Otherworldly Music

When I was fourteen, I asked my mom about hippies.

“Mom, were you a hippie in the sixties?”

She didn’t look up from her needlepoint. “What? Of course not.”

“But I thought everyone in the sixties was a hippie,” I said.

She glanced at me, arching her eyebrow. “No, everyone in the sixties was not a hippie. Don’t ask your father a question like that, ok?”

“Did you wear tie-dye?”

“No.”

“Did you like the Beatles?”

“Only when they were mop-tops. I didn’t like what they did later on, especially when that Yoko Ono” (she wrinkled her nose) “showed up and they all grew their hair long and started taking drugs.”

I had no idea who Yoko Ono was, but he/she/it sounded intriguing. “Were your friends hippies?”

She paused in her stitching. “Why are you asking all these questions about hippies?”

“We’re studying the Cultural Revolution in my History class.” I stared at my practical mother in her polyester pantsuit and envisioned her in a patchwork skirt and a wreath of flowers on her head, dancing barefoot in the mud, just like in the documentary we’d watched in class. I watched her needle pull thread through the fabric in the cross-stitching hoop. Perhaps she would have embroidered her bell-bottomed jeans …

“Well, I knew a few Flower Children. They’re different. They never wanted to hurt anyone,” she explained. “They were gentle and loved nature. They believed in love, not like those drug addicts that came later.”

“What happened to the Flower Children?” I asked.

She shrugged. “They grew up, I guess.”

I was silent then, wondering if flowers and love were of no interest to old people.

***

Another question, one that Mom can’t answer, occurred to me today, many years after the Summer of Love faded into the long Autumn of Survival: What names were worshiped then but languish unknown and excluded from today’s teen dreams? Who started it all and died in obscurity? Because it’s probably their ghosts I’m seeing on here on Haight Street, and only artificial tulpas of youthful Grace Slick, now white-haired and plump. Across from me, a mural of Janis Joplin looms over a group of kids in filthy jeans with rope-leashed pit bulls. No flowers in their hair, though a couple have Grandmother’s love beads and imitations of Uncle’s mohawk. They pass around cigarettes, and vodka in Coke bottles. Their vices are cheaper than drugs, which kill the dream more slowly.

America’s collective memory of teen dreams is crammed like an attic, full of ruffled shirts, ‘49 Fords, ramshackle rooms in unwashed bohemia, syringes and rolling papers, leather journals stinking of cigarettes, neon Ganeshes, combat boots under lace, and endless worn sleeping bags on concrete. And in San Francisco, where the grime is layered on streets, I could find, if I was inclined to chip away at it, the remains of flowers much older than I am–organic matter mixed with bum piss and exhaust, composting in concrete cracks.

—————-

The musical inspiration for this came from a kid playing guitar outside the cafe I was in.  Since he wandered off, I’ll leave you with one of my favorite new San Francisco bands, Foreign Cinema.

Photo by Mr. Skeleton.

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The old man kept a jeweled caterpillar in his shirt pocket, and only took it out for frail girls with haunted eyes and thrift-store sweaters. My mother saw it when she waitressed at the little Hungarian restaurant on 44th street in the City. She said it hummed like a cicada in her ears, first left and then right. The old man finished his coffee, and she followed him as he shuffled out. He turned towards her with the larva in his hand, and the little creature rose on its many hind legs. The wet streets lit with its kaleidoscopic colors, and each illuminated raindrop whispered a dream that every child must forget.   Red light, trapeze. Blue light, marionette. Green light, curtained stage. Violet light, top hat man. Silver light, a checker-board floor. Magenta light, the mechanical brain encased in flesh.   Golden light, the emptiness of form on your fingertips.

She froze, fixated on the caterpillar, and was still motionless long after he disappeared around the corner. When she came to hours later, she had written “Junkett Hauser” on her order pad, right under “French fries with brown gravy, Coke.” She never knew if that was the man’s name, the place he came from, what the caterpillar liked for breakfast, or what. Then she was fired for walking out of her job.

“And that was ok, honey,” she said years later, “because then I got that job as a go-go dancer –god, I was so embarrassed but I needed the rent money and it was a really swanky club!– and I met your father there. Now here you are, playing in my old go-go boots, so wasn’t that a good thing to have happened?”

When the old man sat beside me on the park bench twenty years later, I understood something right away.  They had a symbiotic relationship of sleep and wakefulness. The warmth of his chest lulled the caterpillar to sleep, and the glow of its lights awakened the old man back into youth. And as I shivered in the fog, pondering this, I watched the sun set and rise on Golden Gate Park. One day had passed, a day of my youth that he deftly plucked and nestled next to Mother’s in the magenta jewel on the caterpillar’s back.

***

Musical Inspiration: Maelcum’s Righteous Dub by the Changelings. To my disappointment, this song is not available on mp3 and is out of print. You can hear it on YouTube and buy the CD used. (Update!  I’m told it’s now available on the band’s website.)

I wish I were a better artist so I could paint the caterpillar I see in my head. I plan to take drawing lessons in the future, but my Lessons Fund is currently devoted to my new piano teacher. My long-neglected piano skills are not as pathetic as I imagined and I can hold my own with most seven-year-olds. Do you hear that, kiddos?  Do not challenge me to a piano duel. I can play “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” with the best of them.

For now, I will use this photo of a Tiffany dragonfly lamp, misnamed as “Caterpillar” but I’m good with that for obvious reasons! Photo by Terry Johnston.

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