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Hey Joe - The Jimi Hendrix Experience / A Riff
by Perry Glasser
© 2006 Portland Review Literary Journal

In Sullivan County, New York, the languid turns of Route 17 lie gently on the lush Catskill hills, but in our headlamps on this moonless August night, at 135 mph the turns come up so fast that the road appears no more than an unraveling ribbon of gnarled concrete. It’s 1968, and sanity is in short supply. Newark and Detroit burned a summer ago. Flag-draped black vinyl body bags stack like cordwood on landing docks and in airplane hangars, so many American dead in the Tet offensive that in February no less a figure than Walter Cronkite pronounces the war in Vietnam unwinnable. Martin Luther King is shot dead in April, Parisian students riot in May, Robert Kennedy is shot dead in June, and the Democratic National Convention will in a week fill the streets of Chicago with teargas, homicidal cops and the blood of hippies. We race on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, but some fool has stolen the guardrails.

I figure that the pine tree that will end my life waits hidden in the wall of darkness beyond the bug-spattered windshield of Mike’s MGB Coupe, a car dubbed Eloise. We’ll swerve to avoid a deer or some such foolishness, and we’ll die in the night. “Fuck deer,” Mike says, “Eloise slides right under any fucking deer.”

Eloise skids around the worst of the turns, so low to the ground Mike boats he can drag his knuckles if he dares to hang an arm out the window. More casual than Junior Johnson hisself running ‘shine through the North Carolina pinewoods, Mike steers with his left wrist while he shifts with his right hand. Mike’s contraband of choice is the joint he smokes, which he claims helps focus his attention. He also claims that Eloise has a soul and responds to the road better when Hendrix is on the 8-track. With two six-inch speakers cranked to max mounted in the hardtop roof just behind our ears, the top line of “Hey Joe” is an icicle spiked through my ear; the bass line and drums rumble just south of my belly. The voices mixed below the melody are a ghostly choir sweetly singing about jealousy, betrayal, murder, and flight. On this same recording, we’ve got “Manic Depression,” “Purple Haze,” and “Foxy Lady.” An epoch has passed in the four years since the Fab Four in sharply creased suits and thin ties charmed us with, “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” America has descended from Love to twitching psychosis.

Eloise’s sealed windows trap smoke and sound. The car balks and wobbles at these speeds if we dare crack a window and break the aerodynamic design, a green artillery shell on chrome-spoke wheels. The dope gives me only a light contact high; my nose is more numbed by the aroma emanating from the grease-stained brown paper bag in my grasp that contains two still hot-to-the-touch roast pork and garlic-bread sandwiches, each twelve inches long and wrapped in twisted aluminum foil. The sandwiches reek like sewage, but when God Himself wants comfort food, He appears at Jerry and Lil’s in Parksville , New York , and orders one to go, double-stuffed.

No such unkosher delicacy is to be found at the Jewish summer camp where we are counselors, so this food-run to score a late night nosh is worth any and all risk, down to and including some ambitious state trooper discovering the half-kilo stash wedged behind Eloise’s spare tire. If we were in Texas, in 1968 that’s enough weight to get us 30 years of hard time, but in more enlightened New York Mike might get 20 and me a mere five. “Not to worry,” Mike reassures me. “The fucker will have to catch us first.” His hands abandon the quivering steering wheel to pass the joint from left to right to me, but I turn down his third offer of a hit. The odometer spins like a slot machine. When he downshifts for the unpaved one-lane rutted road that climbs the mountainside to camp, Eloise’s Michelins spit clods of dirt that clatter like rounds from an automatic weapon in the wheel well. Mike roars over Hendrix, “Three miles! Five minutes! We’re a lock! We’re golden!”

In the crawlspace behind Eloise’s two leather bucket seats, as if she were in her own warm bed, sleeps my girlfriend, Helena. Helena looks like a geometry problem that has been folded up and put away to be solved at some future date. She is not hung over. She is not drunk. Except for a mild buzz no greater than mine, she’s far from stoned. It has just been a long day beneath the sun, she is tired, and she is not one to squander a chance to cop a few Z’s.

