Outbound

"You were joking, weren't you?"

"We've known each other a week," I said. "Maybe it would be nuts, but I haven't been able to think about anything but you for days."

And when she nodded her head she looked down, didn't say a word. There were a million unheard stories in that glance, too.

"What about you," I asked. "Am I too late? Already spoken for?"

"I was serious about a guy in high school, and we kept dating after, even after he went to SC. We broke up six months ago, well, right before Christmas."

"What happened?"

"He met a girl, I guess. 'Someone better, less complicated' was the way he put it."

"Jeez. That's a nice way of putting things."

"Yeah, you could say that."

"No one since?"

She shook her head. "It messed with my head pretty bad. We're seeing the same shrink, you know?"

No, I didn't, but it kind of made since now so I nodded my head. "What happened?" I asked.

"Pills. My roommate found me in time, got me to the ER. Pumped my stomach, that whole scene. I came home after that. Haven't been back to school since, not really."

"You going to finish your degree?"

"I don't know. Maybe."

"Anything else you want to do?"

"I like sailing, that's about all though. Dad put up some money to get a sailboat maker up and running, and I'm going to start working in the marketing and sales department this summer. I guess we'll see how that goes."

"Sounds kind of fun. Not a lot of stress, anyway, and doing something you love."

"What about you? You going to keep playing?"

"I don't know, composing, anyway, and maybe working on studio tracks. We have a studio musician who's preparing to go out on the road if I can't handle our next concert."

"Where's it going to be?"

"San Francisco, at the Fillmore. Hendrix is going to be there, some Brits, too. Should be a scene."

"Wow..."

"You wanna come up?"

I could see it in her eyes. Recognition...this might be real...uncertainty, too. "You sure you want me to?"

"You know, we were talking about getting married a few minutes ago. Nothing's changed, as far as I can tell. So, yes. I'm sure. Real sure."

She looked at me again and I could see it all over her face, in her eyes. Not quite shame, but a real close cousin. Something deeper than embarrassed, anyway. Trying to kill yourself -- and failing -- had to be hard to deal with by yourself, but to lay it all out there like she just had? She either had guts or she wanted to see how real I was. The thing is, I wasn't running. I think I started to really fall for her after that. I mean a deep kind of falling in love, like I wanted to take care of her. I know that seems a little off, but when I saw her vulnerabilities I wanted to be stronger so I could help her carry the load.

And I think that was a turning point for me. Seeing myself as someone strong, someone she could depend on.

Anyway, when we made it to her car we got out and walked around the marina for a while, looked at boats and talked about sailing -- and I held her hand all the while. The thought I'd let go of her in a minute or two, let her drive back to Newport without me was hitting home real hard, a lot harder than I expected it would, and I stopped in front of a hotel there, turned her into my arms and I just held onto her. Maybe like forever, if you know what I mean, then I kissed her, told her that I loved her and maybe we should go get a room.

I remember those eyes of hers. Looking up at me then, so full of lingering intensity. She was so insanely gorgeous, too, probably the most beautiful girl I'd ever known, and if that asshole boyfriend hadn't fucked her up she would have been okay -- or at least I kept telling myself that over the years. And hell, who knows, maybe I believed it, too, but she was fragile after that breakdown. Always was, right up to the day she finally left us.

+++++

I drove up to Berkeley a few days later, as it was time to start rehearsing for our Fillmore gig. That 'feeling stronger' vibe stuck with me, too, and I felt good about going out on stage for the first time in my life. Deni picked up on the vibe, and she was ecstatic about the whole Jennifer thing, too. Rehearsals went great and I picked Jennie up the night before we were set to play, and we went down in time to listen to The Nice. There weren't many of us trying to bring new technology onstage, but Keith Emerson was creating quite a storm on stage and everyone was hanging around in this haze of expectation, waiting for him, and Hendrix, too.

Hendrix was the current God du jour, but for any keyboardists watching that night, Keith Emerson was surreal. Here was someone, finally, bringing classical structure into rock, and while his rendering of Bernstein's America was electric, what caught me was a piece called the Five Bridges Suite, which fused classical with jazz and rock. About halfway through that piece I started to look around at the crowd and found a kind of swaying trance had taken hold. People didn't want to dance now, they had been transported somewhere else, someplace deep within Music, deeper than I'd ever thought possible. Even Jennie said "wow!" when those guys wrapped up and drifted off into the crowd...

