Helen

 The first thing I noticed at Golden Gate Park that Solstice, 1967, were the smells. In Georgia, unwashed flesh was unhappy, miserable even, the stench of hog farms, dirt farms, lye – here, the unwashed flesh held patchouli and sage, wood fire smoke, clove and dope sweetness. This unwashed flesh clawed itself a space – see me – dance, laugh, sweat, breathe – see me. The flesh in Georgia hid behind woodsheds, dissolved into groves of trees, sank, unnoticed, into church cemeteries lined with stone lambs.

Frank held my elbow – the two of us side by side at the top of the first hill at the end of Haight Street. Everywhere was color. From the bright oranges and reds of Guatamalan fabrics to the daffodils and violets and untouchable moss of ancient trees. We stood, side by side, at the top of the first hill, unsure of how to enter it. Underneath the smells of skin and smoke were the sharp notes of pepper and curry, BBQ and fish. I held my fiddle case with my left hand. My right hand was open, grasping air. A chubby girl with a white patch of zinc sunblock on her nose ran in front of us, trailing a pair of lavender balloons.

“She’s going to get hurt, wearing no shoes like that,” said Frank.

I was startled, surprised he saw her feet at all. I had been so captured by the lightness of lavender.

 “We can go on home if you want,” he said.

 I looked at the ground, his workboots heavy, solid, planted. Home, where? Back to the Tenderloin and our 3rd floor walkup with the toilet in the kitchen? Back to Georgia where maybe I’d notice a different set of smells, now that I’d been away? Or home – that place inside a woman where it seems she’s born knowing how to get to but forgets just as soon as she comes in contact with another human. Home to our bedroom, which barely hugged our double bed, which seemed at first like sky diving, but has begun to seem a crowded lifeboat.

“Let’s stay awhile,” I said, unable to imagine ever leaving this kaleidoscope. I eased my elbow away from his open fist and bent down to unbuckle the straps on my beige, sensible, low-heeled sandals. The grass was wet, even though it was long past dawn.

 “You’ll cut your feet,” he said.

“Perhaps,”

The next thing I noticed were the dogs – Labradors and poodles, Dobermans and Dalmations, German Shepherds and beagles. Dogs chasing lavender balloons and dogs dancing on two hind legs. I saw boys with no legs back from Vietnam, boys with eyes a wet jungle. The Grateful Dead were here today, but I had come for Janis. She’d been playing the Fillmore lately, and in her photographs her eyes were as wild as the legless boys’.

I understood why Frank didn’t want to be here. His risk-taking was controlled, measured in predictable outcomes: “Let’s try the new Thai place on Jones,” and “Let’s take the N train to the end and watch the sunset over the ocean.” His basic sweetness coated in a sour safety. Frank’s wildness had left before we met – a day he spoke about once – a boat, a big fish, and his little brother, Benjamin. He rowed back, sopping wet, with the big fish only and a story of a terrible accident and a rock. They had to drain the lake to find his body, clasped at the ankle by the fingers of marsh grass. That story left Frank fearful – always waiting for death to jump down from the trees. So cautious he can’t see that death has already won.

 I heard Janis on the radio the first time. I heard her shriek from the wombs of all of us – and I wept in an unexpected gasp in the kitchen of our 3rd floor walkup. I gasped as if I could swallow that voice – take it back inside me and find a way to explode it out my own throat – a way to shower myself with the sparks that flung themselves, unchecked, from her belly.

 “You’ll cut your feet on glass,” Frank said, looking squarely forward.

“Yes,” and I slid my shoes back on, not thinking until much much later how nice it would have been that Saturday summer Solstice – to bleed.

I had put those sensible sandals back on when I first saw her. I had a sensible man beside me who was content with the same breakfast every day – two hardboiled eggs – at the same kitchen table, coffee (one cup only, no sugar) from the same tan mug every day. This sensible man looked at her and saw a loud, drunk woman – a woman who could have benfitted from the same meal every day, clean laundry folded and put away in drawers, a sensible four-door car (tan) to take her safely to the grocery store and back. He looked at her and saw what happens when a woman is left alone to go wild.

 I looked at her and saw the goddess – I saw the tug between creation and destruction, the power of a talent too fierce to be contained in flesh. I saw the alcohol. I saw the drugs, but I knew what Frank could never know – she was painfully lonely in that way only a woman could know – painfully lonely because she knew no man could ever give her what singing gave her – that no man was strong enough to stand beside her and let her sing. My fiddle case was heavy – a burden suddenly, like my shoes, on this summer day when all the world seemed to be dancing, feet and chests bare to the sun, convinced a revolution was on its way.

“Let me carry that for you,” said Frank, taking the fiddle case from me. “That’s too heavy for you here in the hot sun.” He surveyed the crowd – in front of us a black man and white woman dancing (barefoot), eyes rooted into each other’s – 2000 miles away civil rights workers were still “disappearing”, Strom Thurman ran for Senate as a member of the Klan, Elvis was in Germany, MLK about to die for, in some ways, the right of this man and this woman to dance together, half naked in the sun – a part of all the world.

“Someone might bump into you and steal it,” he said. His hand was cold as it closed over mine. I released the handle of the fiddle case into his. He smiled slightly, glad to be of service in some way, glad to be relieving me of some hardship – How could I hate such sweetness, such emptiness? I never did hate him, not really. He thought I did, I’m sure. I pitied him. Maybe that’s worse. He wanted safety, stability – every woman’s dream. He wanted to love someone. It wasn’t his fault I was too dangerous. It wasn’t his fault I looked at Janis Joplin for the first time and saw in the same moment what I could be and what I would never be. It wasn’t his fault that moment broke me. But it wasn’t my fault either. When she sang I felt my own unvoiced scream inside perk up. I felt it wiggle its way up and demand release. Janis woke my sleeping dragon.  She made noises I knew were inside me. How she got there on demand every night was the amazing part. She was turned inside out – all that stuff we’re supposed to keep locked up inside was right there on the surface – not just for her but for everyone to see – for everyone to judge. She was a wound that never had a chance to scab over – she picked it open every night and blew air on it and we all got to watch while she screamed.

The smell of hash was overpowering – of perspiration, pepper, and patchouli – and I began to dance in spite of my sensible sandals. I wanted to be wearing one of those long flowing cotton skirts and I wanted a flower in my hair. I so wanted a flower in my hair – a yellow one, the color of the sun that day – not orange, the color of war dropped from the sky on straw villages, not red, the color of the fires in Detroit, not white, the color of the sheets in the South – a simple yellow – for the sun, for the hope I felt that day, even as Vietnamese children burned, there was hope that if we shouted loud enough someone would hear.

I wasn’t part of that we. I stood at the edge of Golden Gate park, the youth I should have been experiencing dancing in front of me, this heartbeat of a baby inside me I didn’t want, this man beside me I didn’t need, the roadmap of my life charted before I knew the pen was in my hand.