Eloise growls, the car lurches forward, and I realize that if I live I will have to marry her. In a world gone mad, what are the chances I will find another girl for whom garlic, Hendrix, speed, a felony drug rap and imminent death pose no obstacle to taking a nap?

Two years earlier, for my second semester of required French, I enroll again in Professor Spagnoli’s class. No one fails Spagnoli’s class. It’s a political thing. A young man who flunks out of college loses his student status, and that ends his draft deferment. Spangnoli is a frail old man with bright blue eyes who does not care to condemn young men to violent death in jungle mud because they do not grasp the niceties of the subjunctive imparfait for the second conjugation verb, savoir. My first college semester, my test average is a dismal 57. French, Pig Latin, and Urdu are all the same to me, but Spagnoli awards me a D, striking his blow against the empire, no small gesture at a time when sanctimonious professors utter pieties about the integrity of the academic community. Shall we allow politics be allowed to corrupt scholastic standards? Fie on it! Better to send youth into free-fire zones! Understand, Spagnoli’s academic generosity takes more courage than it may seem. The professor grimaces when he sees me reappear for a new, more advanced semester, but he greets me with an impish, conspiratorial smile.

A thin girl comes into the room, slightly tardy. On that murky, gray January day in Brooklyn , snow fine as ash falls in fitful bursts from clouds the color of an old bruise. Her enormous, impenetrably dark wraparound sunglasses cover whatever part of her face remains unhidden by her full hair, some of which is gathered by a leather clip and cascades to the small of her back. She wears a brown and black hound’s tooth peacoat, the collar raised, her hands closed to fists deep in the chest-high pockets. She passes where I sit in my habitual seat near a classroom’s rear door, the fastest getaway at dismissal. While Spagnoli rattles on about the dedication we will need to explore the pleasures and challenges of Racine and Moliere, knowing she must be stoned, I whisper to her, “Wow, sure is bright out. I wish I wore my shades.”

She bends forward, pushes some hair aside, and whispers, “Fuck you, prick,” before she heads for a desk at the far side of the room.

I am in Brooklyn College ’s Scholar’s Program, which except for a few required courses like French means I am engaged in a lot of independent study under the loose supervision of a few indulgent professors. I hang out in an exclusive lounge where someone gifted at the piano is always playing Moonlight Sonata. The Program proves socially isolating, so when during a fall membership drive at an interview I correctly differentiate between a dildo and a phallic symbol, I am invited to join Kingsley House, a social club. Think fraternity with no ritual or national organization. We field intramural teams and we have parties. In a smoky room filled with loud music and sweating undergraduates, I meet for the second time the skinny girl in shades who will become my wife for twelve years and bear my only child.

“You’re the asshole from Spagnoli’s class,” she says.

“D minus,” I say.

Her, too.

Her rat-brown Rambler takes us to a diner where we order French toast, smoke cigarettes and drink coffee. It’s a fine place; Formica counters, aluminum walls, and a few bench-seat booths. A quarter buys three tunes off the chrome jukebox. We slouch low, our feet propped up on the seat opposite. Helena ’s finger traces her initials through the condensation on the window glass. I pick at the duct tape that seals a wound in the red leatherette near my hip. The diner is open all night. The coffee refills are free and the waitress is amenable. We linger, and when my cigarettes are finished, we smoke Helena ’s, and when those are finished, rather than invest in separate packs, we compromise on a fresh pack of Parliaments, weaker than my Marlboros, stronger than her Kents . Parliaments become our brand.

