Passing Through the Flame (30 page)

“You’re not happy
now
, are you?” Jango said. “Of course not, because you’re fighting your own destiny, you’re trying to deny what you are. You can’t win that way. You’ve got to give yourself to the flow, move inside it, ride with the power. A strong person can swim with the currents of the river and use them to get someplace like where she wants to go, but if you keep trying to swim straight upstream, you’ll eventually exhaust yourself and drown.”

“What bullshit!” Bill grunted, looking pointedly away from Jango, down into the tangled chaparral in the ravine below the sun deck. But Susan found Jango’s words flowing inside the configuration of her being, moving her from within. Doing, in a sense, what he was telling her to do with destiny.

“You’re afraid of what you’re becoming,” he said. “But you can’t hold it back. You can’t go back to being a stoned kid in the Haight in the Summer of Love. The place you were isn’t there anymore, and the you that was isn’t you anymore. You can’t help flowing forward; you’re going to become whatever it is that you’re meant to be. Your only real choice is whether you’re going to ride it high and wide or be dragged kicking and screaming.”

Bill turned on Jango. “You miserable fucker, all you want is to make some more bread off our pain!”

Jango widened his vision to include Bill, still exuding that glacial calm. “Sure I want to make some more money off the Velvet Cloud,” he said. “Don’t you? But not off your pain. You’re in pain now, and how much money am I making while you sit around unable to write a simple song and Susan freaks out at the thought of performing live? I make money when you make money, and that’s when the pain goes. I’ve seen this kind of artistic funk before. The pain comes from the fear, and the fear comes from the pain. The only way out of this mess is to go right into the pain, into the fear. Be what you were meant to be, and there won’t be any fear or pain. If you want to get through the fire, you’ve got to step into the flame.”

“Far out,” Bill said, “sympathy from the devil.”

“I just want to help you....”

“You just want us to cut a new album at this damn festival of yours so you can get a little richer.”

Jango shrugged. “Sure I want to get richer,” he said. “Who doesn’t? But the way I get richer is by unblocking your creativity—you feel better and I get richer. If I was the bastard you think I am, I’d simply sign a binding contract as your manager with myself as producer, then sue you for breach of contract if you don’t appear.”

“You really think you can scare us with a lawsuit, man?”

“Fear wouldn’t be the lever,” Jango said. “Plain old hunger would. There’d be liens on everything you own, and even if you eventually won, your bank accounts would be frozen for months. You’d have to go back to work just to eat.” He paused, narrowed his eyes. “Maybe that’s what you need,” he said. “A return to basic reality....”

Then Jango smiled and touched Bill lightly on the shoulder. “See what I could do if I were really an unfeeling exploitative bastard?” he said softly. “Aren’t you glad I’m a man of sensitivity, a true friend genuinely interested in your personal well-being?”

Susan had sensed the reality of the threat in Jango’s voice; only an idiot would’ve failed to pick up on the fact that he was brandishing it as a final ploy. But there had been a kind of sincerity in everything he had said too, Jango’s strange brand of hypocritical honesty. If you want to get through the fire, you’ve got to step into the flame.

... What would it be like to give up fighting and just let the music take me? Let go, and become whatever I was meant to be? Could it be worse than what I’m doing now, fighting my own being every waking hour?

“Remember what Jango said, Bill?” she said. “About having to step into the fire to pass through the flame? Maybe that’s truth. Maybe we should just let the music take us, and be whatever we were meant to be. We believed in that once, we believed in it so hard....”

“And this is where it took us,” Bill said bitterly. “This is where I put you. On the edge of flipping out.”

She lifted her head off his chest, looked deep into his eyes. “Don’t blame yourself,” she said. “Whatever happens don’t blame yourself. Whatever we’ve done, we’ve done together. Whatever we’ve become, we’ve become together.”

“Just you and me and Jango Beck,” Bill said. “Me writing Star, you living her, and Jango pulling both our strings.”

“And the people that need us,” Susan said. “The people who Star can help because we’ve made them believe.... Can we just walk away from the people who believe in us?”

“Fuck ‘em!” Bill snarled, but Susan could sense the falseness in it. The Bill she loved, the Bill who had conceived the whole thing in the first place, couldn’t really turn his back on people’s need, could never be the cynic he now so desperately wanted to be.

