To wit: while this blog hasn’t been updated since January, in the interim there’s been tons of good writing, including 50 pages of KUNK, a memoir-ish novel in progress, as well as a completed and polished story, “Andy Wiki,” which details one Andy Kaufman fan’s obsession with the myth that the comedian is not only still alive, but actively planning to again reveal himself to the world one day.

In addition to active writing projects, a number of pieces of work are circulating out in the world — DOGS OF PARSON’S HOLLOW, a novel previously shopped and recently revised, has been entered in the prestigious Faulkner-Wisdom Competition, alongside a novella, STATE OF MIND, and a short story called “The Night I Prayed to Elvis,” which readers familiar with earlier work have told me represents some of my best voice-driven writing yet. As a former Faulkner-Wisdom semi-finalist for my literary novel MANSION OF HIGH GHOSTS, I have high hopes for placement in this year’s competition.

In addition, a new sequence of short stories, both published and unpublished, has been prepared: TRAUMA AND RESTORATION represents 12 of my best short stories, including the above-mentioned “Elvis” and the novella that represents the autobiographical beating heart of the collection. This collection has also now been sent out in competition.

During this productive period I’ve also had what is turning into the one of the most exciting peaks of my writing career — after becoming a two-time winner of the SC Fiction Project for my story “Heroes and Villains,” now published in Sandlapper magazine, I’ve been invited to sit on the Arts Commission panel at the South Carolina Book Festival on May 14 at 10am. At 3pm the same day, I’ll also be hosting one of the keynote presentations, that of singer-songwriter, recording artist, actress and author Marshall Chapman, an ex-pat South Carolinian now living and working in Nashville. Marshall’s on quite a roll, with a new book and a featured supporting part in the Gwyneth Paltrow-starring Country Strong, so I’m as thrilled to be a part of her presentation as I am my own.

Like many writers, nonfiction is also a big part of my ongoing career. Some of my recent work can be seen in Columbia Living magazine, as well as on jambandsonline.com, a site to which I contribute the occasional concert review.

So, in a nutshell, the writing life for me is a full, rich, ongoing experience that’s so far never failed to live up to the dreams I’ve always had of being a working author. With the Book Festival looming and a new burst of creativity propelling me forward as though wind-borne, 2011 has already shaped up to be the best year yet in my still-emerging writing career. Thanks for reading, and being a part of the ride!

But by now, I am used to the routine. I’m just especially tired tonight.

“Go ahead,” I say to him. I look down; my toenails appear dry. I start pulling out the little foam dividers. “What is tonight’s grand revelation?”

He shoots me a withering look, then paces back and forth, his hands jammed into the pockets of our grandmother’s robe. She doesn’t need it anymore. “Ever so impatient,” he says, scratching his stubble. I don’t think he’s changed his shirt for a month, now—I think he just keeps Febreze’ing it every few days. The front of it looks like a Pollack interpretation of my brother’s last couple of dozen meals.

“Yes, but—”

“That book’s eating you alive, that fiction. Take a breather, General Ripper.”

I look down at the volume, a collection of thrilling and implausible stories. Engrossing, unchallenging, chock full of incident; forward narrative momentum that pauses neither for breath nor logic. Gunplay. Betrayal. Intimations of erotic congress, though not explicit. Fade-outs as in tame movies; a diffusion and then black as the bedroom door closes and our imaginations fill the empty spaces with our interpretation of that which the lovers do to one another. (With one another, I mean.) I teach the real stories all day long, “A Rose for Emily” and “Good Country People”; the bad stuff helps me relax. Turns off the brain. Lets me be someone else for a while. My secret shame.

I don’t know that I can take the routine tonight. “Howdy,” I plead.

“Tut-tut.” He turns on me, wagging a finger.

He hates that nickname—Howdy—but too bad, to me that’s who he’ll always be. I gave it to him when we were kids because Howard sounds so stuffy, antiquated, even.  Howdy is more than a name, it’s a cheerful greeting. But in the end the Chamberlain in me chooses appeasement, rapprochement, even: “All right, Group Captain Lionel Mandrake. Better?”

“I should say so,” in a clipped, reasonable Peter Sellers. The Captain Mandrake Peter Sellers, that is. “Yes, yes. May I proceed with my report, General?”

I close my book. I sigh and sink back into the easy chair; I gesture in a helpless expression of what other choice do I have?

“Very well, then.”

It’s cold in the room. I swing my feet over in front of the embers. I ought to throw on another shank of cordwood, but I’d have to go all the way out back. Even colder out there. Dark, out in the country. Besides, it’s Howdy’s job to bring the wood inside.

Mandrake—my brother, older than me, back home from the wars, as he tells it—proceeds to regale me with the protracted preamble to his main point, which is always the same point, only with modest variations. The oration rambles on—childhood minutiae, a missing pet, a locker room embarrassment, a failed college romance, a marriage, a divorce… but also nice things here and there: a magical sunset on a Boy Scout camping trip, a ball game in the bright sunshine with an old childhood friend, a walk alongside a field of sunflowers in resplendent full bloom (a new bit—a fabrication?). Various and sundry triumphs, tragedies, impressions, life lessons. My eyes droop.

“But then I truly lost everything.” This is the jumping off point from his near-boilerplate prologue, that which is altered and revised only just so in the telling each night. Now to the main event of the evening, the feature presentation:

The plans for the future. These plans are the meat, the entrée, the main course. These plans, these are what keep the audience interested—these are the surprises, the plot twists, the new material that he’s trying out like a fourth-rate comic working the chitlin circuit before hitting the big towns, refining the material, writing new jokes, creating a theme for the act. That the plans are always words and not eventual deeds does not seem to factor into the telling, this nocturnal ritual. I think he does it to let me know that he’s all right, that he’s not completely lost in the wilderness of his illness. That he’s looking ahead to some positive goal, like any normal person would.

“And the conclusion I’ve now come to, sir?

“Yes, oh Captain, my Captain?”

“Sales. Sales. I have always been a salesman at heart.”

“Yes?”

“Think about it.”

“I’m trying.” I squeeze my eyes shut, pretending to concentrate. “Okay, I thought about it.”

“Good. Now: Fuller brushes, vacuum cleaners. Magazine subscriptions. Newspaper subscriptions. Digital satellite television subscriptions. Homeopathic health care remedies. Cosmetics, even—gender specific roles are passé. Encyclopedias. Insurance policies—peace of mind, in other words, and that’s something they say you can’t buy.” He’s wound up now. “Investment opportunities—no, scratch that. Let’s see: Automobiles. Real estate. Foodstuffs. Wholesale goods and services. Cardboard boxes. Styrofoam peanuts. Plastic food wrap. Astringents. Emulsifiers. Manufactured housing. Precious metal futures. Oil futures. Porkbelly futures…! Gah.” He turns as white as a sheet. “Scratch that, I say.”

“But, that is something you know all about…”

He stands there in the middle of the rug with his hands on his hips and looks up to the ceiling. I can hear his neck pop. “Ah. Ah. But here it is, what I was leading up to: The sale of private security, both in the homeland and otherwise. Military hardware and training. Military expertise. Military—”

“Extraterritorial security services?” I feel the urge to help him along. To get to the end. “By private companies?”

“I can’t think of a reason why not. And not just extraterritorial. No no no. The future of America is in privatization. Private armies of well-paid, middle class men…”

I raise my eyebrows at him.

“ . . . and women. The important part: that they be loyalists, focused, with skill sets that are honed to a razor’s edge. The skill sets of warriors. But controlled by private concerns.” He looks over at me; his eyes are shining yet opaque. “The corporate world is now far more disciplined than the military, my dear. Than the government ever dreamt of being.”

“All this seems rather far a field from your background, Howd—I mean, Mandrake.” I try to hint, to carefully jog his tortured memory. “Weren’t you in financial counseling?”

He ignores me. Howdy lost a passel of money for a whole bunch of folks, and they were so mad at him that one day he just ditched everything he had and came skulking back home. The people were so mad at him about his oversight in handling their funds that it knocked him completely off center, so much so that ever since he has shuffled around in Grandmother’s fuzzy green bathrobe all day and all night, acting like he doesn’t remember who he really is anymore. And being glad he didn’t end up in jail, or on the wrong end of a firearm, probably. It was a lot of money.

“Far a field. Far, a field. Far a field. Far a field.” He seems taken with the rhythm of the three syllables, like a poet rolling a line around in his mouth.

He snaps back to the question at hand. “Yes, well, less far from my experience than you might think. I’ve been doing quite a bit of research.”

“So I hear.”