Mostly we talk writers. This is a time in my life when I cannot formulate a sentence without the word fuck, but Helena proves to be as foul-mouthed as I am. It’s not so much a ballsy pose as the diction of Brooklyn . She likes e.e. cummings, a poet who is fucking amazing, but her recent discovery is A Coney-Island of the Mind, poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a book she picked up because of the title. Her copy of Howl is also used, bought for $.35 off a rack at a 4 th Avenue book store. I’ve read the fucking poem. Up until this moment, I have never known anyone other than myself who might take the subway to wander among used bookstores in Lower Manhattan . We talk about the Strand , a place that in basements and sub-basements holds a labyrinth of floor-to-ceiling dusty bookracks, rickety ladders, and sales clerks who know everything worth knowing about everything ever written by anyone at any time in any place in any language. I confess that I am in a smart-kids special program. This doesn’t put her off. She’s interested. So I tell her I’ve just read something called Growing Up Absurd by Paul Goodman, a book I’ve come to after Alan Watts’ Psychotherapy, East and West, which came after Siddharta and Steppenwolf. My high school English teachers cultivated my habit: good books suggest more good books, and you follow the trail. I mention I want to be a writer. Instead of laughing, she tells me her favorite poem by Ferlinghetti. She says, “Constantly risking absurdity and death…something, something, something.” It’s about how poets take risks like high wirewalkers. Writers. Fuck, yeah, writers are okay.

As I compose this forty years later, the memory startles me. We were semi-articulate kids who unashamedly talked about ideas; we read serious books, even poetry, for pleasure. The stuff mattered. Helena was a skinny kid with horn-rimmed glasses; I needed to shave every three days or so, my upper lip not at all. We cared.

So we make a date. Helena will show me the whole poem. It turns out the poem defines my life for a long while. Still.

Good writing came with hard effort. I liked that. Writing attracted girls. I liked that, too. Writing is narcissistic—the writer’s first leap is to believe he has something to say other people need to hear. Yeah, well, here I am. Writing explained the world by narrative, and writing allowed my compulsive imagination to seek a world more sensible and more just than the world I knew.

Writers. Fuck, yeah, writers are okay.

Months later, we have sex. It is my first time. It is not hers, so to even the score and make myself feel better about myself I tell her she is not my first, either. The lie leeches toxins into my psyche; I never correct it. When things start out wrong, there is no fixing them, not without discovering a kind of courage forever beyond my reach.

So when at 21 we marry for several complicated reasons, only one of which may be a kind of love, I begin to wonder: What have I missed? My sense of loss weighs on me. I know; I know. My resentment is not a rational thing. We are long past rational. Helena has done nothing wrong; I can’t forgive her.

Noxious seeds take root in her mind, too. Helena ’s favorite song when we meet is Bob Dylan’s “Tom Thumb’s Blues” because, while listening to Dylan, she and a girlfriend smoke dope in her basement and exhale onto a gerbil. The stoner-rodent runs wildly on its wheel, reducing both girls to helpless giggles. Now, I never smoked dope with Helena or anyone else, for that matter. I will sit in a room or car with anyone who smokes weed, but no tokes over the line is just fine for me. But in divorce counseling fourteen years later, I learn my attitudes towards marijuana suffocate Helena ’s lifestyle. I over-control her life. I have denied her self-determination. When she ticks off my transgressions on the fingers of her hand, her sense of guilt for smoking marijuana is number three, close behind my having urged her to accept a job that doubled her salary in our second year of marriage, a defect second only to how well I have gotten along with her parents. I am not her ally. Her resentment is not a rational thing. We are long past rational. I’ve done nothing wrong; she cannot forgive me.

Whole lifetimes are available for regret and recrimination; let celebration have its season.

In Brooklyn , where boys pick up billiards more readily than Hoosiers dribble basketballs, Helena often watched me chalk up at Jackie Cannon’s, a dingy poolroom in a basement on Flatbush Avenue . In her worn jeans, smoking Parliaments, for long afternoons into early evening and late at night, she sat on one of those high wooden chairs. Cannon, a lean, middle-aged Irishman with freckles and a full head of red hair, bought her soft drinks and gave her quarters to feed the jukebox. Helena was partial to “Eight Miles High,” the Byrds song by Roger McGuinn and David Crosby. While I applied blue chalk delicate as lipstick to a cue and peered over green felt to line up a shot, she and Cannon talked politics or evaluated the day’s racing card.

