Sailing down the freeway on the way home from Aunt Hallie''s, I scanned the marquee at the foot of the bridge. `Tonight,' the billboard announced, One Night Only, Country Joe McDonald AND The New Rider's.'

Glancing at the flashing neon clock perched  atop the old drive-in, I momentarily reflected on my exhausted finances, but no matter, this was an occasion I couldn't miss. In the early sixties, the same sign had marked the town's hottest drive-in. Now, thirty five years later, they've changed the lettering on the sign to read, "New Times." The sign and the clock now mark a bar, one of the few places in town where people can still hear bands play original music.  Long lost friends, drinking partners, ex husbands, their wives old and new, now gather to see the bands that pass through on their way to San Francisco or Seattle.

The New Rider's are good musicians, a good party band, but Country Joe is more. Just seeing his name on the sign reminded me of  the days when time inched its way to some marvelous other life, that was surely better than anything I could then imagine.  I was twenty in 1965, already with two small kids and a husband. One night as I was nursing my three month old daughter, the T.V. turned to the evening news, I'd watched idly as a priest robed in  saffron yellow sat in the middle of a wide street in Asia, poured gasoline on himself, and lit himself on fire. Holding my baby up to my shoulder, I'd patted her back and watched the graceful flames mesh with the orange of his robe and the smoke steam off him like fog from the morning river, and I didn't know why he was dying.

Later, when Country Joe had screamed, `What are we fighting for?' I couldn't answer and neither could many of us who would have our lives forever changed by the war. Country Joe had stood up for us long before we knew we were in danger, he'd worked hard, harangued us into thinking.  Even if we didn't agree about the war, he did get us thinking and talking.  After I started to understand about the war and realized the country had choices, I started wondering about my life, and realized that I had choices too. I didn't have to stay married to a boy who used his fists to control me.  I turned the car around in the Safeway parking lot and headed back over the bridge.

The place was not as full or as smoky as I'd expected.  I sat at the end of the black horseshoe bar, as close to the small stage as I could.  Some might hesitate to sit right under the speakers; I never have. Two women my age were already settled on bar stools, moving them practically onto the apron of the stage.  A big, stocky woman with greying, curly hair, smiled over at me.
        "I seen Country Joe in Golden Gate Park in sixty-eight," she said. "We got here right after work to get these seats."
    I hadn't remembered how casually people in Eugene dress. Both women were wearing jeans and sweatshirts. My filmy skirt and the long red scarf shielding my neck from the bite of October felt too dressy.

Sitting side by side on the bar stools watching the crowd gather and keeping our eye out for Joe, the bigger woman kept including me in their conversation.  To pass the time we talked about the town and work.  When I asked where she worked, we discovered we had both worked for the same man.  I had managed a bar, not unlike the New Times, for Charlie. For years we'd had an ongoing argument about his cheapness, and he finally fired me. She turned to her friend and grinned again.
    "Well, I've been working in the office at the mill--the one down behind the train yard."  She jerked her head toward the south end of town. "I been tryin' to get an exter twenty five cents an hour, oh, for I can't say how long.   Marty, here, she'll tell ya.  He just keeps saying I'll get it, but I never did.  And now I'm done!"
    The woman sitting on her other side peered around, and nodded her head gravely.
    " He's just ridiculous.  If I ever had any money, I wouldn't be so damned cheap.  I know I wouldn't."
    The big woman next to me leaned back so I could see her friend.  "I  just quit him. Didn't I Marty?" 
Marty again nodded.

    "We had a big fight cause I wanted to leave early, to get here in time."   She shrugged at Marty. "I told him I had to get here early  to get a good spot for the show.  Joe inspired me," she said.  "So, Charley, he say's, go ahead.  But if you leave before the last truck unoads, don't come back.  I says, I'm only askin'  for twenty minutes.  And he looks over and smiles and says, take all the time you need . . . just don't ask me to support you and your longhaired lefty weirdos."

"Did  you like Charley at all ?" I asked.

"Like him? That has nothing to do with anything. I worked for him."

"No, I mean, as a person, did you like him at all?" I was curious because he was one of those weirdly blended people, the most absolutely charming, witty, but stingy and mean rich man I'd ever known. He was a slum-lord who made his money by squeezing his employees and his renters.