But when finally Jimi came out the place erupted, and when The Experience started in with Fire you could understand what the electricity was all about. I hung on 'til they finished up with The Wind Cries Mary, and when I looked around the place I could feel something else passing through the crowd, something hard to put my finger on, but what lingered in my mind was the power music held over that crowd. Something awesome and huge, some force I'd never reckoned with before, yet what held me right then was watching Emerson watching Hendrix. He was watching the crowd too, gauging the sudden surge of empathy, and I guess like me he was lost inside the wonder of the moment.

One other thing that hit me just then, too: the amount of pot hanging in the air. From fifty feet back the air was literally a purple haze, and with the multi-colored stage lights bathing the area around Hendrix the atmosphere was otherworldly. I knew a couple of cops were working the back of the crowd, but I wouldn't have wanted to be them in this place. After the 'free-speech' demonstrations across the bay over the last few months, their was another 'something' hanging in the air, apparent, and it weren't purdy, if you know what I mean. And that vibe was the raw underbelly of music at the Fillmore...that something in the air. It was beyond revolution, more like anarchy, and the mood was palpable -- and growing.

Sure, a lot of the music was about 'peace and love' but after Reagan called out the National Guard there was an awful lot of anger in the air; even so there was this Hell's Angels vibe going around, too, an undercurrent of outlaw malevolence that felt rooted in the desire to burn everything down to the ground. That was San Francisco then and I suspect it's always been that way. Like some people working the fringes wanted to create something new, but to me it felt like this Fillmore fringe didn't really care who got burned along the way. So, yeah, I think there was real anarchy in this group, like this new fringe wanted their parent's world to dissolve within the purple haze hanging over that crowd inside the Fillmore, all emotion rooted in infantile rebellion, like the tantrums of spoiled children.

Yet sometimes children are right, too.

That was in the air, too. Even the music. Our parent's forms and structures, subverted and inverted, creating something new, anarchic and inclusive. Like the Beatles opened the doors to polite society and now the riffraff was rushing in -- burning babies in Electric Ladyland. Music was, right before our eyes, becoming more political than it had in a hundred years, when Wagner politicized opera in post-Napoleonic Europe. If you think that's trivial stuff, just consider for a moment that Marx grew out of that rebellion, and so did Darwin.

So yeah, something was stirring in the underbelly of that crowd. Something big and noisy, and maybe ugly, too.

+++++

We were the first gig up the next night, so we set up early and I looked around the place while I helped hook up the Moog and Mellotron. The air clear now, the room didn't look all that big, or like a place full of wild magic. Just a room, I thought, not unlike the other gigs we'd played around this city, yet I had felt those forces the night before. Emerson had too. We talked after Hendrix left, talked about the vibe we'd seen and felt, and we talked in epochal terms about music shape-shifting to the needs of the moment. About the politics of music. We talked Nixon and Vietnam and John Wayne and about the image of a girl who had put a flower down the barrel of a National Guardsman's rifle. Everything was linked, he said, but the links weren't easy to see -- not yet, anyway. Music had to become the fabric that joined all these disparate factions, and musicians had to claim their place as leaders of this movement. Heady stuff, and even Jenn seemed caught up in the moment. Emerson was a philosopher-king, if ever there was one, yet he was as fragile as the rest of us, too.

Yet standing up there on that stage looking out over that empty room it was hard to see music as anything other than a diversion. Maybe we were the sideshow to the real action. I'd just read Jerry Rubin's 'Do It!' -- a real Bay Area anarchist's manifesto -- and I wondered: could music take on the weight of so much revolutionary zeal, shoulder that burden? Or would music fragment the way society seemed to be fragmenting?

Even when I worked with Deni it was there -- this impulse to fly apart, to head off in uncharted new directions, yet there wasn't some unseen political hand pushing us towards a grand unified theory of musicians leading a movement. Most of the kids on stage were just that: they liked to play the guitar or the keys, and egos can get big under the bright lights. We got off on making music together, yet I can't recall ever sitting around and saying "Wow, did you see those riots up on campus today! We got to write about that!"

