The Naked and the Dead

Here's the latest continuation of the science fiction time warp adventure story: Paradise Hotel by Michael Dolan

Mantra Rock at The Avalon Ball Room

Back at the temple, it was time for action.

The Digger’s Free Store was next door to the temple. It was run by a strange group called the Diggers, an offshoot of the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Emmett Grogan had been a jewel thief and and actor. The head of the local Diggers, he could have been a stunt double for Richard Burton. Charming and erudite with wavy hair and boyish good looks he wore a duffle coat and an engaging smile.

He greeted Krishna John as an old friend.

Schwartz Prabhu was there, dressed in a white dhoti, tennis shoes and a business shirt and tie.

“What’s up?” said Hawk.

“Hare Krishna,” said Schartz Prabhu. We gotta load these boxes on the truck. Help us out.”

Bhakta Congo was already hard at work along with Dave Krishna.

Krishna John introduced everyone to Emmett.

“Emmett here runs the place,” he said.

“Nice to meet you boys,” he said. Turning to Krishna John he said, “But you know, we really don’t have any leaders. We’re just folks trying to lend a helping hand. Tonight’s party will be quite an event. The Avalon Ballroom is sold out. Will you be performing tonight?”

Krishna John said, “I’ll be playing my flute, but the real event are the Hare Krishna Chanters. They’ll start the mantra and then the Swami will speak. He’ll explain the philosophy. I hope you can make it.”

Emmett turned to Billy, “I’ll do my best. Look, I’ve got to run. I’m going downtown. I’ve got some business with Alan.”

“Allen Ginsberg?” said Hawk.

“Well, him too, but actually it’s Alan Watts. He’s here with Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert and they want to have a meeting with Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady, and the Grateful Dead. So, I’ve got my hands full. If it was up to me, I’d help you guys put together the food distribution. But I’ve got to run. Do you need to get to the Ball room, Krishna John?”

“Yes, I’ve got to do a sound check for the Swami.”

“All right, I can give you a ride. I’ll drop you off. Come on. Let’s open the doors of perception.”

“Let’s go,” said Krishna John. Emmett buttoned his coat against the San Francisco mist and hurried off. With Krishna John by his side they made an odd couple.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

“How are we doing this?” said Billy.

“We’ll do the cooking in our own kitchen and bring the prasadam over here,” said Schwartz Prabhu. “I understand you guys will handle the transportation over to the Ball Room.”

“OK, we have the Hell’s Angels helping with cars and trucks. Even a few teamsters are donating their labor.”

“Good. What about the equipment for the Swami?”

“It’s taken care of. But you should talk to Chet.”

“Right. I spoke to him earlier this morning. All right. Esmeralda and the girls will be over here with the food later. If you have any problems call Atmaram. We’ll go over to the Ball Room and make sure everything’s ready for the Swami.”

“Cool. Emmett’s co-ordinating the entire event, Krishna John’s doing the sound. I’ll stay here, get together with Esmeralda and the girls and make sure the Angels get the food, I mean prasadam down to the hall. You guys can catch a ride with Speedy.

“Speedy?”

The guy with the harmonica stopped playing.

“Yeah?”

“Give these guys a ride to the Avalon.”

“All right man.”

Speedy was true to his name. He drove a candy apple green ‘Chevy 58 with a V8 hotrod engine. Speedy stomped on the gas and raced passed Union Square on Geary to the Avalon Ballroom, tearing up the streets of San Francisco. They reached Sutter and Van Ness in a matter of minutes. Speedy dropped them off at the corner in front of the Ball Room and took off in a cloud of white smoke.

The Avalon Ball Room had originally been a Dance Academy, and had space for a hundred ball room dancers to move comfortably. The dance floor was upstairs from the street. The floor was wooden, giving a warm quality to the sound of the hall. Mirrors against the walls let the dancers see themselves do the foxtrot, the waltz, and the mambo. There were huge gilded columns and a mandala in the center of the ceiling where a chandelier hung.

When they got there Krishna John was on stage, playing a Chinese shakahuchi flute with a deep tone. He was going through the sound check, but the mellow sound of the flute carried Hawk to another time. They cranked the sound up. The floor shook. Hawk felt the vibration from the bamboo flute penetrate his heart as 150 decibels waved through the air.

The sound stopped. Emmett Grogan appeared and at a signal Krishna John took a break and went back stage with Emmett. Schwartz Prabhu and Hawk found Chet Helms upstairs in one of the balconies adjusting the strobe lights. Chet was lean and lanky with long strait hair and a mustache. He looked like one of Robin Hood’s merry men.