Helena talked horses as well as anyone. Go find an 18-year old girl today who knows the difference between the track variant and speed rating. Helena knew the fixed weight carried by horses in the Kentucky Derby, the distance of every race in the Triple Crown, and that in 1948, the year of our birth, Citation won all three races under Eddie Arcaro, a jockey known as “Banana Nose.” We are not talking about some suburban kid in jodhpurs and a black helmet on an English saddle; the only horse Helena ever mounted was on a merry-go-round, and if she had not been strapped on, she’d have fallen off. She knew that animals not for eating, were for betting.

Helena was also a very serious card-player. She was proud of being “one of the guys.” This is before “feminism” was an ism. She adored being told she played Poker as well as a man. And she did. Better, mostly. She carried her bulky wallet in her frayed back pocket because with a menstrual cycle that was at best a sometimes thing, other than a hairbrush, why would she know the uses of a purse?

One night at Kingsley House, we yield to group insanity and deal Acey-Deucey. Most card games, you play against the other players, but in Acey-Deucey you play against the pot. Everyone puts up a dollar or two. The pack is shuffled, two cards are turned face up to each player in turn, and the player bets any amount up to the whole pot that the next card will numerically fall between the first two. Since a tie is a negative result, some hands are simply unwinnable. No one can draw a third card between a five and a six, for example, but a player still must toss in the minimum bet. So the game can go on forever; there’s a player who never gets tired ¾ the pot. If anyone decides to go home ¾ even if everybody decides to go home ¾ whose money is that piled in the middle of the table? How should it be divided? Better to play until someone takes it all.

That night the cards are treacherous. Someone might be dealt a king and a four, bet five dollars on what seemed an easy thing, and the next card comes up a three. It was uncanny. We are at first giddy with how the odds are beating us, but then we become grim. As we go through the pack, reshuffle, and go through it again, three separate times a player dealt the best possible hand, ace-deuce, calls “Pot,” a wager that will end the game, and three separate times the player loses to an ace or deuce. Ties are a loss. The odds against this are astronomical. Nevertheless, the pot doubles, redoubles, and doubles again. Lots of smoke. Lots of quiet. Nothing more than the snap of the cards, as the pot is cleaning us out.

Doug deals Helena a king and a three. She says, “Pot,” reflexively, doesn’t even think to count how much money that is to see if she can afford to lose. That was her way; Helena knows a gambler must take chances when they come. No gambler gambles for long with scared money.

Doug had gone to junior high with her, and he worked as the soda jerk in the candy store down the street from her house. He knows her family well enough to call Helena ’s mother “Minnie” and Minnie calls him “Dougie,” but Dougie does not snap the next card over. Instead, he says to Helena , “Where’s your money?”

Helena laughs. Doug has to be kidding. Here is a guy who makes her egg creams and forgets to take her money off the counter at his job. “I’ll write you an I.O.U.,” she says.

“Nothing doing,” Doug says. “Cash only.”

If he can make Helena bet less than the pot’s total, then he keeps his chance to recoup his own losses. All the other players agree. I keep my mouth shut. There’s not much I can say; if Helena ’s boyfriend objects, who will be surprised?

The moment is causing Helena some pain. Cold cash or bet less. They count on intimidating the girl in their midst. One-hundred and twelve dollars is at stake.

“All right,” she says. “I’ll get it.”

Her chair scrapes the floor as she pushes back from the table. She stands, tells me to watch the fucking cards, swings on her peacoat, and charges down the steps and out the door. We hear her car engine start. This is near two o’clock in the morning.

Twenty-five minutes later, she returns with six twenty -dollar bills in her fist. Her face is flushed, her hair the usual mess half over her eyes, her coat collar raised around her ears as a defense from the chilled night, the final stub of a cigarette between her thumb and index finger. Her dark eyes are hard as marbles, and from that I know she has gone to her father, awakened him, and he has loaned her the money.

Years spent proving to herself and the world that she is not “Daddy’s little girl,” and now having to ask Max for money, must have cost her, but, then again, Max would bankroll a good Poker hand for a total stranger faster than he would invest in next season’s fabric.

Helena never sits. She stubs her cigarette into an overflowing ashtray, slaps the bills down on the table and spits the word, “Pot.”

Nine of diamonds.