Howdy’s taken the small inheritance from Grandmother and set up a home theatre in his room, which is where he spends most of his time. With the kind of movies he likes—full of whammies, as he calls the explosions—first I made him reposition the subwoofer, then I gave him money for soundproofing foam, then I finally just moved downstairs into the basement, which is damp but quiet as a tomb. Howdy—the Group Captain—watches movies all night, war movies. I would get Howdy another place to live, with other friends in similar mindsets, but I don’t think they’ll let him have his movies there. And that would seem cruel and unusual.

The Theatre of Operations. That’s what my brother calls his room. It is a lonely space, even when he is in it, like I imagine the sky above must be for God, sitting there by Itself watching the world spin around.

Or maybe It sits there spinning around along with a certain point on the globe, God. Geostationary orbit, somewhere far above Howdy’s room. Arthur C. Clarke came up with the idea for use with communication satellites—that, and the space elevator that somebody one day ought to build.

All this private mercenary army talk is giving me the willies. Maybe he’s been slipping in some CNN with his movie time.

I don’t know what my brother does during the day, since I’m out of the house: Somebody has to work around here. If anything, my workday is too short, my summers too long: my students are a vacation compared to Howdy—even when the kids are rowdy. A rhyme in my mind means I have tuned my brother out; it is a nightly event without which I would pout.

I rack my brother back into focus; he is winding it up.

“I think tomorrow is day one,” Captain Mandrake concludes with a flourish, dancing the little jig like Hitler in Paris. “I think I have a plan. Wing Attack Plan R, R for Robert. R for Reality. Realities that await to be, to be…”

“Realized?”

He looks dewy-eyed at me, now. His little sister, now the parent, now the guardian, now the sounding board for his plans to alleviate the onset of doomsday. “Yes,” he says with immense gratitude. “Realized, and lived.”

And then he floats back up the stairs, his hair all corkscrewed, his slippers too small for his feet, the robe threadbare and ancient. I yawn as I hear the subwoofer thump; what is left of the fire sputters its last bit of cinder-breath, and then goes out once and for all.

—

Originally published by the Charleston Post & Courier in its 2008 SC Fiction Project supplement.

The short story in question, “Heroes and Villains,” is quite dear to my heart, and autobiographical enough to give me a little catch in my throat whenever I’ve read it aloud to people, including my previous Midlands Technical College fiction writing class. After I read the draft to the group, both students and author felt that the piece was good, but not good enough. So, I went home, revised the story, read it through, and then felt so strongly about it that I chose “Heroes and Villains” as my entry to the Fiction Project competition. And here we are today, with a new piece of award-winning fiction. Good lesson for you aspiring writers out there—read, revise, and submit. Submit to the process, and then take  your polished and accomplished work and submit it to journals and web sites. And keep doing so until you hit the mark—every rejection, however painful, is a step on the road to eventual publication and success.

To be published in the March issue of Sandlapper magazine, I couldn’t be more honored and happy to have my story recognized with this prestigious award. Thank you, Arts Commission and Sandlapper!

Now, what we have in this is code language to soften the blow, execution as euphemism for the writing itself. For the thin-skinned nascent writer, such a rejection can be devastating. For me, however, this spurs me on to evaluate and edit the text of my novel with a fresh eye. All the quote-unquote encouraging rejections have shared a commonality in that these agents have been taken with the logline but clearly did not find the manuscript itself to be worthy of further consideration (or rather, what few pages they read—many agents admit that they don’t read more than a page or two before tossing someone’s work aside and moving on). So what to do?

Take a fine-tooth comb to the manuscript.

Francine Prose (as fortuitously a named writer and writing teaching as there ever was) discusses in her book Reading Like a Writer her teaching concept of “close reading,” in which she takes a careful consideration of every word, phrase, sentence, and paragraph chosen by a writer. Make no mistake, the writer must also do this to his own text in order to make the work sing. So, in this spirit (and as a response to the last rejection) I’ve begun a true close-reading edit of DOGS OF PARSON’S HOLLOW, the first such edit in over six months. Within moments of beginning, I’ve seen how to make the first chapter much tighter, much cleaner, much better.

The first 10-50 pages are crucial in terms of marketing any manuscript, and this one is no exception. The rest of the novel is, I believe, in reasonably good shape; these opening chapters, too, are far from fatally flawed—they simply need to be leaner, meaner, and must get  us on our way quicker to the suspenseful and frightening elements that comprise the bulk of my protagonist’s journey into the darkest corner of Edgewater County. There is backstory that can be shifted to a later point in the narrative; there are a couple of scenes that have been with us since very early drafts, pages that have nagged to be cut for a long time now. Cutting otherwise good scenes that don’t move the story forward fast enough hurts—they call it “killing your darlings”—but this kind of editing is crucial to the success of any writing project.

Editing like this can be brutal, especially on a manuscript that’s been through the wringer already a few times. I often run into problems at this stage of writing, if for no other reason than fatigue with the material. I can set DOGS aside and chalk up its writing to another learning experience, i.e., my attempt to write a more commercial rather than straight literary story. However, the process I’ve followed in creating this story, both in careful consideration of plot, character, and theme, as well as getting feedback along the way from other writers and readers, has led me to believe that this piece is worth continuing to edit and market. And so, I will.

NOTE: Tonight begins my six-week Fiction Writing I class at the Harbison Campus of Midlands Technical College. The process of editing of DOGS will be much discussed, I suspect, over the course of these class meetings, and I very much hope taking the students along for the ride, so to speak, will be of benefit to them.

Dutch provocateur Lars Von Trier’s ANTICHRIST is a mature work of art from a filmmaker, by his own admission, in the bleak throes of major depression, one who has produced a motion picture to be reckoned with, albeit one destined to be perceived as perhaps profoundly silly as well as profound. Owing to a penchant for shocking, surreal horror imagery, once the film hits DVD its cult status is assured.

Von Trier’s works typically demand more of the viewing audience than most people who see movies only as sources of escapist entertainment (rather than truly emotional or enlightening experiences) are willing to expend, and ANTICHRIST is no exception. The masses demand to be spoon-fed narratives that reinforce comforting falsehoods about the ideas of good, evil and the possibility of redemption, but that’s not how Von Trier (BREAKING THE WAVES, DANCER IN THE DARK) rolls.

The film opens with a nameless couple, He and She (Willem Dafoe, Cannes Best Actress winner Charlotte Gainsbourg) having ecstatic, joyful sex while their toddler falls to his death from an open window. A therapist by trade, Dafoe insists on treating his devastated, bereaved wife’s tenacious grief himself, and decries her medical doctor’s prescriptions as the answer. His motivation makes him suspect to his spouse, if not quite the audience—at worst, his intentions seem misguided, borne by what she calls his arrogance. Her issues go beyond grief, however—He will find that She now equates the act of sexual congress not with the bringing of joy and life, but of anger, and death. Le petit mort indeed.

The story’s setup exists to get the characters into their allegorical anti-garden of Eden, a cabin situated in a wooded glade, a location of pure unbridled nature: “Satan’s Church,” a place where chaos reigns, and the wife’s grief, pain, and despair (the titles of the film’s chapters) will manifest in an orgy of disturbing sexual violence pushing the boundaries not only of taste, but of reason itself.

Eschewing the doctrinaire tenets of Dogme 95, the austere filmmaking manifesto Von Trier had once adopted, here the artist employs effects and a stylized soundfield that remind one of David Lynch at his most surreal. Bookended by an elegantly photographed prologue & epilogue set to Handel’s “‘Lascia ch’io pianga’ from ‘Rinaldo’”, ANTICHRIST is a quiet film that builds slowly to its terrifying scenes of both unexplained , symbolic phenomena—a talking fox, a deer running with a half-birthed dead calf hanging from its hindquarters—as well as depraved acts committed by She upon her husband, and at the climax, Herself.

Viewers will find much to decry about this film (including what some have charged as misogyny), but at the same time there is also considerable beauty (anti-beauty?) and artistry on display, making ANTICHRIST not only one of Von Trier’s most accomplished and fully realized visions, but a worthy addition to the canon of challenging world cinema. Highest recommendation, with some reservations.

A side note: If there were any justice in the pop culture world, “Chaos Reigns” would be the new “Where’s the Beef?” or “Aye-caramba,” but likely won’t ever happen. Too bad—I’m still trying to get over “I drink your milkshake!” not taking off either. C’est la vie.