“I got these strobe lights at a discount,” he said. “Army Surplus. They were developed by the CIA for use in Vietnam. Never been battle-tested. They can flash at a frequency high enough to cause epileptic fits in rhesus monkeys, but they’ve never really been tested on human beings. We’re going to try them out tonight. Maybe we’ll break on through to the other side. You must be Schwartz. Didn’t you used to play piano for Green Armadillo?”

Schwartz demured. “No, actually it was mostly classical; Rachmaninoff’s 9th Concerto was my thing. But I did do some backup work for Quicksilver Messenger Service before I met the Swami.”

“You know George Harrison, right?”

“That’s a very well-kept secret for the moment.”

A new group took the stage. A stout Texan woman was shouting blues into the microphone that had gone dead for some reason.

“That’s Janis. The strobe gets really good action working off the day-glo paint. It’s what they call psychedelic. Watch this.”

The house lights dimmed. The seats below were cast in darkness. Suddenly a brilliant white light flashed thousands of times per second. Hawk felt his retina dance, his brain shiver. The lurid flourescent colors on the walls jumped into action, bouncing off the pilasters on the walls with weird effects, spray-painting his field of vision and frying the neural synapses inside his brain-pan.

Helms shut it off. The lights came back up. Janis was outraged, screaming something at the technician. The microphone was still dead but you could read the rage on her purple face as she bunched her fists into knots. Hawk couldn’t wait to see her sing the blues.

Helms said, “I need to adjust the synch. The idea is to have the lights play with the rhythm. What do you think?”

“I think it’s a new gateway to the mind,” said Schwartz Prabhu diplomatically.

Helms spoke less like a cut-throat business man and more like a hippie prophet.

“Well, that’s the Swami’s lookout. I hear the Swami is going to give a good talk. It’s all part of the same revolution, man. There’s a lot of young people who want a change from the establishment bullshit. They’re looking for something spiritual, here. I hope we can bring it. Look, as for the money, as long as the bands show up, you guys get 90% what’s left of the gate after we pay the bands and the Hell’s Angels for security.”

“Right,” said Schwartz, “Atmaram is handling the money.”

“Cool.”

“Listen, Chet, I need to check the Swami’s equipment.”

“Sure,” said Helms. “Go backstage and see Wrong-way Eddie. He knows all about it.”

“All right, Chet. Come on Hawk, we’re burning daylight.”

The two of them went downstairs and walked the length of the ball room to get backstage. The ball room was a long boxy rectangle with no chairs. At a concert it would hold maybe 2,000 people standing up, maybe more depending on how close they stood. It was big enough for a good old party, but not exactly a thrilling opening night. Word was that the Fillmore had better acoustics, but the Avalon had superior light shows. The strobe light would blow a lot of people’s minds.

The ceiling was a huge mandala with a chandelier in the center. They walked to the big stage at one end of the hall, where Janis had cooled down a bit. She wore a black miniskirt with high-heeled roman sandals. She wore rows of love-beads as a necklace and multicolored bangles as jewelry. Her ginger-colored hair was frazzled and stood on end as if she had just had electroshock therapy. The microphone was working now and blasted a screech of feedback.

She grinned at Hawk and Schwartz Prabhu. She winked playfully and said, “Howdy boys, Mama’s happy to see you” into the microphone, and shook her hips.

Schwartz Prabhu turned red as they walked back stage. Behind the curtain they found Wrong Way Eddie moving amps.

“You guys are with the Swami?”

“That’s right.”

“OK, we gotta move this throne. It’s pretty heavy, so take an end.”

There was a giant throne made of plywood and decorated with red velvet. It took three of them to move it onstage. Janis was taking a smoke break. Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir were plugging in their guitars as Pigpen was setting up his drum kit.

“Hare Krishna, gentleman,” said Weir as he tried a couple of riffs with a bottleneck slide. Jerry Garcia, or Captain Trips as he was known, was stoic. His head was ten thousand light years away. He nodded and Weir changed gears, playing a backup rhythm as Garcia sliced his way through a modal lead. Wrong Way said, “Over here. That’s good.” They set up the throne center stage, between the drum kit and the guitar amps. Wrong way mopped his head with a bandana. “Take a break.”

Hawk took a quick walk around the block. Outside the Ball Room, Hawk tried to catch his breath. This was the first moment he had really been alone since he had arrived from 2017. He needed to catch his bearings.