Yeah, but there was one anthem out there that contradicts all that vibe, and I loved it. For What It's Worth, by the Buffalo Springfield -- and maybe that's the vibe Emerson was channeling that night in the purple haze -- but the idea hit me then that I had always seen music as a reflection of events, not a means to change things, but maybe it could be both and I'd never really seen it as such -- and I had an idea.

I hadn't played Lucy-Goosey in years. The music had dissolved into that early Beatles-like haze of I Wanna Hold Your Hand and She Loves You, Yeah-Yeah-Yeah, but it was still there, buried somewhere in our collective unconscious -- so what if we...

Deni was kind of entranced by the whole thing, too, and she came up with a few bridges to make the pop refrains relevant once again. Lucy was going to go from bubble-gum chewing sycophant to radical anarchist on stage that night, and the whole thing was taking shape in a burst of creativity that had come out of nowhere, man.

When the lights went down a slide was projected on the wall behind the stage, an image of that girl sticking a daisy down the barrel of the national guardsman's rifle, and I walked out and got behind the keyboards -- then turned and looked at Jennifer standing in the shadows backstage and I smiled, then turned to face the sea of faces and raised my fist, then the room went black -- with just a small spot on me, and that image of that flower-toting girl hanging back there behind the purple haze.

I started with the simplest piano refrains from Lucy-Goosey and the sea of faces went silent as quiet expectation replaced hyped anticipation, and my piano was almost in chopsticks mode: simple notes even a child could play, awakening memory. Our lead guitar stepped out and another spot hit him, and he started echoing my simplistic melody. Deni came out next and the crowd erupted, then as quickly shut down as she started into an even simpler, quieter version of my original lyric, and she turned to a small harp and echoed my notes as the lights faded, leaving only the image of the girl with the daisy -- which soon faded to black as my piano grew softer, then silent. In the darkness the rest of the band came out and when the lights flared we turned Lucy into a molotov cocktail throwing radical with what I'd say presaged a grungy-heavy metal infused sound -- music that no one in the audience had heard before -- and the surge of energy was cataclysmic. I kept the simple piano melody going, but that was echoed by soaring, dark chords on the Mellotron, and with Deni's inverted lyrics Lucy's transformation was complete.

And I felt that transformation in my soul, too, like I'd just grown up. The insecure teenager died out there under those lights, and when we walked offstage an hour later I walked into Jennifer's arms and held on tight, because I knew the roller-coaster ride ahead was about to hit some real bumpy turns.

+++++

Pops was a lot sicker than he let on, but he kept everything wrapped up tight and out of sight. Every time I called he was 'fine, doing great' -- even Terry went along with his charades -- and it worked, until we came to LA to play several concerts around town. I went home after our first night and when I saw him I burst out crying. I couldn't help it.

"Do I look that bad?" he asked.

He looked like an orange scarecrow, only worse.

"The color," he said, "is from liver failure. I kind of like it, too. Like a walking traffic sign, don't you think? When I walk out of the doctor's office everyone stops and stares."

I felt sick, too, just looking at him, and when Terry took me aside and told me he had maybe a month or two left I kind of fractured. Like I didn't know what to think. Pops was my last link to an almost invisible past, and without him I would be well and truly alone. There weren't any brothers or sisters or aunts and uncles, there was just me and Pops. I was going to be, if I remained alone and childless, the last of the line.

And that was a big question hanging in the air between us.

"What's with Jennifer?" he wanted to know.

"We're good," I said, but there was something else hanging in the air, apparent. That whole fragile thing. She was depressed, and when she started going down that hole she turned to dolls to pick her back up. Dolls, as in The Valley of The. Pills, in other words, and here I need to digress a little. I don't do pills. I didn't smoke -- anything, ever. I didn't drink much, because I don't like the whole idea of losing control. I know, like the idea we have some kind of control is an almost comic idea in and of itself, but the point is we do have the ability to control some things, and losing what little I had was to me a Very Bad Thing. I tripped all I wanted when I disappeared inside my music, but I could come out of it intact and lucid. I had seen Deni disappear down the LSD rabbit hole and not come out for days, and that scared the shit out of me. We'd been through two lead guitarists over the course of a year simply because one drug or another had taken them someplace they just couldn't break free of, and I wasn't going there.

