Elmolake

At the Beach

Elmolake

I couldn’t tell you what day or even the year he died, remember the party though.

I walked there. I could have had a ride, but I was trying to make some time with a girl (probably would have called her a chick back then). She wanted to take a walk.

We walk. I do my best to convince her I am worthy of her affection. I try, but don’t make the grade, “close but no cigar” as some guy my father’s age might say, not sure it was close. It gets bizarre, my mother and aunt ride up, they are out for a ride and spot me. They ask us if we want a lift. I wave them off and smile like “gee chucks ma don’t embarrass a guy.” I’m sure they think it cute, me walking with a girl, cute isn’t exactly the reason I am walking with her.

I steer us towards the lake, because of the party. I don’t want to miss my opportunity with her, don’t get that many opportunities, but I want to go to the party – I am multi-tasking – back then people called it “doing two things at once.” Something is needed to mark the event, at least in the minds of some people who like to party. Party at the beach is their answer. I invite her to come along, but it’s a no for that too. I hoped things would turn out better for us, more for me, my hopes dashed I bid her adieu. I feel stupid. She is probably more relieved than disappointed.

The sun is setting. I walk over the bridge spanning Pike’s creek (really a small river) and cross the road toward the lake. I can see the parking lot is half full, the party may be a dud, or I am early. I don’t see Tim’s mustard Mustang. Love that car, riding in it past fields of farty smelling cabbage, talking, drinking beer, listening to music, driving up a hill to find the city lights for directions back to city.

Was supposed to come with Tim. He might be waiting for my call, I was busy making the case for affection. He would do the same thing, maybe not, chicks are attracted to him, he doesn’t have to make the case. Hope he comes though, would like a ride home, ain’t looking forward to more walking, not that walking isn’t my usual thing. May be at the wrong place. There are places up and down the lake. People confuse them. It happens.

Simmon’s was the place for freaks to hang out at night. Panel vans and beater cars lining the lakefront, people roaming from van to car to the hill sloping down to the beach. Speakers turned out so all could hear the music. Some people wore hippie clothes, tied-dyed stuff, puffy pants, but most of us wore blue jeans and t-shirts. In the early days, there were a lot of bell bottoms, but they lost their following, I kind of miss them. I sometimes wear a dark t shirt with a bright embroidered dragon on it, no one else had one like it.

The gatherings grew from a handful of people to the hundreds. People smoke pot, drink wine and beer, usually someone has acid (LSD) for sale. My buddies and I graduate from smoking banana peels in Johhny Gonzales’ basement and other homemade attempts at getting high, sometimes ending up with more of a headache than anything else, to finally getting high on pot and taking acid. By the time we start going down to lake, we are experienced.

The police know about Simmon’s, it is the city’s main beach. Friends and I mug for the camera we spy in an unmarked police car on our way there. Walking towards the top of the slope we see a new sedan, alone, parked with hand directed spot lights on each side. The car is manufactured in our city. All the police squad and detective cars come from the “motors” as it is called. Half the people in the city own a vehicle that rolls out of one the motor’s factory doors and it seems half the working people in the city work in their factories. The detective’s unmarked sedans are a step up from the police cruiser models, without top lights and identifying insignias. Seeing it there alone with the pair of side spots on it, we know it’s the cops. Any kid chased or cornered for causing a ruckus knows cop cars have double spots, regular and unmarked ones. Thru the tinted windows we see someone in the back seat of the car holding a film camera. We guess they want film of the people coming down to the lakefront, so we do a few dance steps for them, like we are in a variety show or something.

We make fun of them, but know they won’t let us gather at the city’s central beach forever. They eventually start busting people and we say bye to Simmons. People find other places, “out of the way” places, beaches hidden from the public and the cops’ view, ones on the outskirts of the city that regular citizens don’t go to after the sun sets.

The parking lot measures about forty by twenty something, a stoney flat place, where people park their vehicles, get out, and walk thru the trees and shrubs to the sandy beach or the park pavilion. Near the edge of the lot a cardboard sign tacked to a tree says “Jimi.” I am at the right place at least. I step off the stones onto the sand and walk into the brush.