Helena doesn’t whoop or smile. Nothing. Like she expected it, is entitled, knew it all along, and is super-pissed with us for requiring her to demonstrate what so plainly was obvious. She is destined to win. She stuffs big fistfuls of crumpled money, mostly ones and fives, into her coat pockets. And then she leaves us to stare stupidly at each other.

Yeah, you could say Helena played cards.

Helena was no athlete. Not that she wasn’t game; she participated in all manner of co-ed sports when we were students, but toss a ball into the air, and if she does not trip over her own feet, Helena will run in tiny circles until the ball drops to the ground somewhere in her vicinity.

She yearns most for tennis. Maybe the good looks of the Aussie amateurs who dominate the game first attracted her, but she learns to appreciate serve, volley and the charge to net of the power game. We become regulars at the earliest rounds of the annual Forest Hills Tennis Tournament, today’s US Open. The humidity in Queens in early September is tropical, and since her thick hair traps heat, she wears a yellow terrycloth hat. Her sundress is a green and white pair of culottes, her thin legs brown with sun, her eyes hidden by the same thick sunglasses I first see her in. Helena buys a printed copy of the brackets and precisely pencils in winners and losers, noting the scores on days we cannot attend by checking results in TheNew York Times. She keeps these score sheets for years; she may still have them.

A spectator can walk on the grass between courts in those days, eating chilled strawberries and yogurt or sipping a flute of champagne, close enough to hear Emerson and Newcombe and Laver and Roche curse, spit, and swear at each other, the umpires and themselves. Tennis is not yet a cash machine requiring players to be walking billboards with product names on every garment or piece of equipment they use, but is a sport for pretty-boy athletes who wear white, for royalty who clap, for rich people who pay club dues, and for kids who attended summer camp, kids like me. “Tennis anyone?” is the punch line to jokes about affectation. Amateurs can win no prize money; the players travel with, and seem genuinely to like, each other. Their camaraderie charms us as much as the play. Women’s tennis is a mere sideshow. Those tall, handsome, tanned, lean men in tight whites with muscled legs and arms chat up Helena, a young woman they understandably mistake for the heiress to a fortune.

In a year when we run with the crowd of gay men we came to know through my sister’s decorator, one birthday I gift Helena with a day-long session at Elizabeth Arden, the tony beauty salon in mid-Manhattan. Helena stalls for weeks before she makes the appointment and finally spends six hours behind the bright red door on Fifth Avenue . We all agree to meet at La Champignon.

Every eye in the place follows her as she arrives. Our gay friends are mute, a rare condition. This is post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS New York City , and such silence in this chattering crowd is rare. The word “stunning” can be literal.

Helena is 24. Her hair is lustrous, deep, even and styled to sweep over one eye. Her brows are plucked perfectly, maybe the only day in her life she has more than one eyebrow. The makeup they’ve applied to so young a woman is slight ¾ blush, lipstick, a hint of mascara, blue-eyeliner. Her skin is radiant. She wears a high-collared cream-colored taffeta blouse, sleeves to ruffled cuffs; her embroidered burgundy leather gaucho vest matches her miniskirt. The antique cameo near her throat has never looked this good. Her nails glisten with a rich polish that matches the color on her lips. Her knee-high 3-inch-heel boots click smartly as she strides across the restaurant’s parquet oak floor. The ox-blood brown leather of her shoulder strap bag matches her boots. Helena is 5’ 6” and weighs less than 100 lbs., what weight she has is in her chest. With those high cheekbones and dark brown eyes, she looks to me as though she should be wrapped in sable and bundled into a sled pulled by a troika of matched black horses, a silver cloud of breath at her lips, wolves in pursuit.

“I guess I look pretty good,” she whispers to me and, while for the only time I can recall in our lives together, waits for the restaurant host to draw back her chair.

We order her a Black Russian, naturally. She opens her purse and withdraws a crimson box of Balkan Sobraines, cigarettes rolled in black paper with gold filter tips. Our friends gush. When I hold my butane lighter to light her cigarette, she steadies my wrist with her two hands and her hair falls slightly forward to frame her face, golden in the glow of the flame.