“Change Rocks.” Such a simple, unambiguous phrase, shared by brand of costume jewelry, but in this context, signifying a much loftier calling than that of mere adornment: This is the title given the much-heralded—in Deadhead circles, that is—concert featuring all of the surviving members of the Grateful Dead, playing together for the first time since 2004. In the nomenclature of youth, “rocks” denotes the highest sense of positivity and approval, though it’s a colloquialism likely to be supplanted. After all, rock and roll may not be moribund, but it is a creation of the previous century. Old people’s music, this subgenre of rhythm and blues.

By contrast, many supporters find Sen. Barack Obama, the 2008 Democratic standard bearer, to be an emblem of a new era. Not just antidote and antipode to George W. Bush, but perhaps the first example of a new political genre: a leader from the left who, despite the best efforts of the GOP’s ad men and strategists, may be better characterized not by creaky old tropes and memes, but instead as post-boomer, post-60s, post-Vietnam, post-trickle-down-economics—in short, twenty-first-century Democrat. Some observers call him a potential harbinger of a fresh, quixotic American political reality, one that seeks more than a mere rhetorical refutation of the excesses and hubris of the Reagan right, but a course change, a tangible way forward out of the shambles of deregulation and greed that have precipitated an economic crisis of unprecedented scale and extent.

Perhaps no greater indicator of the candidate’s appeal to the graying ponytail set was the event held October 13, when no less a group of 60s icons than the Grateful Dead put aside personal and business differences to reunite for a higher calling, for what some seem to feel may be the best chance to, yes, change the course of American, if not human, history. Many assume, wrongly, that the musicians did this sort of thing before. But the Grateful Dead always eschewed overt displays of political allegiance or theater (as if there is a difference) in their thirty years of playing benefits and supporting causes. Now in 2008 the stakes were apparently high enough to shunt aside all that back story in a gambit to do their part to influence the great unfolding of homegrown electoral history.

“We’ve been waiting forty years for another shot,” bassist Phil Lesh said at a February 2008 press conference for “Deadheads for Obama,” the first attempt by the band to raise awareness just before the California primary. In an apparent reference to the tragically forestalled candidacy of antiwar Democrat Robert F. Kennedy, Lesh seemed to invoke the very spirit of the times in which his musical and philosophical allegiances were forged. Lesh made the point explicitly: “Obama, when he speaks, I get goose bumps.”
In the same press conference, another reporter asked guitarist Bob Weir if they were frustrated at having played so many political benefits through the years without seeing the kind of idealistic change that their generation had hoped for some four decades earlier.

“I don’t remember ever playing a concert in support of a candidate before,” Weir answered.

Whether Obama or the Bush presidency (or both) caused the band members to make such a public expression of unprecedented political activism, the decision led some fans to wonder if the legendarily antiauthoritarian Garcia would have approved. After all, in a 1982 interview, Jon Carroll asked, “Would you ever consider playing to support a political candidate?” Garcia was emphatic then. “Never. We draw the line at that . . . there’s nothing we believe so uniformly and so totally that we could use the Grateful Dead to advertise it.”

But the Reagan era eroded that stance, and only six years later came the first, seemingly antithetical example of the band’s engagement with direct political action. In September 1988, on the final night of its annual Madison Square Garden sojourn (in those days, an astonishing series of eight or even nine-night sellouts), a cast of pop star guests turned what would normally have been a routine Dead show (if such a thing could be imagined) into a bullhorn of alarm over the still continuing destruction of Amazonian rainforests.

The band’s commitment was such that the psychedelic pioneers even put on sport coats and held a press conference at the UN, an occasion that produced another memorable Garcia quote, one perhaps echoing his earlier reticence about being a mouthpiece for much of anything besides free-spirited improvisational music: “Somebody has to do something, and it’s just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us.”

—

The puddle jumper from Philly bumps along at 12,000 feet over the rounded, ancient Appalachian foothills that characterize the topography of middle Pennsylvania, urban density giving way to what constitutes the geographic majority of the state: rolling farmland, Whitman’s “quintillions green” laid out in checkerboard for God and air travelers to admire, representative more of the American heartland than the compact coastal centers of American commerce and governance to the east, strung together like an endless supercity.

Below me lies what locals call the Happy Valley, as if my destination were a sitcom small town located somewhere between Mayberry and Petticoat Junction. Pennsylvania’s diversity, thanks in part to this rural part of the colony, makes it that most essential of voting blocs, the swing state, or as is more often termed in this unusually bitter race, a battleground for the presidency of the United States.

State College, Pennsylvania, is the centerpiece of Happy Valley, the home of Penn State. Hard to imagine anything much being here without the university, in fact. A nice little Deadhead omen appears, a sign announcing “Fillmore, 2 miles” shortly before the taxi rounds a bend through a corridor of green. The football stadium abruptly breaks the bucolic reverie, an enormous structure accommodating 100,000 fans, all out of proportion with anything else around. A modern day temple at which those of a particular American faith gather. It’s Sunday, and being high college football season, I ask the cab driver if there’d been a game the previous day.
“No,” he says, “we’re on the road. But we got Michigan next week. That’s a big one.”

“Make a lot of money on game days?”

“Nah,” dismissive. “I don’t work game days. More trouble than it’s worth.”

I can see why: Hard to imagine a town of this size accommodating such a crowd, equivalent to the largest audiences to which the Dead performed at the zenith of their late period popularity.

“Heard about the big Obama concert tomorrow? With the Grateful Dead and the Allman Brothers Band?”

An uninterested shrug. “Yeah, I guess I heard something about that.”

In the shadow of the stadium stands another sports structure, the Bryce Jordan Center, home to Penn State basketball, and soon, a mass of Deadheads. For four years, diehard fans have not heard a full reunion of the remaining band members. While Deadheads have not been exactly starved—the individual members have their own bands now, and all tend to tour with frequency—not since the 2004 tour have fans had a singular impetus around which to gel as they had in the glory years: an arena of concrete amidst green fields, for a brief time its surrounding parking lots turned into what folks used to call Deadville, or the Scene, or the Village, or just “the lot.” That was ground zero for an entire subculture, one that did not emerge following a messiah or a sports team, but instead coalesced around a rock band, one of the biggest ever. The music industry suffers in the wake of the aging, vanishing supergroups; who can fill such structures now but flash-in-the-pan pop sensations and television talent show winners? Surely a Dead reunion, particularly for this unprecedented cause, would be big news.

To the Deadheads who sold out the venue in a matter of hours, apparently so, but few others. Thorough and multiple Google searches on the day of the show found nary a mention on CNN, Fox, USA Today, MSNBC, CSPAN, or anywhere other than a couple of token articles in local, small circulation media. Curious. The Dead and the Allman Brothers: legends both, veterans of landmark concerts like 1973’s Watkins Glen Raceway extravaganza, at which they’d performed to a crowd estimated as high as 750,000. Now reuniting on the same bill to perform for Obama, having never, ever played a show in support of a political candidate. Never. Ever.

A call to a Penn State’s media relations specialist reveals a cagey attitude: “All media inquiries must go through the Obama campaign. Here’s the number.” It looks as if the Obama camp, wary and weary in these final weeks before the general election, naturally wants all the help it can get, but at the same time is leery of any potential fall-out. What if hundreds of Deadheads, with their documented proclivities for psychotropic substances, get arrested?

And so this particular event has been run well below the radar, with nothing like the coverage of Bruce Springsteen’s mini tour of the state over the weekend, a reprise of his attempts to humanize and underscore the necessity for change that in 2004 brought the Jersey rock icon out at late-season John Kerry rallies. Couldn’t the Grateful Dead be a useful PR catalyst for political transformation? And if so, why not bill it as the Grateful Dead, instead of “Change Rocks” and a list of musicians that non-Deadheads have barely heard of, if at all?

I ask about that. Why not advertise the groups by name? “The billing wasn’t decided by the campaign,” Pennsylvania Obama campaign press secretary Andrea Mead says, “but by the band.” She corrects herself. “Or, you know, I think the groups needed to be billed that way for reasons of campaign finance law.”

So no concern about affiliating Obama with the Dead and its motley legion of discalced and hirsute followers this close to the election?

“The campaign was happy for their participation. The ‘Deadheads for Obama’ event in February, they [the band] put that together themselves.” That concert had been an impromptu reunion of three of the four Dead founders. “When they volunteered to help in the general election, we were thrilled,” Mead adds.

The Obama PR representative goes on to explain that the Pennsylvania location was suggested by the band: indeed, a swing state, though one situated in the heart of the Northeast “Dead corridor,” which has always bred devoted Deadheads. Mead says, perhaps a little disingenuously, “And Penn State had the right size venue.”