“You don’t mean that, Bill,” she said.

His eyes softened. “Maybe not. But I’d sure like to.
I
need you, babes, more than anyone does. I need
Susan
, not Star.”

She touched a finger to his lips, then kissed him, long and deep, tasting the salt of stress on his lips, trying to suck the stale wind of despair out of him, feeling his body tremble against hers.

Silently, they walked through the house to the bedroom, silently, they undressed, and silently, Bill lit the four fragrant bayberry candles atop the bedposts of the water bed. She stood there for a long moment staring at his nakedness as the sweet odor filled the room, as he gazed at her body, as he hardened before her, and the whole thing seemed like a ritual, an act they had repeated so many times that now they were moving through it like robots. Not that there was no meaning left in sex between them, but too much meaning, so that every moment, every motion, was fraught with memories and overtones, frozen into a dance of love whose rhythm they dared not break for fear of shattering the fragile pattern of their love and letting in... and letting in....

She threw herself at him, away from the thought, away from the fear she could not name—dared not name—and tried to bury the feeling that was bubbling up like black tar from the depths of her being in the taste of his mouth, the feel of his flesh against hers, and, after too short a time, the flash of pure physical pleasure as he flipped her back on the bed and entered her.

Entered, but did not possess. Penetrated, but not to the core. Not that delightful merging in the quick of their mutual pleasure. She felt the sweetness and the love in the rhythm of his hips, his tiny trail of kisses along her neck and collarbone, and she answered it with a love dance of her own, with little moaning cries. She felt his pleasure, felt her pleasure, but
their
pleasure, the communion that they shared, was gone. It was hiding somewhere behind the hollow personas that they were trying to become, for the full feelings that were roaring through them hurt too much to share. He was making love to her, she was making love to him but they weren’t making love together.

We’re performing
, she thought miserably as she felt him surge toward climax. We’re performing even with each other. In despair, she found herself in the middle of faking an orgasm for him, a forlorn thing she had never dreamed of doing before. And mockingly, as she moaned and writhed in simulated ecstasy, the act, the
performance
, brought on the real thing, or a cold electric version of the real thing, a flash of physical release that passed through her with all the human warmth of a charge of static electricity.

After a long time, during which Bill lay panting on top of her with his face buried in the fur of a pillow, she finally found words. “Bill, I think we should try to get an album together. Get the guys together, see if you can write some stuff, try to come alive again. I feel so dead, fighting it. I’m starting to feel I’m fighting on the wrong side.”

“You’re sure? You’re not actually thinking of recording at the Carnival of Life?”

“Just an album,” she said. “Just to be doing something together again.” Inwardly, she wondered. Our love has always been wound together with our music. If we stop the music, maybe we’ll lose it. Maybe we’re losing it right now. Maybe the only way we can save it is to let the music take us. Let it take us back to ourselves again. Or to wherever we were meant to go....

When the music comes knockin’ on my bedroom door

And my feet won’t let me hang around here anymore

Then I’ll fly like a bird into the silver sun

And I won’t be lookin’ back for anyone

And I’ll fly through the sky till I die

And lie beyond space and time

Then it won’t matter that the words of the song

My life don’t rhyme....

Bill Horvath squeezed technically proficient chords out of his guitar, and Susan sang the words he had written in a clear unwavering voice, Mark’s guitar was in there with him, Jerry’s drums were in the background where they belonged, and Bobby’s organ backed Susan’s voice with power instead of riding over it; it was all right.

And it was all wrong, and Horvath knew it. It wasn’t the Velvet Cloud. It was dead inside. It was Susan singing something written by some nameless dude in this damn Eden Tower with a deadline in his head and a check in his hand. And it’s me writing like that, he thought. It’s not the
Velvet Cloud.

“All right, let’s break,” he said. Jerry, Mark and Bobby left the rehearsal studio to go to the head together; Susan and Horvath stayed behind with Jango Beck. It’s getting like that, Horvath thought as he watched them leave. Susan and I are the Velvet Cloud, and the boys are just sidemen. Just musicians, and we’re something else. Maybe that’s why the Velvet Cloud isn’t the Velvet Cloud anymore.

