘Jewish resistance in Palestine’,” repeated one of the SDS boys, chuckling. “I’d call that an oxymoron.” And so I felt like a silly, ignorant midwestern girl. Sarah said they were all “businessmen’s kids, doctors’ and lawyers’ kids who spend their time feeling guilty about being comfortable instead of just fucking
helping
people who need help.” I loved Sarah. I still do.

I missed Chuck. But I also took pleasure in missing him, especially when he phoned me at the end of my first week in New York. No one had ever called me long-distance. In addition to working as a lifeguard at Gillson Park, he said he was helping out at his father’s electronics firm.

“You’re working for your dad’s
company
? I thought you had that big fight about him being a war profiteer?”

“I know, but he’s not. It’s not. It’s just research into some kind of Teletype system for computer scientists. That the government happens to be paying for. Just like the government has paid your dad to do research.” I’d made Chuck nervous, gotten him off-track. “Anyhow, I’m also mowing lawns on weekends. Saving up money for a surprise for you.”

“How will it be a surprise if you already told me you’re giving it to me?”

“Hmm … riddle me that, Catwoman.”

In fact, it was a complete surprise, a few weeks later, one that made me yelp, when I found Chuck sitting on the steps of the dorm where I was staying. I didn’t recognize him at first, from far away, because he hadn’t cut his hair since May. He’d taken the bus all the way from Chicago. He was going to stay in New York for a week.

I cried. Chuck laughed and hugged me. I felt as happy as I’d ever felt in my life, and I said so. “I’m glad you didn’t tell me you were coming. I know we’re supposed to always tell each other the truth and hold back nothing. But I’m glad you held this back. Some secrets are best if they’re kept secret.”

He’d booked a room for the two of us at a cheap hotel in Times Square, not far from where I worked. At the Northwestern library, he’d researched New York restaurants and had a list of a dozen where we could have dinner for under three dollars apiece, although most nights we ate at a place in Chinatown called Hung Fat, where the only other white people were also in their teens and twenties.

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.

Sgt. Pepper’s
was playing over the PA system in the basement of the Cafe Wha? in Greenwich Village as we awaited the boozeless Friday-evening “teen” show, and when Chuck sang along with the chorus to “When I’m Sixty-four,” I leaned over and kissed him. We wandered over to a psychedelic dance hall in the East Village, where we were surrounded by kids and even some adults with snakes and stars and moons and flowers and words painted on their faces and chests and arms. I’m not sure I’d even smelled marijuana in a public place before, but here the smoke was like a fog.

“Alex would like to see this,” Chuck said. “He sent me a postcard from Belgrade. He shook hands with Tito.”

“I got one from Budapest. He saw some gigantic opera that lasted all day long. Sounds like he’s having a great time.”

A girl Sabrina’s age with a bloodred
LUV
painted on her forehead offered me a joint, which I passed to Chuck, which he passed to a boy wearing braids and blue-tinted glasses. As the girl and boy drifted away, I said, “It’s like they’re
performing,
like they’re playing the parts of hippies.”

“We’re all playing roles, right? We’re all characters in the show.”

That struck me as wise.

As a band started playing in the main room, Chuck was reminded of something. “I bought tickets to a concert Saturday night. At some stadium. Where’s Queens?”

“Across the river. Who?”

“Technically, the Monkees—I
know,
I know, but one of the bands opening for them is the one I mentioned a while ago, with the black guitarist and singer who’s completely amazing? At this huge three-day concert in California, he lit his guitar on
fire.
We don’t have to stay for the Monkees if we don’t want to.”

We almost left before the Monkees came on, at the end of “The Wind Cries Mary,” when Chuck quietly asked the two junior high girls next to us to “pretty please shut the fuck up,” and the father of one of them stood and threatened to punch him. The girls and hundreds like them kept chanting “We want the
Mon-kees
” and
“Da-vy, Da-vy, Da-vy”
all through Jimi Hendrix’s performance. It was annoying at first, but after the mescaline Chuck had gotten from Flip Macallister kicked in and we were tripping for the first time in our lives, we considered it urgent, as I said to Chuck, to “turn off the Chatty Cathy robots.”

Chuck was on his feet jiggling and jerking and bopping while Hendrix played, so I stood the whole time, too. As with jazz, I felt like I didn’t quite get it—the feedback, the distortion, the
noise,
like some science-fictional Factory of the Future falling apart, exploding in slow motion—but I loved the rollicking hell of it anyhow. It sounded like revolution. “He’s playing directly from
inside
his
brain,
” Chuck shouted over “Purple Haze.” I’d never seen anyone so entirely, recklessly, virtuosically committed to making a spectacle of himself as Hendrix. And when he spoke, I was shocked by his sweet, modest, mouthful-of-marbles voice. He was like a character from
Alice in Wonderland,
funny and serious at the same time, dangerous and adorable.

My dad had said to me over the last couple of years that teenagers in every era feel as though they’re experiencing life in original, unprecedented ways, confusing the novelty of their individual adolescent experience with something marvelous and historic. “Solipsism,” he’d said. “Look it up.” Now I had a counterargument: this
was
unlike anything anyone had ever heard or seen or maybe felt before.

Jimi spoke less and less as the set went on, and the spaces between songs were more and more filled with crowd chants of
“Mon-kees, Mon-kees, Mon-kees.”
At the end of “Wild Thing”—which he’d fractured and stretched into several digressions, some of them unintelligible screeches, some of them recognizable pieces of song, including “Strangers in the Night,” which made us laugh—Hendrix was steamed. He walked to the edge of the stage, put up his right hand, and gave us all the finger before disappearing into the darkness. It made me feel like crying.

The most psychedelic special effect of the night was unintentional and Monkees-driven—the thousands of flashbulbs strobing all over the stadium, like a swarm of electronic lightning bugs in a giant jar.
We’re all playing roles, we’re all characters in the show,
Chuck had said.
Fool yourself so it doesn’t even feel like lying,
Alex had told me. When the Monkees finally appeared and ten thousand screamies yelled and jumped and—in the case of the little girl next to me—sobbed, I had a revelation: they weren’t
like
actors playing roles, they
really were
performing parts they’d learned from watching Beatles fans on TV and in the movies, and each one had fooled herself into sincerely believing her own performance of unhinged euphoria. Whereas the Monkees, a self-aware simulacrum of the Beatles, were funny about it: onstage between songs, they snapped pictures of one another, performing parodies of the Beatles and their unhinged fans in
A Hard Day’s Night.
My post-Jimi embarrassment and sorrow lifted. We still left halfway through their set, driven away by the banshee screams that greeted the first bars of “I’m a Believer.”