—

“Free Trip to Heaven—Details Inside” announces a church marquee directly across the street from Penn State’s campus. An eyecatching suggestion to a Deadhead, words like “free”, “trip” and “inside” all being loaded terms in the subculture’s lexicon, though “free” became transposed in later years into the concept of receiving a “miracle,” i.e., a gratis ticket, courtesy of a generous fellow traveler. (Seen on a roadcase a few years ago at a Ratdog show, Weir’s principal post-Garcia project: “YOU DON’T NEED A MIRACLE, YOU NEED $49.50.”) The streets on Monday are now alive with tie-dye, much of it stretched taut across middle-aged bellies, coronas of wispy hair corralled by caps emblazoned with various Dead icons and signifiers. Not exactly the youth vote meant to be motivated by this event. With the lack of publicity and public awareness, will the concert have much meaning to that eighteen-to-twenty-five year old demographic?
Alisha Balée, 21, a Penn State student and employee of a shop across the street from campus that stocks such Deadheady accoutrements as glass “tobacco” pipes, has doubts: “I don’t think most people are aware that this is an Obama event.”

“Are you going because of Obama or the Dead?”

Balée, who reports having seen the Grateful Dead a few times with an older sibling when she was “6 or 7,” replies, “The Dead. I haven’t seen them in so long.”

For many longtime fans, the Dead in 2008 is a mere simulacrum of the actual, Garcia-fronted band. Some Deadheads, perhaps more with cynicism than sentiment, find all post-Garcia iterations of the band lacking: Fine musicians all, but Garcia was the core. As one Deadhead scholar explains to me, “The individuals all played with each other as a group, but each member was conversing principally with Garcia. He was the hub; they were the spokes. You can see that in what happened after he was gone.” For him, that’s what has been missing in the various reunions. Each attempt has underscored the problem of trying to replace that crucial center of gravity. Another longtime fan, Lisa Biasi, a New York Deadhead and veteran of over 200 shows, put it succinctly: “No matter what they do now, they always sound like a Dead cover band,” she wrote after Monday’s performance.
But it is worth remembering that the band faced the problem of replacing a central member, and the ensuing issue of authenticity, before. In 1973, following the death of founding member Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, Garcia himself commented, “It can never be the real Grateful Dead again now.” For most fans, though, it was the demise of Garcia twenty-two years later that proved to be the true line of demarcation between Dead and dead. Whatever they may call themselves, all that remains is essentially an extended rhythm section: the drummers Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart, bassist Lesh, and guitarist Weir, an iconoclastic and accomplished musician, but never more than the second vocalist. To many critics and even some fans, he remains Garcia’s protege, the rhythm guitarist, not the lead.

So for their increasingly rare reunions the band turns to players such as jamband go-to guitarist Warren Haynes, not merely a member of the Allmans, but the frontman of his own harder-edged group, Government Mule. As he did for the Dead’s last tour in 2004, Haynes will play lead guitar and supply harmony vocals tonight, a thankless role that, thirteen years later, remains a target for criticism and disappointment, regardless of who stands in for Garcia. Even post-Grateful Dead conglomerations boasting two lead guitarists proved unable to recapture the magic. The original band members themselves have often characterized their onstage chemistry as possessing qualities more ineffable than sharply defined, “catching lightning in a bottle,” as Weir once put it. Alchemy may be the better metaphor, suggesting that Garcia’s shoes need not just a musician with a guitar, but a wizard with a wand.

To the credit of the post-Jerry experiments, they all honor an explicit wish of Garcia’s: that his life’s work would result in “something that they can’t tear down after I’m gone.” A resurgent Dead, as in 2003-’04, would in a sense be enough to satisfy the late guitarist’s hope for his legacy, but with the fragmented but quite real subculture also continuing to survive, it would seem that with or without his original bandmates actively playing together, Garcia’s contribution to American popular culture has not been forgotten.

—

The show, with reported ticket sales of 16,000, is now only hours away, and the dappled sunlight and crystal blue sky reminds more of an old spring tour stop than an autumnal afternoon in Pennsylvania. By the time the lots between the various stadia and the arena begin to empty of their normal occupants, faculty, staff, and students—it is Monday, after all—traffic is not so much backed up as steady. There’s plenty of room, and though it’s early, there’s not much time before the Allman Brothers begin at 6:30.

As with tradition, early arrivers in Deadhead parking lots comprise a number of distinct sociological groups: vendors aiming to get the best spot, either away from likely security hassles, or just in a prime traffic area; amateur audio enthusiasts, anxious to get inside the arena first and claim the best spot for recording onto whatever digital medium so-called “tapers” use these days; hardy railrats hoping to make it all the way up front on the general admission arena floor; folks of whatever tendencies ready to get a decent head on before the big show—if in fact they’re going inside at all. The scene outside the shows, particularly in the latter years, became notorious for attracting those looking for a free outdoor party complete with a cornucopia of cheap beer and readily available drugs, even nitrous oxide, a particular scourge that many have cited as one of the more unsavory aspects of life in Deadville.

“Shakedown Street,” as the row of unlicensed vendors is traditionally called, is tentative at first, and remains so throughout the evening, at least in terms of beer and other consumables described above. Artisan wares like hand-blown glass pieces, jewelry, bottled water, and Obama shirts are abundant, however. A young girl, smiling beatifically, calls out to passersby, “Ice cold candy; ice cold water!” A far cry from the old mantra of “doses and ’shrooms, doses and ’shrooms,” but then, as the years had rolled on and the fanbase aged alongside the band, the Dead scene became by necessity a de facto family environment.

The word has been that this will be a tough security environment, the pre-show email announcements from the venue explicitly warning against certain behaviors, though nothing out of the ordinary in twenty-first-century America: No open containers of alcohol, no narcotics, no weapons, and ominously, “the Bryce Jordan Center is a smoke-free environment.” Clearly, too, the venue has been advised by the Dead organization, given the last injunction: “Please note that sleeping overnight in your car is not encouraged.” Crowd rumors abound over whether an actual candidate will make an appearance, but even a cursory assessment suggests there’s nowhere near the level of security for that, just the normal campus cops, sitting on the edge of the lots, watchful but not intrusive. I ask around if anybody’s heard anything about Obama or Biden or even self-professed Deadhead Al Gore showing up, but nobody’s heard a peep one way or another.

Another question, posed to a random sample of show-goers: “What about the Obama connection influenced your decision to attend?” Bridget from Albany, late twenties with two small children—a boy of five and a girl, Stella, two—is bringing her youngest to the child’s first Dead. Shy, only the slightest bit self conscious, she replies: “I’ve never voted. I’d like to see Obama win, though. I mean, I’m not down with McCain.”

Why hadn’t she voted?

“I just never trusted politicians, any of that stuff. I never registered.”

Far from looking like a hippie chick living “off the grid,” Bridget appears much like any young, single mother: Jeans, a sweater, hair pulled back. Just another American, politically disaffected and emotionally disenfranchised by a life that has given them a great sense of so-what. How can my puny vote make any difference? In the wake of suspiciously-decided close elections, butterfly ballots, 90,000 elderly, jewish West Palm Beach residents somehow voting for Pat Buchanan, and easily hacked electronic devices, it is easy to see Bridget’s cynicism for what it is—and not as an exception, but very often the rule.

Traffic streams into the lots, Shakedown Street fills in, bodies mingling as the spicy aroma of sage and other combustible vegetable matter swirls. A standard pre-show scene, if more modest in scope. So what else is different about this scene from the old days, other than scale? To this writer, a veteran of just over a hundred shows in the last decade of the Grateful Dead’s touring life, it is apparent that the “Family,” as the most hardcore group of Deadheads were once identified, are not here. These were committed, even pseudo-religious followers, doctrinaire, living in converted schoolbuses, attending every show (whether or not they went inside). This is a Northeast Dead crowd, middle-class white kids of all ages, looking to party, looking to recapture past, ragged glory. The Church of Unlimited Devotion, an actual sect of Deadhead dervishes, is no more; no ecstatic “spinners” will be seen in the lobby tonight.

“How much for the Obama stealie?” I ask a vendor arranging a table of T-shirts with the campaign’s appealing logo, a rising sun with the letter “O” superimposed within the familiar, red, white and blue skull known as a “Steal Your Face,” after the album whose cover featured the icon.

“Fifteen, or two for twenty-five.”

I pass; there must be a dozen vendors with variations on Obama/Dead mashup graphics, as well as at least one out-and-out Obama campaign schwag setup. If I decide I need a souvenir, these vendors will still be here after the show, for as long as they are allowed. But even more than this, I’m having a hard time warming up to the idea of a Dead-endorsed political candidate, even one as promising and symbolic of a new age than Barack Hussein Obama, a true representative of the supposedly polyglot underpinning that defines the American rubric. Like the bumper stickers on fundamentalists’ cars say, “WWJD”? An acronym for “What Would Jesus Do,” Deadheads years ago appropriated it, and now it seems particularly apt: What would Jerry do?