"He was a prick. Just like every other man walking," she said. "Can't hide what you are."

"There are some good guys out there." I was thinking of Jim.

"Maybe for five minutes," she said and laughed, a gut echoing guffaw. "All they want to do is murder you. Look at the papers. No!" She nodded vigorously, grey curls bouncing over her forehead. "I got a friend whose husband beats the shit out of her, and I had two husbands who beat up on me. I got two divorces, and I'm never givin' another son of a bitch a try." She lifted her beer glass grinned, red cheeks glowing, and took a drink.

Country Joe McDonald was tuning his guitar as I turned to order a second Coke from the bartender. I knew it might happen someday, but it was not something I could have prepared for.  When I looked up,  Michael stood at the bar. He hovered over a chubby blond woman and a big faced man, who I thought must be her husband. The woman had the satiated, gleeful look of a heavy drinker, but the man appeared sober, watchful. I'd last seen Michael fourteen years before when I'd testified against him for burglarizing my Mother's  house. He was convicted and sent to prison. He'd called me a traitor to love. Then, I'd believed him.

Michael's son, Corby, stood close behind him. I'm sure it was Corby.  He must be just twenty-one by now. He has the same quiet, musing look he had as a child. Then, he reminded me of an other worldly being--elf or sprite. It was the way he looked at me, blond head tilted, glass green eyes resting on mine, an edge of smile. His father must have said "Be nice to the lady," but the boy's eyes were so secret I knew he was elsewhere. Maybe the same mysterious place his father inhabited and I could never quite go.

"Oh, God," I said to myself, to the big woman. "Oh, Lord, I almost ruined myself over that man." I ducked, trying to make myself invisible, taking cover beside her ample figure.

She frowned at me.

"Don't look," I said.

As she looked over, Michael grabbed the chubby blond and grinning like he had a prize, shambled her to the dance floor.

Country Joe struck a chord. "Give me an F," he cried.

In the middle of the empty floor Michael started a kind of clog, or reel, arms paddling air, knees pumping like he was possessed.

"What a loser," my barstool buddy said.

Her pronouncement was followed by Country Joe shouting in to the mic, "Give me a U."

Fifteen years ago, more full of idealism and hormones than common sense, I would have argued with her. Surely, either silently or verbally, I would have relegated her to the judgmental underbelly of slimy, establishment in-humanity.

I remember my Michael rationalizations--every one of them. He hadn't had the same opportunities; his mother was a hopeless drunk. He was too spiritual to care about things like personal hygiene or mere cosmetic effects. He was a free spirit, a poet, a far seeing wanderer of this earth who defended theft, upholding collective ownership of all property in the name of Christ, Marx and the Urantia book.

He had the same emancipated ideas about sex and relationships. At one time in our long association, after confronting him with evidence that he had been with another woman, he looked at me with those soft, big animal eyes and said: "What's a little sperm among friends?"

"Yes," I said now.  Watching him dance, loose jointed, mouth hanging in a slack, drunkard's smile, I thought what she said was true.  He had lost. And my rationalizations were right, or partly right. It was the alcohol, the drugs, the habits that he couldn't shake that had buried his glorious self. It was only his pain that he couldn't lose, and I felt it all as I watched him dance. Stomach levitating, I felt completely alone in the crowded room. I pictured myself talking to him. Surely, after wondering about him for all these years, I could finally talk to him.

The red bandana tied around his chopped, gold hair reminded me of the little talismans he'd carried, some around his neck, some in his pocket: a joint, dried wildflowers, pretty rocks from some country road or summer beach, the Bible in his back pocket. The bandana summoned images of a jean jacket patched with red, green and blue velvet he had worn like a dinner jacket, and of his warmth, his drunken kindnesses. Michael's untied sneakers, strings trailing the dance floor, reminded me of the night he broke out the windows on the ground floor of my house. I had left him and found someone new. The strings, like snakes of broken promises, were shed skin, reminders.