I hear faint sounds of music, didn’t hear it in the parking lot. That’s the outside world, when you enter the brush and trees you are in a different world. I follow a light sandy path, try to stay on it and out of the vegetation, away from prickly stuff. Music gets louder.

I see the park pavilion, basically a slab of concrete with a roof over it. Red pen sized lights glow on the amp and speakers playing the music. For a small fee the city turns the electricity on in park pavilions, which amounts to letting current flow to the electric outlets on the steel pipes serving as pillars holding up the roof. Families, church organizations, and the like use the power for their gatherings. This party is not as well organized or financed as that – no one applied for a permit and the Park Department doesn’t usually give out night permits, especially to long hair types. The amplifier runs on hijacked power. Someone bypassed the Park Department’s block on the electricity.

I am not a big Hendrix fan. It’s sad he died. I know he is good. Anyone who picks up an electric guitar – and almost every kid whose parent wants him to get a haircut does – knows it’s hard to take all those sounds and bring them into a thing the way Jimi Hendrix does. People refer to him as Jimi, because he refers to himself that way, as in “move over Rover, let Jimi take over.” I can’t figure him out, he is a black guy who plays bluesy stuff, but doesn’t play blues in the usual way, he can rock, but he’s not a rocker, he uses feedback and other sounds, things that make up psychedelic, better than maybe everybody, and he borrows from Dylan, a guy generally not listened to by black kids. He’s in a category all his own.

He looks good in pictures and on album covers, dressed in polka dots, wearing hip hugging colorful pants, bright headband scarves, and stuff like that. It influences people, probably influenced my buddy Ollie who bought flowery hippy clothes and now doesn’t wear them. Frank the barber saw him walking past his place wearing them and walked out of his shop and yelled, “Ollie, you look like a Tuti Frutti.” Tim can’t stop laughing about that. Most white guys don’t look good in colors and flowery things.

Hendrix overdosed and died. He was in his twenties and he took too much one night. It shakes the music world. It makes a ripple in our world where a fair part of my friends and my existence involve listening to music.

The party long passed and I am going to classes at the college. College for working class me is not a place I belong. I still work at the factory, which is more my speed. One day after work and a class miles away, hitch hiking from one place to the other, and then to my small apartment, I arrive tired and hungry with a box of fried chicken I picked up on the way, looking forward to sitting on the small side porch and eating my meal.

Its warm out and I would rather be outside than in my stuffy apartment. The sky is red with sunset and the big thoroughfare running through the neighborhood unusually quiet. I feel a bit lonely. Maybe some music? I go in and throw on the first album I see, its Hendrix. It’s not even my album, it’s my buddy’s who uses my place as a getaway, the freeloader.

The music starts up and I am enjoying my meal, looking up in the sky. Then this moment happens. A swarm of small birds rise hundreds maybe a thousand feet in the air and loop back down and around. They do great loops in the red and blue sky, there formation rippling as birds change direction. Hendrix’s guitar rises and falls with them. The music from his fingers, from his guitar, seem to be in sync with them. It brings me to a place I had for some reason separated from, kept as a memory not accessed.

**********

I make out several figures, almost shadows in the dim light as I approach the pavilion.

“Hey man,” a skinny guy, straight hair reaching to his shoulders greets me. I know him, can’t remember his name. His baby-faced chubby friend standing with him nods smiles.

“Where’s the party”?

He points in the direction of the beach, “people out there.” A fire burns out on the sandy beach about fifty feet away, people gathered about it.

My nameless friend passes me a bottle of wine saying, “for Jimi man.” I take a swig. We converse a bit. I excuse myself, “going to look around, see you later man,”

“Peace.”

I figure people might be being extra hippie, saying peace and the like, given the occasion. I head out to the fire

The closer I get to the fire the closer I get to the lake. A veil of fog, a white wall on the water’s edge extending up as far as I can see, runs along the lakefront. Never seen anything like it.

“Howdy,” I say walking into the fire’s circle, a dozen or so people there sitting on beach wood arranged around the blaze. The fire pops sending embers in the air. It’s a healthy one. A couple nod, but no one answers. It feels like I am interrupting. There’s Wesley sitting there. I don’t think he knows me. Went to a small party at his place once – where he and his band are too busy jamming to notice most everybody else. Their music doesn’t move me. Someone tells me it is conceptual, I think it is an excuse for not knowing how to play. They look good though. Johnny puts it well as we are leaving. Getting in the car with him and other buddies he says, “they suck,” everyone laughs – agreed.

