Amateur Insanity

The Magic Mountain Music Festival and Fantasy Fun Faire

 

It’s a benefit for Hunters Point Child Care Centers put on by AM rock station KFRC. Half way up Mt Tam we arrive at an overflowing parking lot where buses are taking people to the concert at the top. It’s crowded and we’re late and a bus is filling-up as we pull-in. Because I am the only one familiar with the area, having hiked it, I feel obligated to help Danny find a parking place. And besides, I want to get away from Christine for a while and savor my thoughts of her.

Tim gets on the bus arm-in-arm with Sherry, then Don-Ed and Cookie. Christine and I part at the door. Caressing gazes, brushed fingers. After parking the car, Danny and I walk beside creeping traffic back along the road to the parking lot. Occasionally we speak, but most of the time I stumble along in a daze, stifling a whoop, a guffaw, a cartwheel, a leap-and-tapping-together-of-heels. While we wait for the next bus, the Doors’ first hit Light My Fire comes from cars around us with radios on KFRC. I remember the first time I heard it, in Christine’s bedroom.

On her own, she found their album and bought it before anyone else I knew, and one night she invited Tim and I to her bedroom to hear it, especially that last cut on the first side, Light My Fire. With some chicks, their bedroom was their art form, and I had seen enough to recognize Christine’s virtuosity. It was an eclectic, exotic showcase: pomegranate-red paisley bedspreads covered the walls, bead curtains hung over the windows and closet, multicolored Afghani fabric billowed down from the ceiling over an enormous double mattress on a box spring surrounded by incense holders and candles and a hookah. Across the room in orange-crate shelves were the stereo, records, and copies of Siddhartha, The Lord of the Rings, and the I Ching. 

While Tim and I drifted in the music, lying on the bed. Christine knelt on the floor and colored in a coloring book on the bed.  By the end of the album, she had switched to stringing beads. The next album, Fresh Cream, was equally exciting. Still, the whole time I was on her bed, my mind never got far from the realization of where I was. She was about my age yet decades more sophisticated. In another flat across town, she and Tim had been roommates (it was through her that he found our apartment on Scott Street), and by necessity, he had developed toward her a brotherly fondness.

After we get off the bus, Danny and I cross the road and walk down a crowded paved path through overhanging fir trees to an amphitheater. Like a Greek ruin, it has stone-slab seats that terrace down to a stage, now crawling with roadies, in front of a gleaming vista of the Bay and the City. Danny and I stand to the side scanning the crowd. It’s a Sunday on Haight Street teleported to the top of Mt. Tam complete with booths from hip stores, milling teenyboppers and Hells Angels, speechless tourists and swaggering straight Berkeley frat boys pathetically trying to blend in by going shirtless. There is one thing on Mt. Tam not found on Haight Street though: dazed, starched forest rangers in Smoky-the-Bear hats.

All this is sprinkled on a great sun-warmed mass of freaks. This was the first great rock festival and the biggest freak gathering since the founding Human Be-in, the Gathering of the Tribes in January. Monterey Pop will be the weekend after The Magic Mountain Festival and become more famous because of its stellar line-up and a movie about it. I will find out later that twenty thousand are on Mt. Tam today, still it doesn’t feel as crowded as I expected, so I am surprised when I can’t find Christine.

I see Tim and Sherry sitting and snuggling thirty yards away and I start toward them. Danny then spots Don-Ed and Cookie uphill and starts toward them. As I approach Tim and Sherry, I notice Christine sitting twenty yards beyond them, some cat talking to her. I stop, stunned.  She is laughing. The cat crouches on one knee. I anxiously read their poses. Though it doesn’t seem he is settled-in or she is exuding more than normal wattage of charm, I sit beside Tim and Sherry.

While watching the crowd, I frequently throw quick, sidelong glances at Christine. The cat stands, says good-bye and leaves. Eventually she notices me. I try to maintain convincing interest in the crowd and/or the readying stage. Now, she’ll have to come to me. Our eyes never meet. In snuck glances, I see her face go through surprise, then bewilderment, then hurt. She stares-off into her thoughts for a while, then I see that familiar rueful expression. She becomes resentful, resigned, and finally she stands and goes uphill.  

And that was the end of that. Stunned and dazed as by a bomb, I immediately regret it Instantaneous total irrevocable change. A groan of self-disgust wells up. I haven’t the slightest idea why I did it. 

Late that afternoon, the concert was still going when Tim and Sherry and I walked back along the paved path. We had lost the others and now were finding our own way back to the City. Sunlight had left the amphitheater and a cold wind had come up. I watched the concert from farther than the distance to the stage. If, technically, I saw it, I heard none of it. I was dazed, numb, head swarming with replays, castigations, and stifled cries of despair.

Ahead of me on the path now, Tim and Sherry were giggling arm-in-arm. They had been in the woods. She was very attractive with wavey dark hair cascading to her shoulders and freckles and prominent pert breasts. Several times she looked back at me with a goony grin. At first, I thought she might be mocking me. Then she hid her face, nuzzling Tim’s shoulder and I realized she was embarrassed by my knowing what she had done with him in the woods. Then I noticed, going around us in the same direction, off the path, JIM MORRISON!!!

He wove through the crowd quickly, the hub of stares, evoking hush, even the other Doors walking at a distance from him. He seemed smaller and, now without a shirt, scrawnier than he had on the stage, which he had fallen off while trying to swing around an upright two-by-four. I found him annoyingly affected. When I saw the Doors at their first Fillmore gig, at one point, instead of singing, Morrison let the intro go on and on while he staggered and reeled back and forth across the stage, provoking Ray Manzarek to slam his hand on his electric piano and vehemently shout into Morrison’s face, “Sing!!!” This kind of thing went on throughout the performance. The next day on Haight Street I saw Morrison in a store and it seemed from the desperate way he scanned the crowd for recognition that word may have already gotten around about his outrageous onstage behavior. Now, on Mt. Tam, as he passes Tim and Sherry and I, Morrison lifts his chin, breasting the awe.

A few minutes after that, just before we reached the road, I saw Christine for the first time since our “breakup.”  She emerged from the woods just as I was passing. It was too neat and I suspected she had planned it until our eyes met and I faced her weary indifference. She didn’t care enough. A lean and good-looking cat emerged behind her. He leaned toward her and told her something he found amusing which she ignored. She had purged herself of me and maybe some pain. She said nothing as she turned onto the path in front of me and headed toward the road, causing the cat to hurry to keep up. I felt a pang of desire just as I would have before she sat next to me in the backseat.

It was only later that I thought about how sticky things could have gotten around Scott Street if Christine and I had become a couple. Also, I avoided possibly sharing the trash heap with John Groupie and those bewildered guys seen once only in her kitchen the morning after. Though if she had dumped me, she would have been justified. I didn’t lover her and couldn’t. I could desire her overwhelmingly, fantasize and masturbate over her, but after Ruth, I knew I couldn’t love a woman without an intellect. I noticed about myself that if a chick had an intellect, looks didn’t matter; if she didn’t have an intellect, looks were all that mattered.

So, for the heaven of Christine’s bed, I would have had a doomed relationship that would have kept me out of circulation during the Summer of Love. Which explains why, after a couple days of self-flagellation, I felt relief.

Then I went back on high-alert for my mystical soul mate. I was concerned that a pattern of obstacles was emerging that prevented me from living out the rock lyrics, those ad-jingles for romantic love. I wanted what seemed to be so available to everyone else, the transcendence of sex with someone you love who loves you.