So when I saw Jennifer headed down the same road I told her it worried me, and she told me to fuck off. So I did. I put her on a plane back to her father and told him what was going down, and what I heard back from him wasn't worth mentioning, because he'd thought he was done with her and wasn't happy to have her back under his roof.

I started spending more and more time in LA, spending as much time with Pops as I could, and my understudy started filling in more often when Pops started the terminal decline. I decided to go on to our next few gigs and was in Cleveland when Terry called me, told me to come home, and it was about five hours before the show that night when I called Deni and told her. She came to my hotel room and we talked, and she told me to take my time, that they'd manage without me and I held her for the longest time. We'd been together as a group for more than a year by then, and I realized she was about the closest thing to family I'd have left -- and I told her so.

"I never wanted you to be my brother, Aaron," she told me. "All I know is we work well together, like I always imagined a husband would be, ya know?"

"Those two days...you remember?"

"Yeah. Love heroin. I'll never forget. I've never loved anyone like I loved you," she sighed, and then she was crying. "God, I don't want you to go. Something's going to happen to you back there. Something fuckin' big's coming, and I feel like it's going to crush you, man."

"I don't know what I'm going to do without him, Den. I'm scared, and with Jenn gone? I don't know, man, I don't know..."

"I'm here. Don't you forget that." She looked at me and we kissed, I mean like the last time we kissed, and I was full of these bizarre electric charges flickering on and off like lightning all over my skin, then she looked at me again. "I love you, and I will forever" she sighed, then we kissed again, and this time we were hovering beyond the abyss, ready to fall into bed, but she pulled back and ran from the room.

I got my stuff together and made it out to the airport in time to catch a one-stop to LAX, and made it to the house a little after midnight. I went to Pop's room and we sat and got caught up while Terry left to put on tea, but she came back in a few minutes later, her eyes full of grief. She turned on the TV and there were news reports of an airplane crash, a flight from Cleveland to Buffalo, and a hundred and fifteen people, including all members of the group Electric Karma, were feared dead.

I blinked, recoiled from the very idea Deni and all my mates were gone, that the sum total of our existence had been wiped from the slate in the blink of an eye, but the pictures on the screen told a very different story. A midair collision about a mile out over Lake Erie, and the 707 had burst into flames and fluttered down to the wavetops, then slipped beneath black water.

Pops died the next morning.

+++++

Jennifer thought I died that night and she came undone. Razor blades this time, and she'd meant to take herself out, no doubt about it. By the time I called their house the next morning the damage was done, though I didn't find out for a few more hours. When I talked to her father later that morning he sounded relieved and furious, and I told him I'd be down as soon I could. He said he understood and we left it at that, and Pops slipped into a morphine induced coma later that morning. We didn't really say goodbye, but when I held his hand I could feel him respond to my words. When I told him he meant the world to me, and that I'd miss him most of all he squeezed my hand, and in our silence I could hear him talking to me over the years. All the talks we'd had were still right there, and Terry was with me, holding on to me, when he slipped away.

She was English, my Terry. She'd had a good run in Hollywood, made a half dozen romantic comedies with the likes of Cary Grant and, yes, Jimmy Stewart, so when Pops moved on it was a big deal in Hollywood circles, yet the death of my bandmates cast a long shadow over the whole affair. Everyone knew about Pops and me, how tight we were, yet Terry was the big surprise -- to me. I'd never really appreciated how close they were, but one look at her and you knew it wasn't an act. She stopped eating for a month, literally, and wasted away to nothing -- and then I had to admit I really felt something for this woman. She wasn't just Pop's third wife: she, too, became the one last link I had to him, one I'd never even realized existed, and all of a sudden I was scared she might leave me too.

And let's not forget Jennifer, lying, in restraints, in a psychiatric hospital tucked deep inside the hills above Laguna Beach. I started driving down to Laguna every other day, then every morning, and I spent hours with Jennifer then drove back up to Beverly Hills, back to Pop's house, where I tried to pull Terry out of her funk.