I am sure these people are not going to offer me anything, not even a good word. I don’t want to start on a bad footing. I say goodbye to the “cool” people at the fire and start off for the shoreline. For some reason the veil of fog attracts me and I want a better look. It’s unreal. Someone shouts, “hey, red on the head,” I stop and look. Being a red head, I know what follows that phrase in my neighborhood, “like a dick on a dog.” I know whoever is calling out is likely one of my ne’er do well friends.

Rugged, broad face, mop of sandy hair, it’s Dave.

“There goes the neighborhood,” I say. He shows me his goofy grin. Couldn’t figure out that grin first couple times. Dave’s big and solid with a reputation. One guy likes to tell how he saw Dave lift a motor block from a car they were working on.

I got to know Dave at a park we hung out at in earlier times. I hung out there more than he, it was close to my house. We had talked before just a bit when one day he shows up at about five on a Summer’s Day. Most my usual park friends have left for home and dinner. For some reason, I am sitting alone in an area near the public pool. Dave walks up and with a grin across his broad acme scared face says, “how’s it going.”

I make small talk, “I don’t think anyone will be around till seven.”

“Probably right.” He stares at me still sporting his goofy grin

“Want to get high,” he says.

“Sure.”

“Then come on.”

We take off for a secluded spot to light up, which usually means a spot a little past the nearby creek in the park’s woods. But Dave wants to go further, out of the park to a place in the old landfill about a half mile away, a place where mounds of dirt mixed with hunks of cement and asphalt cover tons of old city trash. They stopped dumping raw garbage here years ago, its desolate.

I follow Dave to a spot down an embankment, out of sight. Dave pulls out a homemade hash pipe. Back then we took cardboard tubes that served as the base on wire clothes hangers, cut them short, and used them as hash pipes by notching a slot in the tube and putting aluminum foil over it, poking holes in the foil to use it as the bowl of the pipe. Hold one finger over the end opposite your mouth, put a piece of hash in the bowl, light it, and draw in the smoke. More than one mother wondered why some of their hangers were missing their cardboard bases. Dave takes out the pipe and puts a small chunk of kief in it. We smoke it, passing the pipe between us. I know the sandy greenish piece is kief, smoked some before. I got buzzed then. Some say it comes from Africa and isn’t exactly hash. Don’t know. People say stuff comes from all kinds of places, Acapulco, Panamá, Lebanon, etc. I just know what is called kief gets me high and isn’t too harsh. I also know it is hard to find. So when Dave produces the kief – especially at a time when there is not much pot to be found – it surprises me. We pass it back and forth and after a short time I am buzzed again on kief. I forget about the silly grin on Dave’s face and most likely have one of my own.

Dave and I walk up the embankment and tramp across the desolation, weeds shoot up between the pieces of asphalt and concrete, in summer’s dried hard greyish soil covering all those years of discarded things. High, I laugh, thinking what the fuck are we doing here. We make for the park. Dave ends up turning before we get there and heads off, saying “well red this is where we split.”

“Don’t you want to go back to the park.”

“I have to be somewhere.”

“You get me high and you leave me alone, that ain’t fair.”

“You can handle it red.”

The whole thing would have passed out of usable memory, if Dave didn’t come down to the park a few more times over the next couple weeks and get me high again. Oddly though he didn’t invite anyone else hanging at the park. He would find me by myself and ask if I want to get high, I would say yes, and we would end up going down to the same spot and I would end up blazed, so high one time I went home and locked myself in my bedroom.

Here is Dave again with his silly ass grin.

“What are you grinning at.”

“You are really a funny looking fucker – you know.”

“Who is that,” he points towards the fire.

“You know Westin.”

“He’s a prick.”

“You know him.”

“Come on, red on the head.”

I follow Dave down the beach, away from the fire and the pavilion into the night. We find our way along the jagged edge where the sand meets tufts of grass. I look to the lake to see the fog still veiling the water. On a flat-topped boulder, probably put there, Dave sits and takes out a bag of pot with rolling papers.

