eyd Thunder claps and roiling clouds. Summer of Love, 1987. South of Portland, in Albany, we pull in for gas. The attendant, young and bearded, fills the tank. “ Enjoy the concert!” he says. “ I’ ll bet I’ve filled ten rigs like yours since noon. I must be the only person in the world not going to Eugene. ” Truth be known, there were only a tenth as many people heading for Eugene as were at Woodstock when Arlo Guthrie climbed on stage and grinning his son-of- Woody grin proclaimed: “We’ve brought traffic to a standstill on the New York Throughway!” A heady moment. A flash of bright light before the big shutdown. Now, as we drive south some twenty years later, most of America is out three- wheeling it or sitting in front of the tube catching the latest Ollie North re-run. Life had pictures of him barbecuing in his back yard. I was sort of hoping they’d have pictures of him the time he sustained a back injury and spent an afternoon jumping off his roof—reinforcing his discipline by handling pain. Up the ladder and off the roof. Over and over again. Your average ranch-home daddy, passing on the values to his awestruck kids. Further down the road, traffic ties up and then comes to a standstill. Could it be happening again? Another Wood- stock? Are we ready for that? People begin rolling down their windows, the music spilling out into the falling rain, some Jimi Hendrix gaining the upper hand, Hendrix more listened to and better understood now than then. Hendrix, closing down Woodstock like a prophet with that bloodcurdling version of The Star Spangled Banner—Jesus! The man knew. You can’t go on knowing that intensely into the future and continue living in the present—Scotty beams you up. Next to us, a car with Montana plates and an Iron Maiden bumper sticker; young bloods, the driver beating a staccato rhythm on the steering wheel with a set of drumsticks. Clusters of people stand around in conversation. Then the traffic up front begins moving, and we’ re on the road again, riding a Woodstock n e Corning °Ut o f the U , J oojungle Wn Ofour b u s ^ t h their hands r°utine. momentum into a hair-trigger future. I t ’s after dark when we cross the Willamette and drop down into Eugene. We finally pull over to ask assistance from two college students, dyed-in-the- wool 1987 mainstream—i t ’s in their speech patterns and the places they’ re recommending. The Holiday Inn. Disco joints. “ No, man,” Brenda says, leaning across me to squint into the dark at their faces. “We want something funkier than that!" They smile vagueness at us across a gap wider than all the generations since Moses. “Guess we can’t help you then,” they say, and walk away. We wind up eating pizza in a walk-in place of 13th Street. Long-haired pizza wizards spinning dough discs over their heads, Sonny Boy Williamson blasting out of a cassette recorder propped cockeyed in the corner over the s ink. . . I flash on the first pizza I ever ate, East-Coast Italian, a carload of us racing over the back roads to Middletown, a rawboned Little Richard screeching through a static storm over the AM radio, Wolfman Jack urging us to be cooool, the skull and crossbones flapping in the seventy-mile- an-hour wind, the trees ablaze with the colors of autumn under a New England harvest moon. . . . It was nearly midnight by the time we got to the place the pizza wizards sent us. There was standing room only, a wall- to-wall and partially up-the-wall situation, the musicians pressed back into a far corner at crowd level. Curtis Salgado and the Stilettoes, pay-dirt blues. The musicians blew stereotypes to smithereens. Salgado himself looked like he ju s t stepped out of a skid-row flophouse at high noon at the end of a three-day drunk. His bass player looked like he’d left his ROTC uniform hanging in the dressing room. His lead guitar was a doe-eyed Rastafarian, and his keyboard man wore the unchanging smile of a bookworm psychotic. What they played was tapped into something deeper, something that negated appearances and eluded interpretation. The music penetrated the crowd and the crowd responded with body language and this is as good an explanation as any of the “ Summer of Love,” this unspoken togetherness, this green inner world thriving under the grey overcast of 1980s American, this cosmic, rhythmic, undulating force. We worked our way up front and found ourselves eyeball-to-eyeball with a reincarnated Lenny Bruce. The first time I heard jazz was long before I heard Chuck Berry. One night on Guam in a car loaded down with kids being chauffeured home from a movie, we heard Dixieland coming out of the car radio against a backdrop of dying snails. When the Japanese landed on Guam at the start of the Second World War, they turned loose a few million jumbo-sized snails—their answer to K-rations. The snails commenced multiplying and migrating back and forth across the island. The Japanese did not fare as well as their snails, and by the time I got to Guam as a military dependent in 1952, they’d all but disappeared, although one morning two tired Samurai slipped out of the jungle and sat down in front of our school bus with their hands on their heads. They’d been eating snails and papayas for seven years, and were sick of the routine. Our bus driver freaked and locked us in the bus. We sat there in silence, our lunch buckets in our laps. The military police finally showed up with vast firepower and took the enemy into custody. We went on our way. Sat down at our desks. Opened our history books. Though the Japanese were pretty much gone, the snails were thriving. They migrated by night, and we were rolling along pulverizing them, red-hot Dixieland blasting out of the radio. It was din to my young ears. I didn’t know jazz when I heard it. I'd been programmed not to hear it, raised in an atmosphere that made sure such things didn’t get through Gi m3 w Men V /f lW RODUC T IO NS TO BAJA EXICO) 1 -3 January 27 February 15 7 Days Spring Break - March 19 Kids with Single Parents April 1-8 $TBA Open Sundays again, 1-5p.m March 2 $500 (+ air fare) iBOOK MANANA! 288-8501 Group Inquiries Welcome Clinton St. Quarterly—Winter, 1987 9 CONTEMPORARY C RAFTS GALLERY 3934 S.WCorbett Ave. Portland. Oregon 97201 503/223-2654 Gi 1 0 DAY WINTER ESCAPES Elegant Desert Camps
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