His head bobbed up and I thought he saw me, but if he did, he showed no sign. I'd been staring at him across the smoky club like he was a precious jewel or a dangerous reptile, and in his power to fascinate, he could have been either. Looking at his shapely legs, remembering their origin in buttocks round and golden, he was Bacchus, Pan, the gods of drunkenness, revelry and fun, of poetry, and life lived for the passions. He is all those things to me still. He is that, but I had learned to balance Dionysus with Apollo, and moved on.

Country Joe, with the crowd singing along at the top of their voices, finished "Fixin' To Die Rag," his most famous war protest song. He was tuning his guitar for the next number when a young woman, falling from a tight white dress, overflowing onto tiny spiked heels, pushed through the audience to the dance floor.

"Sing something happy," she pouted eyes glassy, pushing wild strands of long black hair off her hot face.

He looked at her over his guitar, considering her for a long moment, and began to laugh, big ha, ha's with his head thrown back.  Then, ducking his head over the guitar, he chided into the mic, "You don't even know who you came to hear." 

I laughed with the rest of the crowd but felt uncomfortable. Maybe by now Joe should have moved on to happier songs, but the girl didn't know what we knew, that Joe was still fighting a battle. At the outbreak of the war, he and some others had called it the battle against the spirit of un-love.  Like his running buddy Kesey says, "the thing about Joe is that he won't quit singing until the balance shifts, and the monster is pushed back."

I remember Kesey sitting around a fire one night sometime after Nixon, saying, "once when we were younger, we thought we could defeat the monster completely but we've found that the monster will never leave us, and we wouldn't want to get rid of him any more than we'd want to get rid of the snake."  Kesey could have been charming snakes.  We sat coiled in the dirt sipping wine out of paper cups, listening. "The snake is part of it too. But even though the snake is necessary, we have to keep him in balance. We can't get crazy with anger and go out and kill him off, drive a stick through his head, because that crazy anger will kill us like we'd kill the snake."

I don't remember what party, or what fair, don't remember where we were that night,  but we were all there together.  We were family, and we cared to somehow make things different.  Joe is a warrior with built in radar for detecting the spirit of un-love and then sounding off about it. That's what we liked about Joe, and the girl on the dance floor didn't understand.

After the laughter and snorts from the crowd, and the girl glowering off the dance floor, the big woman leaned toward me. You're doing pretty good," she said. "You weren't over him before." She nodded at Michael who now leaned against a post near the dance floor. He was concentrating hard, head bent forward, straight gold hair falling in his eyes, rolling a cigarette while people milled around him. "Now you can be over it".

I don't remember replying. I didn't expect to hear anything from her I didn't already know. And, she was right, but she didn't go far enough. There was nothing in being "over it." No one gets over it. Life scars and shapes you along the lines of your strongest reservations. And the snake sheds his skin and reappears.

Later, Michael wandered through the warm yellow smoke to the exit. I waited a beat, another, then followed him from the bar. When I got to the dark parking lot, he was gone. Beyond the lot, steam rose from the cannery across the river into the Oregon October night. The blue neon clock above the old drive-in flickered on and off.

I stood holding my red scarf close round my neck, looking past the smoking lights to the black sky filled with shining stars. I looked up at the whole big sky, and I wished on it for Charlie--awake this day, friend, find something other than money to love, someone to love you back. Then, half in relief that he'd gone, and half in longing that he'd reapear, I wished for Michael to have what he wanted. He had wanted to be a warrior on the side of love, he even thought he was. He knew all about the battle but wasn't the warrior he wished to be because he had never loved himself.  I'd not understood this until tonight.

Behind me The New Times pulsed with bright lights and loud music. The lights from the bar haloed a black van at the side of the building, shone like a spotlight on the big white letters spelling Country Joe.  Just then the side door of the place banged open and the girl in the white dress stumbled out, followed by a man.

She slumped against the side of the building, crying, covering her eyes with shaking hands. He leaned over her, sheltering and comforting, her. Then, sensing someone watching, he looked up and saw me standing there. As his eyes met mine they shone as if he might cry too, and then he enfolded her in his arms and they turned away and walked off across the parking lot together.

I stared after them wondering, will love alone--fed by tears, by that old skin we shed, maintained by waters of this turned, new season, worked by worms of humility and forgiveness--will love alone redeem us?
 
Judith Clayton Van, 1997