As he rolls a joint, “Hendrix – he was so fucking great. He will be coming back – from the sea.”
He’s referring to something people say they hear on one of his records, or at least think they hear or want to hear, a hidden message about Hendrix returning from the sea. I am not a big believer in hidden messages, but I go along with people who do sometimes - for fun – a little fantasy now and then doesn’t hurt.

“Yeah, that would be great to see.”

“He is,” said Dan as he passes me the joint he has rolled and lit.

I am blasted once again, curtesy of Dave - this time by tufts of long grass and sand. I hear Lake Michigan lapping at the shore. We walk back to the party and to my surprise it has become one. A dozen more people are standing near the fire. Dave decides to take off, as usual, saying he will be back later, he won’t. An acquaintance walks by with a beer in hand and I ask if there is more. He points to the pavilion. Must be over fifty people in and around the pavilion. I head to the place where it looks like the beer might be, sure enough it is.

Tim yells out my name. He has arrived. He doesn’t seem upset that I didn’t call him, standing there with a beer in his hand and a smile on his Clark Kent face. Of course he’s happy, free beer. I hear some guy is passing out hits of acid – purple microdots or as some people call them “purple haze,” a reference to a Hendrix song by the same name. Hendrix is a saint in the psychedelic church and acid is a sacrament. Knowing I don’t have anything to do the next day and other people will be tripping, I go looking for the guy. I don’t want to seem like a freeloader by opening my big mouth, asking out loud where the guy handing out free acid is. Instead, I walk from group to group, which is the way most gatherings break down, small groups of acquaintances and friends sticking together. I know enough people to listen in on some of the conversations and am bold enough to ask some likely prospects.

At the small bar area in the pavilion, the bar a six foot long wooden board supported by metal poles with a plywood front, a place where someone’s mom might place the potato salad and Kool-Aid for the family picnic, I see a guy with a bottle of wine in his hand near a group of maybe six others, dressed in a winkled suit coat over a t shirt, wearing blue jeans and an old pair of old tennis shoes. He’s a decade older than I am I guess, dark long brown hair parted on one side, a dark haired guy’s week old beard, the image of a white richy class young professor or hippie lawyer. He’s leaning against the bar, Janis Joplin is belting out “Cry, Cry Baby,” and I for some reason know this is the guy handing out the free acid. Someone different always shows, I have never seen this guy before.

First heard about acid while watching a television show, must have been about thirteen. Hippies and freaks weren’t even about yet, or at least not in my neighborhood. There I sat, skinny and pimply on the living room couch in front of the tv. A woman given a new experimental drug, LSD, by her therapist draws a picture of her experience. She draws an image of herself flat footed in a sort of sitting fetal position overlooking an unpopulated treeless land of chasms and plateaus. What a wild experience, that drug must be something else.

A few years later, the show almost forgotten, something called LSD starts popping up in the news. Timothy Leary, a Harvard professor, is promoting it. I don’t know much about professors let alone Harvard professors, but it seems one promoting this drug is a big deal. Leary claims LSD expands your mind – in a good way. I realize LSD is the drug from the news show I watched. More details of its effects filter out, such as hallucinations, increasing interest, mine and most everyone else’s. Before too long it becomes along with pot the darlings of the long hair hippy culture. And I having the choice of two general groupings in my high school, the jocks or longhair freaks pick the long hair freaks, not because I can’t throw a football over fifty yards, but because I have more experience being a freak.

Acid has a strong effect on me when I first take it, like it does most people. Some people say they or people they know or hear about experienced cosmic stuff, hallucinations, or have “bad trips,” I don’t hallucinate people or a monster or figure out who God is. I see paisley patterns on or maybe in the sidewalk and grass, but only when I concentrate on it. My buddy, who has dropped acid along with me sees them too and we laugh about it. We spend most our time laughing. We find things funny for some reason - maybe that is the point.

Sometimes it is just best to ask. I look at the hippy lawyer, “do you have any acid.”

