As I sat on that Naugahyde couch, in crazy sixties-end Los Angeles, roaring from the speakers were such sounds, such lowdown human groans and cries not new, old as time, almost, but never on a record had they seemed so threatening. I had heard such sounds before, heard them as a little boy lying in bed in the wiregrass country of south Georgia, heard the sounds of animals crying far off in the woods, heard the sounds the black woods hands made having what they called church, far off in the woods, the all-night drums, like the heartbeat of the dark swampy woods, boomdada boomdada, and heard the sounds that I could not identify – the really frightening ones. I had not been so frightened since I was a boy lying slender and white and frail in the dark bed, finding a sound in the night, losing it, waiting for it again, a soft sighing sound that might have been the wind easing through the tops of the long-needle pines, or might have been cattle lowing a long way off, but always came back to sounding most like a simple human exhalation right outside the rusty screen of my bedroom window, the quietly released breath of a man standing quietly, just watching, waiting. I loved the woods but for years I lay awake at night fearing that sound. When I was old enough to have a rifle I would sometimes hear the sound, the wind, the distant animal call, the careful breathing in the dark, and I would lie there as long as I could stand it and then take my rifle and slip out of the dark house, not waking anyone, and look around outside, crouching low, breathing with my mouth open to keep from making the fearful telltale sound. It was the same feeling I had now, as the sounds, the awful wails of guitar and mouth harp, pitched and blended together. The feeling came partly from the music and partly from the presence behind my back of this man Klein, a full-blood Jew they would call him in the Swamp, a man of great power, to me almost incalculable power, a man who did not know me, who cared nothing for me. I did not know yet how good or evil the Stones were, but of Klein I was simply afraid, because even though I had a letter from the Stones, a magic piece of paper, there was still the tour, this gauntlet I had to run, and a man like Klein could, I sensed, stop me any time he wanted to take the trouble. But when I was twelve, standing in the dark outside my grandfather’s house, frightened nearly to death, I was still, in some part of my mind that is a gift from my father who got it from his father who got it from God knows where, calm and ready, I think, to do what had to be done. If there had suddenly appeared before me one of the men my grandfather worked with and whom I loved so much, loved their voices and their looks, their yellow eyeballs and smooth bulging black muscles, transformed by poison whiskey (it had happened; my grandfather was nearly stabbed with a sharpened three-corner file) into a mad death-wielding animal, I could have stayed calm enough and steady enough in my terror to shoot him. So I stayed calm and steady in my terror, sensing the craziness of the Stones, of mad Keith, and knowing that what the Stones had already done had killed one of them.
Sandison came in – I hadn’t noticed that he’d left – with a girl, and they sat beside me on the couch. She was wearing blue jeans and carrying a notebook. The song track was so loud as to preclude introductions. I spoke into her ear: ‘You must be from the Saturday Review.’
‘Yes,’ she shouted back. I read her lips. ‘Who are you?’
This was giving me something to do besides get scared. ‘Jann Wenner,’ I said.
She looked at me as if I were crazy, which I had just been thinking about becoming. Then she turned to Sandison and in a second he answered her, speaking my name so loudly that I heard it. If I heard it, could Klein hear it? If he heard it, would he recognize it? If I had known more about Klein, I would be even more worried. But he had not heard; when I looked around, he was going out the door with Mick. They went into the studio, leaving the door open, light from the hall falling into the big high-ceilinged room, dimly illuminating Mick at the piano bench, Klein sitting backwards around a folding chair. Mick was erasing with the back of his hand something Klein had said. Big as Klein was, this skinny foppish young Englishman could stand him off, deny him the tour and get away with it. It was almost enough to make you afraid of Mick, of the Stones.
When they finished talking Klein left, Pete Bennett with him, and Jagger came back into the control room. For the moment the tapes were still, and Sandison introduced the Saturday Review’s girl reporter to Mick. She looked sleepy, hypnotized by Mick’s presence like a chicken by a snake. Then she remembered something. ‘Oh!’ She picked up her carpetbag and took out a bunch of marijuana plant-tops. ‘I brought you some flowers.’
‘Oh, thank you,’ Mick said, taking the boughs and throwing them on the couch. ‘That’s very nice.’
Sandison was speaking to Mick, who emitted a tiny guffaw apropos of nothing Sandison was saying and threw a slow-motion pitch toward the girl’s left tit. She slowly managed to react; as his hand barely missed her breast she threw the same sort of punch back at him, but its aim was uncertain, she couldn’t very well hit him in the balls and it was pointless to strike his flat chest. Also, in the midst of the act, the sense of it seemed to come to her – she was returning a playful punch Mick Jagger had made at her tit, her tit had become more popular than she ever expected – and this was not stupid, he really was a star, his potency existed in the room, her hand stopped in mid-air, opened, fluttered like a shot bird to her side.
Mick took her up to a chair beside the control board and told her to ask him some questions. She began to ask tiny Saturday Review questions, and he gave brief, smiling replies. Al Steckler arrived with the pictures for the concert programs, showed them to Mick and asked, What about text? I don’t know, Mick said, Keith, what about a text? Yeah, Keith said, something short, just – Maybe we can get Sam to do something. Hey, Mick said, looking at me. Ah, Keith said. You’re a writer, Mick said.
‘What – what – all right, what do you want?’
‘Something for the program,’ Mick said. ‘Not very long. Something lighthearted.’
‘How long, Al?’
‘A hundred and eighty words.’
‘A what? How do you know?’
Al shrugged. ‘That’s long enough.’
‘You know,’ Mick said. ‘Something lighthearted.’
‘I need it as soon as I can get it,’ Al said.
I figured I’d better go home and start writing. Sandison was leaving, so we went together. There were no cars at the studio, but we expected to get a cab on Sunset. Once we got out, the doors locked behind us, there were of course no cabs, this was Los Angeles. We walked along, thinking we’d find a cab in each block. Two with fares passed and then none, but I didn’t mind, it was a pleasure to walk toward the sunset on Sunset. There were all sorts of signs around, a machine that took your fifty cents and dropped into your hot hand a map to the homes of Hollywood stars, and just a step away another machine selling the L.A. Times, whose headline read I WANT HELP, SAYS ZODIAC KILLER. We passed Ralph’s Pioneer House, the Vienna Hofbrau, Father Payton’s Crusade for Family Prayer, and a man who was walking along reading the newspaper. (I want help!) On his back he was wearing a battery-powered machine with a mask that fit over his mouth and nose, allowing him to breathe the polluted air. Across the street was the Apocalypse, a store specializing in pornographic books and notions. Sandison had ‘never been in one in America,’ so I went in with him. Kama Sutra Oil, plastic vibrating dildoes, inflatable vaginas, posters of men, boys, women, girls, and various animals, separately and in combinations. The books were equally various: Hot Snatch, Pedophilia, The Story of O, all manner of porn for all persuasions. By the time we left the store the books had become in my mind one giant volume called The Return of the Son of the Curse of the Vengeance of the Giant Vaginas.
Night fell, the lights came on, cars buzzed around us, the mist filled our lungs. We found a taxi in the deadly romantic murk and made it back up to Oriole.
While I was wandering around the house trying to get high enough to write 180 words, Steckler gripped my biceps, gave me the high beam from his baby blues and said ‘Please.’ I told him if he wanted his fucking text to leave me the hell alone. Bowery Boys Routine #87, the Artist. I went back to the bedroom and tried to write. A