For You, The Stars
Chapter Ten: Installment 3
Spring came early in Palo Alto. We’d wait for it up in SF and it would still be foggy and rainy and then finally the Frost shows would arrive, the Dead’s first outdoor shows of each year. In those days there were shows in the Bay Area nearly every month. After the New Year’s run there was usually a lull in January and then something for Chinese New Year’s or Valentine’s day and then another little break maybe with some Jerry solo shows tucked in there and we’d be getting tired of the steamy Kaiser in Oakland or the cavernous Coliseum or the weirdly truncated SF Civic, later renamed posthumously for Bill Graham. We’d be ready for an outdoor show, where the low deep bass notes could resonate freely up the hillside of an amphitheatre instead of folding in on themselves off the back wall of a basketball shed.
We would mail order for tickets and get more than enough and figure out who was driving and all that. Then finally the weekend would come and we’d drive down every day and find the sunny weather that wouldn’t follow us back up the peninsula for another month. But that was the official start of spring on our calendar. Layers of clothes would come off. Young, beachy California Deadheads with their good tans and their toned bodies would dance down in front of the band.
Cecilia said her cousin Rhoda was going to be at the show. I didn’t know she had a cousin nearby. “Where does she live?” “All over,” said Cecilia. “She tours. I guess she spends the winter in Santa Cruz.” We found her in the parking lot, selling hippie oatmeal fifteen-grain pancakes, little twiggy disks griled on a portable propane powered griddle. They weren’t bad. Kind of weird and chewy. Rhoda was kind of hard on the eyes, though. She looked like she had been living out in the sun for the past fifteen years. Her hair was white blonde and brittle, frayed and frizzed. Her skin was reddened and, well, lumpy. She kind of squinted. Her face was blotchy. She smoked constantly, either cigarettes or fat joints of mediocre Mexican weed she was constantly rolling and lighting up and passing around. Her voice was gruff and throaty.
I kept thinking, Is this what Cecilia’s going to look like when she’s forty? Then I’d shudder inwardly, privately.
She was nice enough, if a little spacey. She didn’t really follow the threads of conversations, intead just talking about Deadhead things - setlists of earlier shows, songs they broke out last year, whether Jerry’d wear a red t-shirt instead of his usual black - and another inane stuff I didn’t really listen to. Cecilia and Rhoda didn’t seem close, especially. We didn’t sit together at the show, for instance. I didn’t see her as any kind of role model for Cecilia but I was kind of afraid of mentioning how harsh and roadworn she looked, for fear of giving offense.
They opened with “Good Times” the song they’d kind of previewed at the acoustic benefit. I felt like a real insider recognizing it.
Dave was at the show with us, along with some of the other Gomers. I could tell that the enthusiasm for the Dead that had been one of our common interests, binding us together in our quasi-collective and carrying us across the country from college into a semblance of adult life, was waning to a large extent. I was still pretty into it, but not everyone was making it to the shows. Bo saw a transsexual at a show at the Kaiser, a big “he-she” as he put it in a dress but with obvious facial hair and it put him off acid entirely and marked the beginning of the end of his love affair with the Dead scene. He was a pretty tolerant guy in many ways but part of him was still a high-school football player from a suburban town and he was never going to be all that comfortable with fringe sexuality. Chad said he felt like the shows were getting repetitive. He had had some great times in the last few years but he wasn’t sure he needed to see the Dead fifty more times and hear “One More Saturday Night” twenty-five more times. I could understand that.
I think Dave was losing interest too but he came along for the weather and the relaxed atmosphere at the Frost. During the set break he told me he’d been hanging around with Simone a lot lately and would I mind if he maybe went for it. “Are you kidding?” I said. “That would be great. She could hardly keep hating on me if she’s fooling around with one of my best friends.”
“I don’t know,” said Dave. “She’s still carrying a grudge. She doesn’t talk about you that much anymore, but when she does she always refers to you as ‘that asshole’ and worse.”
“I guess I had that coming,” I said. “I have to admit I’m kind of surprised you’re into her. Did you feel that way when we were together?”
“Honestly, no,” said Dave. “It definitely started happening only a couple of months ago. I guess we’ve kind of been friends since our first double date together was such as bust. Her friend didn’t like my joke about blowjobs, remember?”
“Yeah,” I said. “That was funny. At the time I don’t think we figured either of us had a chance with either of them.”
“Most of the Gomers are still friends with Simone, you know,” said Dave. “She often comes over to 1449, like for dinner, when you’re not around.”
I had a vague idea that was true. She had even brought her rebound boyfriend by once. That hadn’t lasted long. He had struck me as a slightly better version of me. He was blond where I had dirty light brown hair. He had a ponytail while I was still growing my hair past pageboy length. He was an inch or two taller than me and probably ten pounds light. His politics were probably five degrees to the left of mine too. He probably made tantric love and never pressured her to give him head. Or maybe she gave it to him all the time, just to spite me.
“Are you talking about that bitch?” asked Cecilia, coming back with two big cups of beer for us.
“Yeah, I said. Be nice.”
“Why should I?” said Cecilia, making her pouty face. “She’s crazy, writing scum on your picture and yelling at us for walking down Haight Street.”
“Look,” I said. “She lost. You won. Can you blame her for being pissed?”
“Why are you taking her side?”
I opened my mouth to say something when I was drowned out by a shockingly loud, slightly out of tune, reverbed-out slash of a guitar chord signalling the beginning of the tuning up for the second set and before we knew it we were back in the thick of that chewy envelope filter of sound.
Now that I think about it, there was a funny little musical chairs routine with me and Dave and Chad and our girlfriends. Dave move in on Shimone, although it didn’t last. I think it was more like they just tried being fuck buddies for a little while. They had that curiosity you sometimes get with your friends of the opposite, or otherwise appropriate sex, and once they satisfied it, the mystery was gone and they want back to being friends no problem. No drama. In a similar way, a few months after Chad and Chelsea broke up, when I was on the rebound from Cecilia and rapidly cycling through a series of little flings, I ended up dropping by her Chelsea’s apartment near the park for some random reason and we sat on her couch talking about not having a lover at the moment and then did one of those doubletakes where we both realized at the same time that there was no real reasons why we couldn’t screw around.
Not unusually for me, I couldn’t really perform the first time we tried. I don’t know if it was just performance anxiety or some kind of knowledge that this was just physical exercise and nothing more emotionally meaningful than that. Maybe it was just shyness, but we ended up just petting a little and then falling asleep. Then I woke up in the middle of the night with a raging hard-on and woke Chelsea up with my mouth. Then we fucked just the way we’d both been meaning to, with no inhibitions at all, purely seeking the pleasure of it. She was very willing to do just about anything, although she did mention that to her semen tasted like egg whites. We went around a couple of times before we fell asleep again.
In the morning we showered together and I said, “So when does this little affair officially end.”
“Now,” she said, “as I symbolically wash you out of me.”
But I’m getting ahead of myself here.