At the crest of the 1988 campaign season, which at its height coincided with the Fall Dead tour, I recall seeing tie-dyes with Garcia’s smiling face and a message: “Toward a Kinder and Gentler World.” That was the most political shirt I remember seeing in those days, and it certainly wasn’t printed and sold by the band; neither were the bumper stickers that said GARCIA IN ’88, Michael Dukakis perhaps just as uninspiring to Deadheads as he was to many voters that fall. Deadheads in particular had less a figure around which to rally than simply suffering a lingering mistrust of the zero-tolerance years, with Drug Czar (and noted nicotine addict) Bill Bennett smugly declaring the hippie sacrament marijuana a “dangerous drug” that merited its harsh, unequivocal prohibition. Only one administration prior to this, gentle Jimmy Carter had advocated that possession of up to one ounce of that dangerous drug to no longer constitute a crime, not only in recognition of its fundamentally benign nature but also to free up resources to make it easier for cops to pursue crimes with actual victims like rape and murder. The get-tough-on-crime congress, Democratically controlled, rejected the notion. Deadheads had, and have, a right to feel a touch dejected, as did their reluctant avatar:

“I have a feeling this whole Reagan era means a tightening down from the top, so we’re always on guard,” Garcia said in that 1982 interview. “The world is not safe for people like us.”

—

Sun setting behind the arena, the doors have opened, the tapers are set up inside, and as we file in, young Obama volunteers work the lines, dangling a carrot, true catnip for Deadheads. “Fill out this card,” the young man says, fresh-faced, smiling, not a minute over 18. “You could win a chance to meet the musicians.”

“You mean, meet Jerry Garcia?”

“Uh, yeah,” frowning only slightly. “I think so.”

I fill one out, checking the box that says “Senator Obama Can Count On My Support,” the most ambiguous and noncommittal choice. I’m from South Carolina, after all, not the Pennsylvania countryside. There are plenty of people back home that need convincing; I’ve got my own work cut out for me. Already I wonder whether this event will generate what the local Obama campaign wants, which is a small army of motivated, fresh recruits to scour the rolling hills and knock on the doors of people without yard signs. In casual conversation, I meet attendees from Boston, Albany, Rochester, Cleveland, unspecified towns in New Jersey, Vermont, North Carolina, Georgia, even a Deadhead named Ivan who flew in one a red-eye from Ventura, California, scene of many legendary Grateful Dead concerts at the fairgrounds beside the green-blue infinitude of the Pacific. So far, I’ve met no one but the girl in the headshop who is actually from Pennsylvania.

The security screening is modest by modern standards, no metal detectors, no wands, only a cursory pat-down; definitely no candidates appearing tonight. A question about the bulge in my pocket that is my eyeglasses case, and the guard is easily mollified; the fanny pack slipped under my jacket isn’t even noticed. There’s no contraband inside—I slipped the pouch behind the jacket tied around my waist only out of habit.

Familiar faces on the concourse; strangers stopping strangers. How much tie-dye can the human eye perceive in a short amount of time? No beer sales, which is probably for the best. A waste of money anyway: six or eight dollars for a tub of Bud Light that sourly reminds drinkers of the old joke about making love in a canoe.

The Allman Brothers Band appeared on stage at more-or-less showtime, perhaps ten minutes late. Greg Allman, back from a springtime health scare that caused the cancellation of a run of shows (shades of Garcia), asks in the standard show opener of “Revival” if the people, can they feel it, the love that’s in the air? A very 60s sentiment, charming and innocent at this far remove of Terror Nation—or perhaps more accurately, the Great Depression, Mark II. The Brothers barrel through what for them feels like a fairly standard set, catalog staples punctuated by less familiar tunes sung by newer band members like Haynes and guest vocalist Susan Tedeschi, the wife of second generation slide guitar virtuoso Derek Trucks. (A highly pedigreed Dickey Betts replacement, Trucks stands onstage in front of his uncle, founding member and drummer Butch Trucks.)

While the Allmans, like the Dead, are short a few original members—the absence of still-alive and active Betts is particularly jarring—with the Trucks bloodline present and one remaining Brother still behind his keyboards, the band is certainly legitimate enough. The crowd tonight is not theirs, though—during their first few tunes, the arena is barely a quarter full. Seasoned Dead show-goers know, however, that fans there for the headliner will stay outside as long as possible, both to circumvent the beer ban as well as skip the opener. For those inside, though, the Allmans play a solid, two-hour set, capped by an incendiary encore of “Whipping Post” to which the now rapidly filling arena responded with enthusiasm.

The lights come up and showgoers circulate, all but the railrats and those jamming the floor in front of the stage, people waiting to get the closest look possible at the rainbow makers, as psychedelic jester Hugh “Wavy Gravy” Romney once referred to the Dead. Stagehands scurry like worker bees: acts of this stature, headliners both, don’t share gear, and the stage must be completely reset.

So far, this event could have been like any concert with multiple acts on the bill. Not a peep from anyone about Obama, nor any politics whatsoever. But then a screen descends behind the stage, the scoreboard overhead lights up on all four sides, and the politics begin with an Obama documentary. Looking around, I wonder how many older fans also realize how far we have deviated from the trajectory of the Dead’s musical history. The video is the one shown at the convention, perhaps shorter, notable for its omission of Obama’s attendance at Columbia University and his service as editor of the Harvard Law Review.

Then the lights on stage come up and we have a series of live speakers, individuals who one suspects wouldn’t have gotten near a Garcia-commanded stage: A theatre professor originally from Chicago’s south side, Charles Dumont, praising the bands and of course the candidate and most especially of course the “finest university in the land, Penn State,” or words to that effect. Since Pennsylvania is critical to an Obama win, he says, “I can’t think of a better reason for the Dead to reunite!” Cheers, agreement.
Next, a couple of local activists, one of whom first saw the band 35 years ago. She asks a crucial question: “How many are from somewhere other than Pennsylvania?” Big cheer; no surprise there, but it underscores the problem. I don’t know how much this event is going to help Obama win Pennsylvania, not with the constellation of McCain yard signs ringing the outskirts of the town. After a couple of student organizers, full of vim and vigor, come an All-American symbol if there ever was, football coach Jay Paterno, Penn State pigskin royalty, and coming out for Obama, no less. But tarring all football jocks as lunkhead reactionary righties is apparently no safer than branding all Deadheads as unemployable worthless stoners.

Another first, then, when a dozen or so members of the Penn State football team file out. The quarterback, African-American like the candidate himself (not the usual Deadhead demographic, which skews demonstrably caucasian), makes a brief speech about how cool and important this campaign (and concert) are, adding: “I’m a drummer, so Mickey Hart is one of my idols!” Whether he realizes it or not, every football fan here will now also remember him as a Deadhead, a badge of honor in this crowd as great as the Heismann Trophy.

The stage goes dark again, quiet house music barely audible, the crowd anxious, anticipatory. As Lesh appears, futzing with his rack of gear, a shattering cheer wells up, an order of magnitude more passionate than any yet heard. The bassist hunches his shoulders and does a mischievous dance back into the shadows. A couple of minutes pass before it seems like the arrival of all Deadheads’ favorite moment: the lights go down. But the musicians don’t appear yet: first another video presentation, this one far more personal. A recording of Obama himself, speaking directly to the concert-goers, looking and sounding pleasant, reassuring, and grateful.

“Thanks to the Dead and the Allman Brothers Band for coming together,” he begins, working into his pitch with lines calculated to appeal to both bands’ fans. “In my twenty-month campaign, I’ve even developed a ‘touch of gray’ myself,’ eliciting appreciative cheers, “and now I ‘ain’t wasting time no more’.” It’s an oddly effective rallying cry, emphasizing that we all need to get to work on the business of righting the ship of state that to many in this audience—a microcosm of aging Boomer, Gen X and Y middle class Americans—is indeed a ship of fools. A standard stump speech, if compressed, Obama’s words touch on the basic themes: working for change, the choice between the candidates, economic populism, the need “to bring this war in Iraq to a responsible end,” which gets the biggest reaction, but even that is muted in comparison to what greets Obama’s final “Thank you, and enjoy the show.”

Now there’s no politics, just “the boys,” as fans call the band members with all due familiarity and affection, rolling into “Truckin’” to open. A signature tune, lacking in political resonance, it is now a classic rock-radio relic, a most autobiographical of compositions, and then jamming into a selection that is both apropos and obvious, and a Garcia tune: “U.S. Blues.”

