I remembered Drew from the 1960s, stoned on hashish or LSD, babbling Marx or Marcuse, whanging away on a red guitar. We lost contact during the ’70s, even though I’d occasionally see him, dressed in bright rags, riding up and down Tejon Street on a bike, a faraway look in his eyes.
Early one morning while walking uptown to the park, I dropped into a place called Poor Richard’s for coffee and a paper. The first thing I noticed was the music, or non-music. It made me feel like I had the flu. Drew was working behind the counter.
“How’s the guitar coming along?”
He stared at me blankly.
“You still got that red guitar?”
“……….”
“Your name’s Drew, right? You and Skip Stone used to bring your guitars to the quad and practice.”
“I never really play it any more.”
“I’ll give you 25 bucks for it if you don’t want it. I can drop by with the money tonight.”
He agreed and gave me his card. I grabbed my coffee and a paper and walked over to Acacia Park.
His perplexing card read, “DREW (just ‘Drew’) – Crystals Tarot Raeki. I wondered what kind of bag he was into. That evening I drove out to his address in Manitou Springs. I found the house and heard more of that strange music wafting out. It was a hateful sound: there was no intent, no melody, no rhythm, just aimless major seventh chords, dreamy, meaningless. It was no wonder Drew had given up music. I smelled bread baking, and the porch flashed like a migraine with shimmering colors where the setting sun shone through an array of tinkling suspended crystals. I knocked and Drew came to the door.
“Yes?” he asked.
“I came by for a look at that guitar.”
“……….”
“The red one. We talked about it this morning, remember?”
“Please enter.”
“Thanks.”
“And please remove your shoes.”
“My shoes?”
“For the man wearing shoes, the world is covered in leather.”
“That can’t be very pleasant,” I said stupidly and put my sneakers in a pile in the corner. Candles and incense burned and the place was dim and smoky. The music went on and on, a synthesizer on valium. It was like a marketing scheme to sell music to the deaf. A young woman of radiant beauty swayed into the room. She was smiling broadly and, like Drew, she had a great many large, white teeth. She looked startled, brimming, fulfilled, like someone who had just now been introduced to Jesus or her first hit of smack.
“Brother Seth bids you welcome to here and now. The others will be here soon. I’m very positive about tonight’s environment. We’re almost there.”
Her gleaming lips moved smoothly over strong teeth. Her skin was like summer fruit and her clean hair reached her waist. Calm eyes invited me to languish in her wide, rich dream. Her skin was just like honey. I became nervous and began to roll a cigarette. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. Suddenly it was quiet – the record was between “songs.” Her beatific expression changed.
“I’m going to have to request you not to smoke,” she intoned, and her eyes shut like the rumored steel doors of NORAD. I felt thoroughly rebuked and somehow ashamed.
“Seth don’t smoke?” I asked.
“You’re not here for channeling at all, are you?” she asked.
“I’m here to see Drew about a guitar. A red electric guitar.”
Her face became disgusted and world-weary as she turned, jerking a length of shiny hair back over her shoulder with a lightning, hard movement. We had seen each other plainly and I was not a member of her tribe; I felt lonely. What did Drew have that I didn’t have? He had a red electric guitar, and I wanted it. I stood in the living room like two hundred pounds of perfect materialist asshole.
I waited, listening to the stereo. The piece evoked a bale of dull hay. It was like the gas at the dentist, music from the Holiday Inn of Hell, where they keep the lobotomies. Finally Drew walked back in, carrying a steaming basket of fresh bread. Eager for something, I accepted a slice. The bread was thick and seedy, and the small slice weighed half a pound. I ate at it, trying to smile while chewing, chewing. Staring at a big color poster of Stonehenge, imagining the horror of fairies, darting gnomes, humorless druids and Big Daddy Time hardly helped. At length I finished the bread. He offered me another slice.
“One for the road,” I said, wrapping a piece and putting it in my coat. I felt dizzy and decided to touch common ground. “I have some money for you, Drew, if you still want to unload that red guitar.”
“A moment, please,” said Drew, whisking into the kitchen.
By now it was dark outside. More people were arriving. They all seemed to wear the same face: placid, formless, displaying the same even-featured benevolence. They all looked very colorful in their asymmetrical clothes – their Chinese scarves and rough-woven shirts and purple sweat pants and humble little greasy sandals of third-world straw. Their uniforms, their purity, their pagan worship, their like-mindedness reminded me of the Politics of Joy, re-birth, the gathering of great destiny, 1933. The Night of the Long Knives. I looked down at my clothes. Some club. I must have looked unhappy, as a pale young man offered me a tube of tea-colored liquid.
“It tastes strange. What is it?”
“Tincture of ginseng and Chinese queen bee pollen. It enhances every human activity.”
“Listen,” I said, “it seems like I’ve been here for hours.”
He beamed approval.
“It seem like forever. . . . I’m trying to get with Drew.”
“Yes, yes,” he said.
Frustrated, I pulled a half pint of Scotch from my coat, offered a hit to Mister Personality (declined with horror), and took a good pull. I belched quietly and turned to find Drew, leaving the aroma of pizza and Scotch behind me. What the hell did Seth know, anyway? That guitar was worth a few hundred bucks and I was going to get it for twenty-five. Maybe Seth had warned Drew about me. I walked through the kitchen. There were many Mason jars filled with brown rice, brown sugar, brown beans, green spaghetti, dried mushrooms, peppers. Large pots and pans hung from nails on the walls and an oversized load of dirty dished soaked in the sink. At the top of a thirteen step flight of stairs glowed a pastel emerald light. I’d found Drew, talking with Dream Girl.
“My man. . . . About that guitar,” I interrupted with phony gusto.
Drew appeared confused.
“Drew, he wants to buy something from you. An electric guitar or something,” said the most beautiful woman in the world.
“What guitar, Mara?”
“A red Fender Stratocaster, remember?” I almost shouted.
Drew walked over to the closet and rooted around. He emerged with a broken red dulcimer, coated with chalky, peeling day-go paint.
“You’ve come for this? I really never play it any more.”
Driving back from Manitou that night, I rolled down the window, got some sweet Rhythm&Blues on the radio, and fired up a smoke. It was a cold, clear, moonlit autumn night. Saturday night and I had money in my pocket. Being a natural born paranoid, I reached for my coat, my whiskey, my twenty-five dollars. I fingered around and found them, feeling the bills next to Drew’s big bread. I threw that bread out the window onto the road.
***
Dan Todd read literature at Colorado College and law at UCLA before returning to Colorado to teach and play music. He taught at PPCC, his alma mater, from 1987 on.