He bought the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle from a paper boy on a street corner and went over the headlines. He walked over to Lafayette Park and sat on a bench.

He saw the date on the newspaper: January 29, 1967. So it was true. He wasn’t dreaming. He looked at the headlines. The Apollo I spacecraft had exploded and was destroyed by fire in Cape Canaveral, killing all three of the American astronauts on board. Killed in the blaze were Command Pilot Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom, Senior Pilot Edward H. White II, and Pilot Roger B. Chaffee. At 6:31 in the evening, the three men were inside the capsule of the Saturn rocket, in simulation of the planned moon launch. A spark from a short-circuited wire ignited a flash fire in the pressurized cabin of pure oxygen.

Hawk looked around. Four teenage girls were walking toward Van Ness, wearing a motley of strange hippie garments: A dark woman wore a Mexican poncho with a sari and motorcycle boots, the blond had an African caftan with a Russian bearskin hat and love beads. A black man walked by wearing a sailor’s hat and a dashiki. A throng of kids sat smoking marijuana making their own kind of music with bongos and a guitar. They were singing, “Ballad of a Thin Man” by Bob Dylan: “..And you know something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is... Do you, Mister Jones?”

Hawk turned the page. In Vietnam Operation Cedar Falls was a massive search and destroy operation to pacify a stronghold of the Viet Cong, called "Iron Triangle", close to Saigon. It was either a great victory for democracy or the Eve of Destruction.  The sun was going down.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Back at the Ball Room, Hawk saw the denizens of San Francisco lining up for tickets to the Mantra Rock.

Where the mob crowded at the entrance were burly men, long hair in pony tails, rugged beards and tattooes, wearing cut-off leather vests and nazi helmets. Parked at their side were Harley Davidson choppers. They were the Hell’s Angels, stoned on acid and providing security for the Grateful Dead as agreed with the Diggers, the anarchist-Hippie Salvation Army. The Angels carried police night-sticks and looked like they meant business. Seeing Hawk, they recognized him from the Digger’s “Free” Store and let him in. “You’re with the Krishna’s right? Tell the Swami we said hello, he said with a menacing grin.”

Hawk jostled his way through the gathering audience in the ball room and made it back stage. Krishna John was there with Emmett and Schwartz Prabhu. Bhakta Congo was rehearsing a bit of drum magic with Jay Ram. The members of a rock group were fiddling with a bottleneck slide riff and a bit of rhythm. And in the back of the green room drinking red wine were a couple of newcomers chatting with Allen Ginsberg.

“Ah, Hawk,” said Ginsberg. “You made it. This is Hawk. We spent a lovely night together over at the Radha-Krishna temple, didn’t we Hawk. I was just telling these gentlemen some of the stories you told me about the 21st century. Hawk is a time-traveller, isn’t that right?”

Hawk couldn’t remember much about last night’s conversations besides Ginsberg’s rambling. Had he really told him about the 21st Century?

A kindly British gentleman with a wineglass and a twinkle in his eye lifted his head and said, “Time travel?”

Hawk recognized him from an Eastern Studies survey course he had taken at Stanford: It was Alan Watts. The man next to him was the Harvard Psychologist and LSD preacher, Timothy Leary. They had come to see Allen Ginsberg in action. Ginsberg was to kick off the mantra rock event with a short poem and a harmonium mantra chant.

Hawk began, “Well...”

He was interrupted by Dr. Leary. “What this young man is trying to say is that time transcends space and always has. Time is not bound by space; it has to do with consciousness which goes beyond. The key to time travel is pharmacological. Never forget that. Chemicals are the key to consciousness and consciousness controls time. Never refuse an opportunity to travel in time, I always say.”

“But Tim,” said Zen-master Watts. “Isn’t time really just a mental construct that keeps us from losing our egos? After all, as long as we’re addicted to time, we’re stuck in space. The wheel of time is really the wheel of birth and death, isn’t it? But then, the non-linear reality of time is more widely understood outside western culture, don’t you think? I wonder what the Swami would say. Allen?” Watts tipped his wineglass back. Leary leered.

As his coal-black beard waggled, Ginsberg’s eyes rolled in his head: “Why don’t we listen to Hawk? Tell us your story, man. Give us a Kerouackian rhapsadoodle blues on relativistic mobility through the warped waves of temporal sanity. Where did it start?”

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“Well, I think it started at the Paradise Hotel.”