“I’m Uncle Sam/that’s who I am/Been hiding out/in a rock and roll band.” Metaphorical, perhaps, for the dearth of leadership from the Bush administration, who have been hiding not in a rock group, but rather in plain sight.

The four founding members, augmented by Haynes in the Garcia spot and Ratdog keyboardist Jeff Chimenti across the stage beside Lesh, attempt quite a few of the more complicated songs from the repertoire, and do so with aplomb, a testament to professionalism and familiarity with the material: All the musicians include in their solo act a high percentage of catalog material from the original iteration of band, time-tested compositions that to now mothball would surely further dilute what interest remains in seeing these men ply their trade.

Another anthemic, iconic Grateful Dead song, “Franklin’s Tower,” and now the entire arena seems to be dancing, joyful. If any aspect of the experience now seems lacking, it is only that the venue seems far from oversold. If this were, say, the Fall 1995 tour (the tour set to begin not long after what turned out to be Garcia’s death, and obviously cancelled), this building would be packed to the rafters, inside the arena, out in the halls, in the parking lot.
As the set progresses, all three of the band’s most legendary vehicles for improvisation are assayed: “Playing in the Band”, “Dark Star”, “That’s It For The Other One.” Transitions back into composed material are sometimes haphazard and tenuous, but the jams themselves are interesting and fully developed. With near-mythical rarities like the psychedelic statement “St. Stephen” and Lesh’s own composition “Unbroken Chain,” recorded in 1974 but never performed live until the last year of touring, the evening’s setlist has all the makings of a Deadhead dream show.

As much of a dream setlist as there can be without the mellifluous sixteenth notes of an emotive, spiraling Jerry solo, of course.

The Dead may have never allowed speeches from the stage, but Weir and lyricist John Perry Barlow (ironically, a lifelong Republican, but one of many this cycle to come out for Obama) contributed at least two eighties political screeds, Biblical Vietnam allegory “My Brother Esau” (too little too late), and the more contemporaneous “Throwing Stones,” with its references to south of the border shenanigans, “shipping powders back and forth/black goes south and white comes north.” The tune, prescient, was first performed four years before the Iran-Contra scandal broke, and concludes that our trust in governance might be better left to ourselves: “The future’s here/we are it/we are on our own.”

“Ashes, ashes, all fall down,” the crowd responds.

Back into the “Playin’” reprise, a classic Dead set closing moment, and the musicians bow and walk off to thunderous approval.

And now, the final taboo—against speaking from the stage—also falls, as Lesh, a liver transplant survivor, now always implores the audience to make the noble decision to become organ donors, and does so here as well, just before the encore. Then Weir steps up to his microphone, guitar in hand, and makes the briefest remarks of the evening. Not a political speech, a concise anecdote: “I remember reading something [late gonzo journalist] Hunter Thompson said that made me sit up and take notice: If every Deadhead in Florida had voted in 2000, this would be a different world today.”

A nice line, but it presupposes that all Floridian Deadheads would have been Gore supporters, and I know personally at least one there who loves the band and is a hardcore GOP partisan, even now remaining an unabashed Bush apologist. But in general, this is what they used to call the crunchy granola crowd, and Thompson’s assertion is probably a sound one. In any case, the message is clear: Vote for somebody, but whatever you do, vote, an innocuous, nonpartisan message, one worth speculating that Weir may have chosen based on a tickle at the back of his neck, the gentle hand of the fatherly figure who’d once been his mentor, his brother in art and life. What would Jerry do?

That message of engagement and not direct endorsement, despite the clear intention of the concert, might be just the sort of dignified expression that Garcia would have made, if not in the old days, then surely now in the troubled times that constitute 2008, and with it the final hundred days of an administration peeling away even their own former supporters like the music fans exiting a concrete cube into the crisp air of an autumn night.

—

It’s not yet Halloween, but the Dead have come alive. Perhaps it was only for this one occasion, but possibly for one more tour around the only country in the world in which they could have been and done what they’ve done: Motivate an entire subculture of Americans to break out of their ossified ways of thinking and “run away to join the circus,” as Garcia characterized the Deadhead willingness to live a life on the road, just like their idols. Tonight their clarion call is one that suggests the tuning in part, but not the dropping out. No matter; that whole idea is so last-century, dude.

Back in the parking lot, crowds of people throng to the hissing of nitrous oxide tanks, avaricious entrepreneurs trading on people’s desire to push the high a bit further, even if it is by ingesting a nervous system suppressant, a sensation intense but ephemeral. Will these Deadheads “take this feeling we have tonight back home and do something with it,” as Mickey Hart exhorted in his farewell following the rousing double encore of “Touch of Grey” segued into the feel-good drumbeat of Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away,” a showclosing staple of Dead shows back in the day, with the crowd clapping along and singing, “Know our love will not fade away?” With the election only three weeks away, perhaps that was time enough for the afterglow to linger—for America, down but not out, on life support but not quite dead, to find a way forward.

On this night, it is easy to see the symmetry—and propriety—of the musical icons standing before us and the choices that lay ahead, the stakes felt enormous indeed. In the words of Lesh’s own lament about mortality “Box of Rain,” the last song Jerry Garcia ever played on stage, “such a long, long time to be gone/such a short time to be there.” Yes, the country is aging and maybe even ill, but far too young to give up the ghost just yet—as is true of the Grateful Dead themselves. It was a historic evening, a worthy cause, and a fine show. Most of all, it may have been exactly what Jerry would have done.

—

This article appeared in the program of the 12th Southwest/Texas P & A Culture Association’s Grateful Dead Caucus meeting. This group of scholars, writers and music lovers convenes during the annual conference, held in scenic Albuquerque, NM.

The first question readers may have: “why Edgewater County Confidential?” An answer: My fiction, both published and unpublished, often takes place in my mythical South Carolina county, one home to a variety of eccentric characters as any fictional, rural Southern county ought to be — “my apocryphal county” as Faulkner would often refer to his own Yoknapatawpha County.  My published novel King’s Highway, while set primarily in late 1970s Myrtle Beach, features a protagonist whose nascent political dynasty of a family hails from Tillman Falls, the Edgewater County seat. My unpublished novels FELLOW TRAVELER, MANSION OF HIGH GHOSTS, and DOGS OF PARSON’S HOLLOW all feature Tillman Falls and Edgewater County as their primary if not sole settings, and one of my two prizewinning short stories, “Howdy from Upstairs”, is likely set in or near the area though this isn’t made explicitly clear by any actual text. A new novel, one that’s been in the thinking, planning, and creating stages for years now, has been traditionally referred to as TILLMAN FALLS, though of late my thinking has evolved into calling this piece simply EDGEWATER. This manuscript has always been imagined as a mature work encompassing many themes and characters from the other novels (as well as a variety of short stories and other, unfinished or proposed novel-length narratives), so it makes sense to entitle the work thusly.

As for the other element of the blog title, it’s a nod to my stint as a sardonic alt-weekly columnist in the Columbia Citypaper, my byline published under the clever heading “Five Points Confidential,” only a couple of which are still knocking around in cyberspace. I have to say, having been a regular newspaper columnist was kind of a cool, left-field dream coming true, one that I miss and to which I may return at some point.

Having said that, let us note that this blog may function at times like FPC once did, with opinion pieces, agitprop, and the like. But for now, I’ll leave you with a piece of work that was my first published piece of fiction.

Benj struggles with the ten-by-ten white lawn-tent while Marcy goes through the beads, box by box:  Disco Ball Throw Beads, Tumblin’ Dice Throw Beads, Heart Shaped Throw Beads, Oversize Mardi Gras Specials (they look like a necklace of round, green Christmas ornaments, and take up so much space that Marcy wants to scream), Peace Sign Throw Beads, Mystic Leaf Throw Beads (which are pot leaves, in about six colors, including bling-bling gold and silver), Spurting Penis Throw Beads (a new addition), Kiss Me I’m Irish Green Shamrock Throw Beads (leftover from the St. Pat’s Festival in Savannah), and a giant blue tub of just ordinary old Throw Beads, which at two for a dollar are a big money generator in spite of their comparative simplicity.  That tub is the one that both of them hate the most; seasoned festival vendors they might be, but it didn’t make the boxes and storage bins of colorful, plastic junk any lighter—especially after all these years on the road.

