guy sitting on the step of that restaurant so I figured if he liked vegetables heâd like that story. His head moves as slow as cold molasses when he looks up at me and I realize that this guy is on whacky tobaccy or acid or speed or all of the above, as the other fellow says. Then he says to me, âAre you really there, man?,â like Iâm something heâd see in the DTs or something. I told him my name was Danny Danny Dan and kept on going.â
The streets of San Francisco held less fascination for Tinker than for Blue. Singing on the streets wasnât nearly as much fun as singing for the hell of it or tinkering with a transmission. When he first started strumming Blueâs guitar the tips of his fingers hurt, and he saw that the calluses of his mechanicâs career, along with the tattoos of grease and oil embedded in them, had turned clean and tender. Except for the radio, his hands hadnât taken anything apart since the Volkswagen van in Colorado. The radio had been a three-dollar pawnshop bargain bought to liven up the evenings in their hotel room, which it did until Tinker became curious about the metropolis of tubes and transformers that resembled an amber city skyline. Reassembled, static monopolized the air waves. Their next radio was filled with transistors protected inside a case of seamless plastic, Blueâs idea.
For Blue, the days and weeks hadnât disappeared into a boring rhythm of street songs, hotdogs and the nightly racket in the corridor beyond their hotel room. Instead, he was slowly adapting to the foreign landscape, enjoying it, turning it into ballads on the pages of his scribbler. The biggest surprise the city held for him wasnât the strange food, one-armed fiddlers or weirdly arrayed hippies, but the revelation that Tinker was shy.
At first, Blue put Tinkerâs reluctance to join him on people-meeting escapades down to a lack of interest in the city. He even thought Tinker might be a little scared of it, hovering in the background when they did find themselves among other people. He could understand his friendâs behaviour among the unknown, the hippies for example, but Tinker acted the same in the hotel.
Occasionally, they joined some of the winos in one of the rooms, sharing a bottle or two. This was so familiar, the passing of the bottle, the men telling their stories, listening to Blueâs stories with actual comprehension, that it made him homesick. But even in this almost-like-home atmosphere, Tinker held back when he wasnât hiding behind a song. It took Blue a long time to put two and two together, to think the unthinkable, that off the island where he was born his buddy, the same guy who once wore only his long underwear and a necktie to a high school winter carnival dance, was shy. Blue had been planning his remedy for a week.
Walking along the street, he stopped to remind those people to whom he had already spoken, and recruited those he had missed. Gerry, the one-armed fiddler shrugged a âWhy not,â Patsy and Sasha, leather-crafting sandals and shoulder bags said, âSure,â and Daisy, the girl who had given them a bowl of soup their first day in the neighbourhood, was pleased with the prospect. The scheme was shaping up for Blue but just as he was about to activate the gathering of musicians and street artists, hustlers and speedsters, whom he had secreted around the corner, out of Tinkerâs sight, his instructions faltered and he fell silent, listening.
Blueâs ear isolated a faint new noise which had joined the collision of sound that was the soundtrack of San Francisco: rock music and traffic and screaming seagulls. After a moment spent assuring himself he wasnât being haunted by homesickness, he raised his hand to the gathered crowd to hold them there while he ran off to explore the origins of the unmistakable sound.
He followed the thread of sound, thinking all the time that he must be crazy,
The streets of San Francisco held less fascination for Tinker than for Blue. Singing on the streets wasnât nearly as much fun as singing for the hell of it or tinkering with a transmission. When he first started strumming Blueâs guitar the tips of his fingers hurt, and he saw that the calluses of his mechanicâs career, along with the tattoos of grease and oil embedded in them, had turned clean and tender. Except for the radio, his hands hadnât taken anything apart since the Volkswagen van in Colorado. The radio had been a three-dollar pawnshop bargain bought to liven up the evenings in their hotel room, which it did until Tinker became curious about the metropolis of tubes and transformers that resembled an amber city skyline. Reassembled, static monopolized the air waves. Their next radio was filled with transistors protected inside a case of seamless plastic, Blueâs idea.
For Blue, the days and weeks hadnât disappeared into a boring rhythm of street songs, hotdogs and the nightly racket in the corridor beyond their hotel room. Instead, he was slowly adapting to the foreign landscape, enjoying it, turning it into ballads on the pages of his scribbler. The biggest surprise the city held for him wasnât the strange food, one-armed fiddlers or weirdly arrayed hippies, but the revelation that Tinker was shy.
At first, Blue put Tinkerâs reluctance to join him on people-meeting escapades down to a lack of interest in the city. He even thought Tinker might be a little scared of it, hovering in the background when they did find themselves among other people. He could understand his friendâs behaviour among the unknown, the hippies for example, but Tinker acted the same in the hotel.
Occasionally, they joined some of the winos in one of the rooms, sharing a bottle or two. This was so familiar, the passing of the bottle, the men telling their stories, listening to Blueâs stories with actual comprehension, that it made him homesick. But even in this almost-like-home atmosphere, Tinker held back when he wasnât hiding behind a song. It took Blue a long time to put two and two together, to think the unthinkable, that off the island where he was born his buddy, the same guy who once wore only his long underwear and a necktie to a high school winter carnival dance, was shy. Blue had been planning his remedy for a week.
Walking along the street, he stopped to remind those people to whom he had already spoken, and recruited those he had missed. Gerry, the one-armed fiddler shrugged a âWhy not,â Patsy and Sasha, leather-crafting sandals and shoulder bags said, âSure,â and Daisy, the girl who had given them a bowl of soup their first day in the neighbourhood, was pleased with the prospect. The scheme was shaping up for Blue but just as he was about to activate the gathering of musicians and street artists, hustlers and speedsters, whom he had secreted around the corner, out of Tinkerâs sight, his instructions faltered and he fell silent, listening.
Blueâs ear isolated a faint new noise which had joined the collision of sound that was the soundtrack of San Francisco: rock music and traffic and screaming seagulls. After a moment spent assuring himself he wasnât being haunted by homesickness, he raised his hand to the gathered crowd to hold them there while he ran off to explore the origins of the unmistakable sound.
He followed the thread of sound, thinking all the time that he must be crazy,
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