Later Mark found the line was a direct steal from the old man with the beard himself. Right now it made him want to melt through the tired pavement outside the auditorium. It didn't help that Sunflower was standing there beaming at the two of them as if they'd just won her a prize.
Fortunately Peter got into a screaming argument with the cops who frisked them for booze at the door, diverting his wrath from Mark. Guiltily, Mark hoped the cops would slam Peter over his blond head with a nightstick and haul him off to the slammer.
But Destiny was concluding its most tumultuous tour ever. Tom Douglas, whose consumption of booze and mindaltering chemicals was as legendary as his ace powers, had been getting mean drunk before every show. The Lizard King was on a rampage; last week's New Haven concert had culminated in a riot that trashed Yale's Old Campus and half the town. In their own clumsy way the cops were trying to avoid confrontation tonight. Frisking wasn't the shrewdest way to go about it, but the cops-and the Fillmore managementweren't eager to have the kids getting any wilder than Tom Douglas was going to make them anyway. So the audience got shaken down as they came in, but gingerly. Peter and his golden head went unbusted.
Mark's first Destiny concert was everything he might have imagined, raised to the tenth power. Douglas, characteristically, was two hours late onstage-equally characteristically, so fucked up he could barely stay standing, much less keep from pitching off into the mob of adoring fans. But the three musicians who made up the rest of Destiny were among the tightest performers in rock. Their expertise covered a multitude of sins. And gradually, around the solid skeleton of their playing, Douglas's ramblings and inchoate gestures resolved into something magical. The music was a blast of acid, dissolving Mark's lucite prison around him, until it reached his skin, and stung.
At the end of the set the lights went out like the shutting of a great door. Somewhere a drum began a slow, thick beating. From darkness broke a tormented guitar wail. A single blue spot spiked down to illuminate Douglas, alone with the mike in the center of the stage, his leather pants glittering like snakeskin. He began to sing, a soft low moan, increasing in urgency and volume, the intro to his masterpiece, "Serpent Time." His voice soared in a sudden shriek, and the lights and the band boomed suddenly about him like storm surf breaking against rocks, and they were launched on an odyssey to the furthest reaches of the night.
At last he took upon him the aspect of the Lizard King. A black aura beat from him like furnace heat and washed across the audience. Its effect was elusive, illusive, like some strange new drug: some onlookers it lifted to pinnacles of ecstasy, others it crammed down deep into hard-packed despair; some saw what they most desired, others stared straight down the gullet of Hell.
And in the center of that midnight radiance Tom Douglas seemed to grow larger than life, and now and again there flickered in place of his broad half-handsome features the head and flaring hood of a giant king cobra, black and menacing, darting left and right as he sang.
As the song climaxed in a howl of voice and organ and guitar, Mark found himself standing with tears streaming unabashed down his thin cheeks, one hand holding Sunflower's, the other a stranger's, and Peter sitting glumly on the floor with his face in his hands, mumbling about decadence.
The next day was the last of April. Nixon invaded Cambodia. Reaction rolled across the nation's campuses like napalm.
Mark found Sunflower across the Bay, listening to speeches in the midst of an angry crowd in Golden Gate Park. "I can't do it," he shouted over the oratory din. "I can't cross over-can't get outside myself."
"Oh, Mark!" Sunflower exclaimed with an angry, tearful shake of her head. "You're so selfish. So-so bourgeois." She whirled away and lost herself in the forest of chanting bodies. That was the last he saw of her for three days.
He searched for her, wandering the angry crowds, the thickets of placards denouncing Nixon and the war, through marijuana smoke that hung like scent around a honeysuckle hedge. His superstraight attire drew hostile looks; he shied away from a dozen potentially ugly encounters that first day alone, despairing ever more of his inability to become one with the pulsating mass of humanity around him.
The air was charged with revolution. He could feel it building like a static charge, could almost smell the ozone. He wasn't the only one.
He found her at an all-night vigil a few minutes before midnight of May third. She was crosslegged on a small patch of etiolated grass that had survived the onslaught of thousands of protesting feet, idly strumming a guitar as she listened to speeches shouted through a bullhorn. "Where have you been?" Mark asked, sinking to the ankles in mud left by a passing shower.
She just looked at him and shook her head. Frantic, he plopped himself down beside her with a small squelching splash. "Sunflower, where have you been? I've been looking all over for you."
She looked at him at last, shook her head sadly. "I've been with the people, Mark," she said. "Where I belong." Suddenly she leaned forward, caught him by the forearm with surprising strength. "It's where you belong too, Mark. It's just that you're so-so selfish. It's as if you're armored in it. And you have so much to offer-now, when we need all the help we can get, to fight the oppressors before it's too late. Break out, Mark. Free yourself."
Surprised, he saw a tear glimmering off in one corner of her eye. "I've been trying to," he said honestly. "I… I just can't seem to do it."
A breeze was blowing in off the sea, cool and slightly sticky, occasionally shouldering aside the words garbling out of the megaphone. Mark shivered. "Poor Mark. You're so uptight. Your parents, the schools, they've locked you into a straitjacket. You've got to break out." She moistened her lips. "I think I can help."
Eagerly he leaned forward. "How?"
"You need to tear down the walls, just like the song says. You need to open up your mind."
She fumbled for a moment in a pocket of her embroidered denim jacket, held out her closed hand, palm up. "Sunshine." She opened her hand. A nondescript white tablet rested on the palm. "Acid."
He stared at it. Here it was, the object of his long vicarious study: quest and quest's goal alike. The difficulty of obtaining LSD legally-and his deeply engrained reluctance to attempt to attain it on the black market, along with his instinctive fear that his first attempt to purchase any would land him in San Quentin-had helped him put off the day of reckoning. Acid had been offered him before in hip camaraderie; always he refused it, telling himself it was because you never could be sure what was in a street drug, secretly because he'd always been afraid to step beyond the multiplex door it presented. But now the world he yearned to join was surging about him like the sea, the woman he loved was offering him both challenge and temptation, and there it sat slowly melting in the rain.
He grabbed it from her, quickly and gingerly, as if suspecting it would burn his fingers. He poked it well down into a hip pocket of his black pipestem trousers, now so thoroughly imbued with mud they resembled an inept experiment in tie-dyeing. "I've got to think about it, Sunflower. I can't rush something like this." Not knowing what more to say or do, he started to untangle his lanky legs and stand.
She caught him by the arm again. "No. Stay here with me. If you go home now you'll flush it down the john." She drew him down beside her, closer than he'd ever actually been to her before, and he was suddenly acutely aware that her usual blond vanguard fighter was nowhere in evidence. "Stay here, among the people. Right beside me," she husked beside next to his ear. Her breath fluttered like an eyelash on his lobe. "See what you have to gain. You're special, Mark. You could do so much that really matters. Stay with me tonight."