They’d gotten up at the crack of dawn and had a big breakfast at the Waffle House—or Awful House, as Benj calls it—next to the Highway Rest Express motel. Another lousy meal at another cruddy roadside diner, one of a thousand such breakfasts that all run together into a fatty stew of heavy omelets, greasy burgers, salty fries that taste of the old oil in which they’ve been scalded, Cobb salads of yellow, tasteless iceberg lettuce and mealy tomatoes, eggs on the side of steaks as tough as shoe leather, weak iced tea with a hair in it, burned, bitter restaurant coffee, half-thawed frozen meringue pie on a cracked plate, and then maybe a cig or two (even they’re both trying to cut back).  They’ve lived this way so long it just seems natural, somehow.

Benj finds himself belching his hashbrowns-smothered-with-onions as they make their way onto the festival grounds and all during the setup, but rushing through another crappy breakfast has paid off:  With a double sawbuck, they grease the palm of the sleepy-eyed festival intern who is assigning the spots, and she pencils them into a prime corner location near the end of the food vendors, only forty yards from the main music stage.  They’ll be deaf by the end of the day, but that is the price you pay in their line for having prime real estate in a high foot-traffic area.  If only his back didn’t hurt so much; if only the indigestion deigns to succumb to the Zantac 150’s that he will gobble off and on all day; if only her feet hold out; if only they can sell some stuff—not just cover the vendor fee, but make some money.  If only, if only.

The neighbors arrive—they are a couple of guys, Steve and Earl, who sell stickers (three bucks each or two for five) from wall-size Plexiglas displays that they set up in rows and hang from poles that they stick into the ground if it is dirt like the vendor areas thankfully are at this festival.  They are on a first name basis with Benj and Marcy from prior encounters, and since Benj and Marcy don’t sell stickers, Steve and Earl are always real friendly and cooperative.  The four vendors exchange pleasantries and then get back to work.

Suddenly Marcy and Benj find themselves more or less set up and ready for business, so he leaves for a few minutes—it’s barely ten in the morning, and the music doesn’t start until noon—to get in a quick potty-break before the early-bird customers start wandering onto the sprawling festival site.  Laid out over the state fairgrounds just outside of town, the festival area shares a huge parking lot with the local college football stadium, so there is plenty of room for thousands of would-be festival attendees.  Benj is optimistic.  The weather is beautiful, and for a minute, as he smells the food wagons getting ready and shuffles through the sawdust and the hay scattered around, he remembers how much he used to enjoy this work.

The porta-johns, a line of which stretches for fifty yards, stand in formation like a platoon of stolid, seafoam green soldiers at attention, ready for duty; at this early hour they are as fresh and pristine as they will be all day. Benj sits quietly and thumbs through a Tom Robbins paperback he’s already read while he waits for something to happen.  He has a wispy corona of long hair surrounding an expansive bald pate, the mostly-salt and pepper locks pulled back into a short ponytail.  His ass is getting as big as the side of a house, as his grandmother would have said; he is no spring chicken. His back hurts and his bad knee hurts and his hip—old man’s hip, Marcy calls it only half-jokingly—is really acting up today.  He knows this life is too hard on him, he knows he should lose some weight, he knows that sometimes he’s not sure how happy he is, he knows that his choices are limited.  This is some life I’ve carved out for myself, he thinks.  And the festival season, stretching on into the autumn, is only beginning.

But this is how we make our living—everybody’s gotta do something.

He’s mildly surprised that they’re even working this particular event again; last year, the struggling music festival had been declared by the city council to be all but moribund, until a last minute grassroots petition campaign convinced the municipality to underwrite the shortfall—again—and give the organizers one last shot to make it into the black.  The city had wanted the music festival in the first place as a badge of honor, as a prestige, tourist-attracting feather in its cap, but all it has turned out to be is a bit of a joke around town.

And so this year the organizers have done all they can to achieve success:  slightly reduced admission, a wide-ranging roster of acts, a kiddie-fair with rides, loads of advertising, even more vendors of both food and souvenirs. Benj has heard that advance ticket sales have apparently been brisk, but you know how people talk a good game. Still—the day should be good.

A number of musical genres are represented, with the two biggest acts being a goth-makeup-metal group called Outflank, who’ll be headlining the main stage just across from Benj and Marcy’s tent. At the other end of the long strip of tarmac is a stage featuring hip-hop trio Blingo, currently enjoying their fifteen seconds of fame on the pop charts after winning a television talent contest.  Side stages will feature other talent of varying stature. Benj hopes against hope that the two main crowds, as different in temperament and taste as night and day, won’t intermingle with unsettling results.  These festivals are always a challenge, especially as the day of beer drinking and carousing lengthens into evening; a mini-riot is the last thing anyone wants.  With kids today, though, you just don’t ever know.  Benj frets and rubs his bad knee and cleans himself and then struggles to squeeze his enormous backside out of the now-soiled porta-john, its pine-scented freshness irrevocably lost.  Benj feels tired already. And only fourteen hours of work ahead—that is, if the breakdown later tonight goes quickly.

Marcy is yawning and setting up the grid panels on which they will display the novelty shirts: the pothead and beer drinking joke-shirts, the tie-dyes (the sign spells it “tye-dyes” however), the leftover St Pat’s shirts from Savannah.  “I’ll get those, hon,” Benj offers good-naturedly; he knows Marcy’s back hurts too, and those seven-foot grids are unwieldy bastards.

“I’ll put out the jewelry, then.”

“And the hats,” Benj reminds gently.

“I know,” she says with a sad smile.  “Want some coffee?” She produces the thermos they filled up out of the complimentary decanters in the motel lobby.

“Not yet, babe” he mutters through an acid belch.

* * *

It’s a slow-starter, this festival, which isn’t all that unusual.  Benj listens to a ball game while Marcy reads. They’ve both smoked three cigarettes already, in direct violation of their pact to only smoke that many all day.

Two o’clock rolls around; the sun is no longer baking them. All the stages are live, now, at least, and there’s some traffic but nothing about which to write home. The supporting acts are a motley mix of local bands, the ones everyone sees all month long around town—every month!—and a couple of seventies warhorses—Kansas, with one original member, and Styx, with two—but that’s about it.  The fairgrounds are dotted only by a few hundred people milling around, most of whom look too much like Benj and Marcy to want much of what they sell, which is aimed at a younger, drunker crowd.  Sales are non-existent for hours, it seems; the first one of note is a “tye-dye” shirt to a fifty-something guy who regales them for fifteen minutes (after squinting and whining about the price of the shirt, begging for an “old timer’s discount, heh heh”) about the time he saw Janis Joplin and how he remembers the way he felt when he heard she’d died, and about Hendrix, and about how he didn’t get into the Doors at all until after Morrison died, but then he thought they were just, just, just the most profound of them all, the Doors.  “That shit’s like poetry, and shit, man. Y’know?  Dang.”

“I know,” Benj replies.  “Did you know they were all twenty-seven?”

“Who?”

“All of ‘em.  Jimi, Janis, Jim…Brian Jones.  Pigpen, from the Grateful Dead.  Even Kurt Cobain…” And then Marcy smiles as Benj produces the “Forever 27” t-shirt with a small flourish from a bin under the jewelry table. The artwork is of a ghostly Kurt Cobain entering a bar—a bar called heaven—as the other dead rock stars sit strumming instruments, all of them save Pigpen—a scowling, tough, blues-biker of a figure, as in life—sporting beatific, angelic expressions on their faces.  “Isn’t that something,” Benj says, more of a statement than a question. “Mm-mm,” he continues, reverent.

“Dude,” the so-called old timer asks, misty-eyed, “tell me you got one a them in a two-X.”  Benj turns and winks at Marcy as he digs one out of the bin.

***

Benj yawns.  Marcy sips the old coffee and wrinkles her nose.  They sell stuff here and there, two dollars, five dollars, ten dollars worth of throw beads to a drunken guy who already has twenty dollars’ worth around his neck.

“Stir fry?”  Marcy looks over at Benj and gives him an exaggerated I’m-hungry belly rub.

“I want a gyro, I think.”

“Ugh,” Marcy says.

“Nah,” Benj jokes, “that tzatziki sauce, it’s good for you.  Mmmmm.” And now he too does the belly rub.  If he’s made it once, he’s made the joke a thousand times.