He smiles and hands me the bottle of wine he is holding, reaches into an inside pocket of his suit coat and pulls out a plastic bag. He hands me a hit of acid which I put in my mouth and wash down with a sip of the wine. “Far out,” I say, knowing it for some reason is the kind of thing the group about would like to hear. They laugh. I take another drink, joke some with the people there. Something about the guy and even the group makes me feel I am being observed more than talked with. Eventually, I drift off to see who else is at the party.

After some more socializing and consumption, I notice a girl with long blond hair, pretty face, and one nice blue jeaned ass. I know her and she is smiling at me. She has smiled at me before. We attended junior high and high school at the same time, are the same age. Since her last name and mine start with the same first two initials we have lined up next to each more than a couple times when school had us line up in alphabetic order for one reason or another. She looked like a cheer leader and usually dressed like one too, short pressed skirt, neat white blouse. I am shocked seeing her at this kind of party, believing her for more of an academic or jock oriented person, not someone who would hang with freaks. She should by now be at parties with people who own big houses and drive new cars. The one thing I always liked about her though was no matter how different I was than a jock type she always had a smile for me, was pleasant, at least with the few words we had shared over the years.

I can’t help myself, “what side am I on again, before you or after you.”

“They are not handing out diplomas here,” she smiles.

“They are handing out some other things.”

She laughs, “hmmmm, what might that be?”

“Fun things I guess.”

“What kind of fun things,” she smiles, lighting up the night between us, at least for me.

Tim notices me and who I am talking with. He doesn’t know her but he knows “good looking.” He’s giving me the eye, he wants me to introduce him. He doesn’t wait for the invitation and horns in on the conversation. It sucks because he has the classic face and build women are attracted to. Me, a mismatch of immigrant blood, goofy nose, lanky, red hair. To her credit and my amazement, she keeps the focus on me and what I have to say, which I suspect has Tim thinking “how did you get so lucky you goofball.”

Probably would have been better if I hadn’t done the drugs. My conversation isn’t brilliant. I blurt out some crap, some of it inappropriate trying to be more clever than I am. I don’t remember what exactly I said, but I still remember the questioning look on her face and Tim’s loud guffaws and know I said something really stupid.

I drift from the conversation, leaving Tim to do his best. I don’t remember a lot of what I said that evening after that, but I do know I should have quit saying a lot of it. I do remember describing how cool the fog looked. I must have talked about it to half the people there. When I found myself describing it more to myself than other people, I knew even in my altered state I had become boring.

I decide I am going to walk out to the fog and head out across the beach. I can’t remember most of what I was saying before I started off, I remember distinctly my trip to the water. It seems Disneylandish, not quite real, the full moon lights up the white wall like a glow bulb, my shoes sink into the sand but there’s no drag on them, as if I am walking on a rubber mat.

I stand there, the whiteness ten feet away over the water, listening to the water lap at the sand. It is the only thing I hear for a while. I turn my head. Someone is headed my way. I recognize him and say, “hey Don.”

I figure him for Don Robi, one of the black guys who hangs with us.

“We all look the same, don’t we,” the black face from inside the hood he is wearing says.

Realizing my mistake, its not Don, I start apologizing. He interrupts, “joking baby, know you aren’t like that.”

“You at the party” I ask.

“Just in the neighborhood.”

It registers, this man looks like Hendrix, “you look like him.”

“Naw, he looks like me,” he gazes out at the lake. The wall is breaking up. I can see the water, the lake spreading, its calm enough to see moonlight rippling on it and for some reason the water is almost a fluorescent blue green, the lake clearer than I have ever seen it.

He says to me, “you know man, just be yourself.”

I nod and he laughs. Says something else and walks into the water. I don’t remember shit about things after that, except for hitting up Tim for a ride home, survival instinct, I guess.

The next day Tim says, “you were out of it” on our way to an Italian place he’s found that according to him has the best calzones in town. For some reason I have to be with to confirm this discovery. I had a long sleep and surprisingly I woke refreshed and soon after embarrassed, remembering how weird I must have seemed to people at the party, especially my blond former school mate.

“Did I say any thing really stupid?”

“You always say stupid things,” Tim smirks, “you’re a goofball.”

I don’t want to know more.

I don’t know why or how I buried the memory, or if it is a real memory, just some sort of trick my mind is playing on me, but I feel there’s something true about it.

end