No one thought to bring a camera. We are that unprepared.

Some night in 1968 or 1969, Helena and I double date with Steve and Carol, a couple who stay married for 35 years before cancer takes Carol. If you are lucky, you have such friends, people who knew you when and care about you now. That night the four of us go to a movie, or for coffee, or who knows what. No one is married yet. We are kids.

Steve guides his father’s car through dark Brooklyn streets. Helena is first drop, before me. This is not geographically sensible, but it is a plan that will leave Steve and Carol alone in the vehicle once they dispose of me. I walk with Helena up the narrow concrete driveway to the side entrance of the two-family brick house where she lives with her parents and brother on the floor above a tenant I never see. We part. I walk back down the alley.

When I return to the car’s backseat, Carol and Steve are stifling giggles. “What?” I ask as Steve pulls away. It’s a cool night, but the windows are open. Night air flows over me.

“It’s nothing,” Steve says, and breaks up. Steve knows Helena since grade school.

Carol turns on the seat, rests her chin on the backrest and says to me, laughing, “What is it with you two? No one has ever seen you kiss.”

My smile is involuntary. At parties, couples will dance close, they will neck on the couch, and everyone has in a dim room seen a guy’s hand go under his girl’s blouse. But not Helena and me. No. Public displays of affection are not for us.

I smile at Carol, unsure why her question is funny to her.

“What do you mean?” I say.

“Oh, Steve and I had a bet. He won.” Carol laughs again and turns around on her seat.

“So what’s funny?” I ask, and they laugh again.

My last year at college, I share a hotel room with Mark and two others. It’s the three-day weekend when Brooklyn College‘s social organizations cart busloads of students to some bucolic hotel resort where we carouse and play volleyball. People get hurled into swimming pools. It’s Spring Break.

Only commuters attend Brooklyn College . As a commuter’s school, all-night bull sessions, the center of the educational experience for the tens of thousands of undergraduates who attend land grant or private schools across the country, just don’t happen for us. Student strikes close Harvard, Berkeley and Columbia . Bombs explode in Wisconsin . But at Brooklyn College , starting a revolution proves awkward; everyone at the sit-in must be home in time for dinner.

That night, we dress for cocktails, dinner, and a night of dancing, which means no more than pulling on fresh jeans and shrugging into dry shirts. That time, that place, that culture, none of us is more than 20, the drinking age is 18, and those of us not engaged are presumed to be dating the women we will marry. You will notice we do not room with our girlfriends or fiancés.

The four of us elbow for position at the mirror in a room damp with shower steam. We are having our bull session. It is very satisfactory, more so for being rare. Ashtrays and Old-Fashioned glasses that hold melting ice, butts, and the residue of bourbon, scotch or rye, are scattered on every horizontal surface. We are partial to brown liquors. Beer is for peasants or baseball games. The room smells of Aqua Velva and Old Spice.

A towel draped over his hips, Mark lies otherwise naked, supine on a white bedspread, his hands laced at his neck. We went to the same high school. We were boys together and are not quite yet men. I once sat in his mother’s kitchen and waited 45 minutes for Mark to eat a single hamburger. No bread. No ketchup. Everyone I knew would inhale the thing and be done, but Mark, who ran cross-country, was never known for speed but for patience. At the right moment, if he detected another runner who might falter, he made his move. His skin is fish-belly pale. He is slender. He studies hard. Years later, he will become the kind of attorney that never litigates. He says to me, “Glasser, Helena ’s great, but why would you marry a girl who is exactly the same as you?”

Someone emerges from the shower. It is my turn. By the time I finish, the conversation has moved on, so I am never required to answer Mark’s question until more than a decade later when I must stammer some explanation to my six-year-old daughter of how her parents’ lives drained of purpose, and all I can offer is some incoherent nonsense about how people sometimes need a change.

What might have I said to Mark? Helena and I were in a hurry. Courtship, marriage and parenthood needed to be done with. Close a chapter, start another. Move on. Helena seemed suitable to me, and I suppose I did to her, but we overlooked how some geometry problems have no solution: try to square a circle, go trisect an angle.