* * *

Benj’s head is pounding as the opener for Outflank is tuning up—not playing, mind you, just tuning up—but at least sales have picked up, finally, in the last hour or so.   Marcy’s frowning as she eagle-eyes some kids pawing through the basket of hackey-sacks while an accomplice thinks he is discreetly fingering the display of Indian incense boxes (some of it so old that it probably just smells like a burning twig now). The incense comes in narrow, square ten-stick boxes that go for only a buck apiece, and she thinks why don’t you just fucking buy one, you cheap little bastard, instead of trying to wait me out and take one as her own headache begins slowly pulsing into existence behind her eyes.  Finally Benj waddles over and stands there with a sour expression, glowering down at the three little punks with their long bangs died different colors and their oily looking jeans and t-shirts for bands that were stars before the wearers were even born.  After a long frustrating minute for both the vendors and the would-be boosters, the boys give up and move on just as a longhair biker type starts asking if they have any glass pieces and his girlfriend engages Marcy about the toe rings and the throw beads and the scented oils.  Benj motions the guy over to the side of the tent, where he opens a padded case full of hand-blown, colorful glass “tobacco” pipes that are shown out of sight at this festival since it is a conservative town. Following a genial negotiation, he sells the guy a small bubbler for sixty bucks, after coming off the original price quote of seventy-five (which still makes Benj his keystone markup anyway).  He gives the biker a small packet of tobacco in case the guy’s a narc. He concludes the transaction with a grateful wink as he hands the three crisp twenties to Marcy, who stashes them in her hip pack, which functions as the cash register. The bubbler is the biggest sale of the day, other than the two t-shirts to the weepy nostalgia-suffused customer from earlier.

***

Sure enough, sometime around eight o’clock, a fight breaks out not too far from the tent, right in the middle of the sticker-guys’ setup next door.  And sure enough, it’s between some gangsta types there for Blingo and some greasy white redneck-metal looking kids.  The white kids sport a combination of wallet chains, black clothing, oversize pants, ball caps, and bad skin.  The black guys, in oversized athletic gear and huge t-shirts featuring icons such as Tupac and Marley, are trying to play it cool but the big fat redneck guy is shiny-eyed and yelling about someone pulling on his wallet chain and then he’s sticking his finger in one guy’s face, after which one of the black dudes starts yelling ain’t no motherfucker gon’ pull yo’ chain, niggah, and then the blows start flying and one of the acrylic sticker-boards, as tall as a man, falls over in a tangle of bodies but then the cops show, and it breaks up fast as the principals are hauled aside while their accomplices melt away into the gathering throng.

Marcy looks pained and stressed, her head pounding, and tells Benj it looks like someone has taken a display t-shirt while she had her back turned watching the fight but before he can respond the three little assholes are back fingering the hackey-sacks and incense again and someone walks up and asks how much the spurting-penis throw beads are just as Outflank kicks into their opening number AT A VOLUME THAT IS SO EAR-SPLITTINGLY DISTORTED that Benj bites his tongue hard enough to make it bleed and tears squirt out of his eyes when he tries to choke out, “three dollars, or two for five.”

* * *

Marcy has shoved cotton into her ears and is standing with her arms folded watching people stream by without so much as a glance at any of the merch.  People are pumping their fists in the air to the heavy beat and throwing beer at each other.  Benj has already packed some merch away into the bins even though it is only ten o’clock—beads have sold for shit, and it takes so long to put all that stuff away that he just can’t stand the thought of having to do it afterwards, even though he knows sometimes this is the time of the night when you can sell it by the handful to all the drunks.  But it’s the beginning of the season, after all, and they haven’t done too badly today.  The hip pack around Marcy’s ample waist is fairly bulging with bills—although most of them are ones, of course.  But it adds up, sometimes.  People would be surprised, Benj thinks.  Not with today’s take, but on a really good weekend . . .

But there haven’t been that many of those in the last year or two, and for all kinds of reasons: Competition, declining attendance—it all costs so much these days, from the tickets to the parking to the corndogs to the, yes, souvenirs, the tchotchkes and crap that Marcy and Benj sell.  Not to mention the difficulty in programming festivals in the first place, with the fractured, fragmented, compartmentalized, sub-genred-to-death music business such as it is—not to mention the overabundance of the festivals themselves, which they have these days for every reason from celebrating bluegrass to jam bands to nostalgia, to diversity or unity or a combination thereof, to okra or crawfish, or else to spring time or harvest time, to Chinese New Year’s and Arbor Day, to the fourth of July and Easter Sunday and Fat Tuesday, to ones like this one which just sort of are for their own sake.  And with all the choices that people have nowadays—hell, with five or six hundred TV channels who needs to leave the house anyway?—Benj is surprised that people like he and Marcy—his love, his sweet girl, always at his side—can still make a living doing what they do.  On the other hand, people will probably always need a reason to get outside and drink beer and congregate in cliques and groups and families, and hopefully in the process leave a little money behind.  Benj thinks sometimes that he’ll keel over at one of these damn festivals; “just step over me on the way out,” he always says.

“Why don’t we open a brick-and-mortar somewhere,” Marcy says, as she grunts a bin into the back of the van. The music’s over, the cops are pushing all the drunks out in the parking lot, the moon is up and the area in front of the stage is a sea of garbage.   “A college town.  Or at the beach.  Work the season, hang out in the winter time…”

“That’s what we do now.”

“But I mean stay in one place.  Think about it, baby.  Somewhere warm all winter, the Carolinas.  Myrtle Beach.  St. Simon’s Island.  Florida—Panama City or Lauderdale or the Keys, baby, the Keys—”

Benj goes over and puts his hands on her shoulders.  “That’d take some mad cash, girlfriend.  You got some I ain’t heard about?”  Benj says this half-wishing that she does.

“I know,” she replies as she turns around with a sad smile on her face. “I don’t, unfortunately.  Just this.” She fingers the hip-pack and shrugs.

“Lot of us there already,” he says, continuing to play devil’s advocate, thinking of all the established t-shirts shops and jewelry huts and airbrush guys and junk vendors and head shops in a place like Myrtle Beach.  “Tough to make a go of it.  Long hours.”  Benj had worked retail as a teenager and hated it.  “Lot of the same problems. Hard work,” he concludes.

“And this isn’t?”

Benj kisses her on top of the head.  “No one said it’d be easy.  Least not…”

“. . . to me, anyway,” she finishes one of Benj’s familiar bromides.  “We’re getting too old for this mess, hon,” she adds with one of her own.

His knee hurts and his hip flares and his back twinges.  “Don’t have to tell me.”

“So what are we going to do?”

Benj laughs and starts sliding the grid panels into their space inside of the van.  “Work the season, work the circuit, get through the year.  Who knows?  Maybe it’ll be an up year.  Maybe—maybe by the end of the summer we’ll be all set.”

“All set?”

Benj stops and looks at her.  “You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, right,” she scoffs sarcastically.  “Ah, well.”  Marcy turns and stoops over to drag a cardboard box of t-shirts over toward the van.  “Help me with this, hon.”

“You got it, babe.” In another few minutes the tent comes down and the van is loaded and they say goodbye to the sticker guys, who ask if they did all right.  Benj looks forward to a late night snack back to the motel; Marcy wants to smoke a joint and have a soak in the bath.  They don’t have to get up early in the morning, so why not, she thinks.

The morning brings the drive back home, where upon their arrival they will check their various E-bay auctions and get together whatever items need to be shipped out.  Then they will restock the road merch before heading out to work the Magnolia Music Fest next weekend, two hundred miles in the opposite direction, three days’ worth of the same-old routine.  Outflank is playing again one of the nights, unfortunately, but so is one of the Grateful Dead members who is still touring around, and Benj is kind of looking forward to that one, for once, along with Buddy Guy on another stage and Aretha Franklin on still another. Benj will not make it over to watch any of those legends though—but then again he’s not there for the music anyway.  Not really.

He thinks that, back home, he will go online and look at real estate and businesses for sale in resort towns like Marcy was talking about; he won’t say anything about it to her, though—they don’t have the money to do much of anything but buy some more merch to sell this season, so why get her hopes up?  Doesn’t hurt to dream, he thinks.  And she’s right about one thing—too old for this shit.  Besides—maybe some amazing deal is just waiting out there to be found.  Maybe they’ll fall ass-backwards into a stake of some undetermined amount. Maybe . . .

Maybe they’ll hit the Lotto.  You never know about things.  Just keep plugging away until it happens—that is what Benj thinks as he signals and changes lanes and then pulls off into the motel parking lot.

In the light of day again, the beads shake and the grids rattle as the van rumbles down the interstate.  Marcy reaches over and holds Benj’s hand, who smiles at her even though his hip is killing him.  We enjoy our freedom, she thinks.  We are beholden to no one but each other—and our customers, of course.  She counts the money from yesterday, writes some numbers in a ledger book that they keep, and looks out at the countryside rolling by while Benj sings along to an old song on the radio.

—

FOREVER 27 won the 2006 PEARL Magazine short fiction competition.