“That’s usable material,” Jango Beck said, rising from his director’s chair, and walking toward them. “Barely usable. A filler song on any first-class album, at best.” He wore a burgundy velvet suit and a black ruffled shirt; the combination seemed to make his black afro look heavier, more massive, and made his eyes seem to smolder like dull coals. Jango at his most exasperating, Horvath thought.

“You’ve got to come up with better material than that, Bill,” Jango continued, when Horvath gave him no response. “Labor Day is only five and a half months away.”

“What’s so important about Labor Day?” Horvath asked without much real interest.

“I want the Velvet Cloud to be ready to record a new album by Labor Day,” Beck said. He smiled the smile of a shit-eating Cheshire cat. “At the Carnival of Life.”

A globe of electricity seemed to explode in Horvath’s gut, leaving his stomach cold and empty and his nerves twanging with rage. “You’ve conned me into putting together some new material,” he said, “or you’ve conned Susan into making me do it, but you’re not going to hand us a needleful of smack and con us into shooting it. No live performances, and
no way
will we get within ten miles of this Altamont of yours.”

Beside him, he could sense Susan’s vibes screaming out of sync onto the edges of a bummer like a band saw biting into metal. The miserable bastard!

“I never deal in smack, Bill. Smack’s an energy eater, just not my style. I’m a high-energy source, I don’t eat it, I put it out. I help people tap the energy sources in themselves.”

“Meaning what?”

Beck extracted a joint from a silver-and-ebony case, lit it, dragged and handed it to Horvath. Reflexively, Horvath took a hit and passed it to Susan. Sweet, mild, and strong—Jango’s usual dynamite stuff.

“Meaning you should trust me, Bill,”. Jango said, exhaling smoke. “Meaning I wouldn’t do anything that would make me fatter by making you leaner. Meaning I know where your energy source is, and what’s blocking it, and how to unblock it. When you’re putting it out, you’re happier and I’m richer. When you’re not, you’re in hell, and you’re failing to contribute your fair share to the excellence of my life-style. We’re both interested in the same thing.”

“All you’re interested in is money, Beck.”

“Money is energy in a suspended state of transfer,” Beck said. “A ripple in the configuration of the flow. What I’m interested in is maximizing the energy flow through myself. Bread is high-energy fuel.”

“Bullshit is pouring out of your ears, Jango.”

“Bullshit is another high-energy fuel, the whole world runs on it.”

“You make me want to puke.”

“Now at least we’re getting somewhere. Maybe you could turn that into a song. ‘You made me what I am today, you make me want to puke.’ That’s about the level of the downer stuff you’re churning out. Jim Morrison on ipecac. You can’t put stuff like that in Susan’s mouth and have it work, you know that, Bill. You’re the Velvet Cloud, you’re an upper, you’re energy for the masses. Your energy source is the image of Star synced into your feelings for Susan synced into her feeling for you synced into what the people expect and need. When you’re riding that, all that energy flows through you. When you’re not, you’re faking it, you’re third-rate.”

“I didn’t know you’d set up shop as a shrink,” Horvath said, unable to meet Beck’s eyes, unable to face the reflection in them of Beck’s knowledge of
his
knowledge that what Jango was saying was the truth.

“Please, Bill,” Susan said, speaking for the first time, taking the half-consumed joint from between her lips. “I want to hear this. I want to hear what he has to say.”

Her eyes were locked on Jango’s. Horvath hated these moments when she showed Jango’s power over her, when she treated him like her guru instead of the bloodsucking monster he was. Sure Jango went deep, but he dove down in there after only one thing: money.

“I’ve said it already,” Beck said. “You’re either the Velvet Cloud or you’re nothing. You either get behind what you really are, or you stop being real. You become ghosts of yourselves like Lennon or Dylan. Then you just fade away.”

“And this Carnival of Life—”

“It’s your way home. It’s an old-time Velvet Cloud trip. A quarter of a million people out to have a good time. Good vibes. Free admission. A little free wine and free dope. Love in the air.”

“Free wine and dope?” Susan muttered.

Beck flashed her a warm phony smile. “When I put on a carnival, it’s a
carnival
,” he said. “Besides, I’ll make it all back on the other end.”