Eternally Unfinished

By James Antell

If the flashfire year of 1967 had been what we wanted it to be, then it would have been what it nearly was: a heliotropic year, a sunward-yearning year.

Yet we will never be done with that year until it becomes what it always wanted to be: a utopian year, an endless year.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 25, 2016
• ISBN: 9781514434932

James Antell

James Antell was born in 1947 in Minnesota and lived in Los Angeles and San Francisco variously from 1960 to 1978. He returned to Minnesota during 1978 to 1982 where he wrote poetry. Thereafter he has resided in California (Los Angeles, Joshua Tree, Redding).

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Copyright © 2016 by James Antell.

ISBN:      Softcover         978-1-5144-3494-9

                eBook              978-1-5144-3493-2

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Rev. date: 12/30/2015

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Contents

Preface—Eleventyleven Years

Chapter One Summer Of 1960—How The Past Got Started

Chapter Two Saturday Afternoon Pool Parties

Chapter Three To The Border Of The City In Springtime

Chapter Four Summer Of 1961—Run Run Run Run Runaway

Chapter Five Crossing The Threshold Of The Only House

Chapter Six Tea With Taki

Chapter Seven Summer Of 1962—Shooting The Curl

Chapter Eight Noe Valley Is Not Our Final Destination

Chapter Nine The Fuel That Feeds The Sun

Chapter Ten The Text For Today Is—Steppenwolf

Chapter Eleven The Text For Today Is—The Golden Notebook

Chapter Twelve Go Ask Alice

Chapter Thirteen The Earth Is The Center Of Our Universe

Chapter Fourteen Summer Of 1963—Sally Go Round The Roses

Chapter Fifteen Big Sur North—Esalen Institute

Chapter Sixteen Acid Rock

Chapter Seventeen The Text For Today Is—Blake’s Bee

Chapter Eighteen The Text For Today Is—Oracle #6: The Aquarian Age

Chapter Nineteen Please Please Me

Chapter Twenty The Age Of Aquarius Draws Nigh—But Slowly

Chapter Twenty-One Year 2660—And Don’t Look Back

Chapter Twenty-Two Freewheelin’

Chapter Twenty-Three Pizza With Taki

Chapter Twenty-Four Dining At The Geek Table

Chapter Twenty-Five Eternally Unfinished

Chapter Twenty-Six Sgt. Pepper Taught The Band To Play

Chapter Twenty-Seven Every Pan Needs A Handle

Chapter Twenty-Eight Summer Of 1964—Culture Clash

Chapter Twenty-Nine Your Map Is Your Territory

Chapter Thirty Dreaming The Same Dream

Chapter Thirty-One Who Is Your Antagonist?

Chapter Thirty-Two Summer Solstice

Chapter Thirty-Three Winter Solstice

About The Author

Well my heart’s in the Highlands

         at the break of day

Over the hills and

         far away

There’s a way to get there

         and I’ll figure it out somehow

But I’m already there in my mind

         And that’s good enough for now

                                             —Bob Dylan, 1997

Preface—Eleventyleven Years

Where I did not find what I needed, I had to artificially compel it to appear to me, quite rightly had to forge and to invent it—and when have poets ever done otherwise?—and why else would all the art in the world exist? And so at one time, when I needed to do so, I invented for myself the free spirits to whom this heavy-hearted, high-spirited book is dedicated. Such free spirits do not and did not exist—but at that time I needed their companionship, these brave companions and ghosts with whom one might chatter and laugh when one wants to chatter and laugh. That such free spirits could someday exist, that our earth will have these sorts of lively and audacious companions among the daughters of its tomorrows, physically and tangibly present and not only as phantoms and the shadow play of the lonely—I would be the very last person to doubt this. I see them appearing already, slowly, slowly; and am I perhaps doing something to hasten their coming if I describe in advance the destinies from which I see them arising, the paths on which I see them coming?

—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1886

Chapter One

SUMMER OF 1960—HOW THE PAST GOT STARTED

On Sunday morning the kids gathered in clumps and clusters on the extensive tree-shaded lawns of the corner church, mysteriously sifted by sex, age and style as if predestined. One group shone brightly in floral patterns—the surfer dudes led by fifteen year old Eric Idleman who hinted to his pals that he might be capable of falling in love with dazzling golden-haired Kristin Clover, never mind that she was only thirteen.

Kristin’s mom was divorced and did not attend church services with her daughter, who walked the half-mile every Sunday alone. This intrigued Eric who was ever on the hunt for anything new and different. A daughter with no father, a mother with no religion, a wrinkle in the fabric of sameness that covered everybody’s lives.

Kristin was flattered by Eric’s interest—she felt the jealous eyes of other girls upon her, all those who thought Eric fell into the so-fine category. But tradition demanded that for her own protection Kristin should pair herself up with another girl in order to hinder Eric lest he cull her too easily from the herd. This task was taken up by fourteen year old Pamela Peel, an imposing four-eyed dark-haired guardian with a fully active intellect who nevertheless, inevitably, glowed with a lesser light than her companion.

They were but two of many stars that formed a constellation known as Eligible Girlfriends in that imaginary sky often scanned by young Jameson Ashkettle who studiously charted their erratic meanderings but doubted that any of them would ever descend from their celestial distances to his humble patch of devil grass staked out in glum solitude on the edges of the church lawn. Nearer to earth, Jamie also carefully measured the much shorter distance that separated him from Eric and his cohort of older boys, boys who could be a bit tough and threatening, boys who weren’t keen on newcomers . Stated in simple units, that distance was a mere four hundred inches but it looked oh so much farther than that to Jamie.

Even so, drawn by the mythical golden glow atop Eric’s heroic frame, Jamie ventured a tentative step in that direction, and then another, and a third. He’d had enough of standing just far enough away from his uncles and aunts and siblings to be able to pretend that he was a solitary gunslinger. Now he wanted to test his mettle against the coolest gang in the territory.

Eric took note of young Ashkettle’s bold advance, as did his fellows. Their nonstop bluster fell silent. They turned as one to face him.

Jamie realized, too late, he had made a classic rookie mistake: he had put the sun in his eyes. The long shadows of sidekicks menaced his approach. Second-thinking the situation, anticipating snarling rebukes, hard shoves and shoulder-punching from the guardian crew, he began hastily to backpedal those few steps he had already taken. The gang relaxed, tense fingers no longer twitching for the trigger.

At that moment, Eric Idleman’s opportunistic mind reimagined the final scene of this little churchyard drama. Instantly, impulsively, he rewrote the ending into an entirely new raising of the curtain onto an entirely new play.

Stepping through his phalanx of boy-soldiers, Eric grabbed Jamie by the shoulder and turned him round, aiming him toward whence he had come. So this is goodbye, Jamie glumly thought, wondering at the same time what pop-song had delivered that melancholy phrase into his mind; coming up with nothing, he brightened at the notion that he had just invented a new lyric—pop music was never far from his thoughts. So this is goodbye, he repeated happily to himself, liking the rhythm of it, and feeling it to be the perfect chorus for his exit from the drama.

Eric however had no intention of letting the story end in the usual manner. The issue of how best to approach Kristin Clover had been uppermost in Eric’s mind for nearly a month. Jamie was of a like age with Kristin; he attended the same school and sat in the same classrooms—in that respect Jamie was infinitely superior to any of Eric’s current crew. The perfect solution to Eric’s problem was now lodged firmly in his grasp.

As the two of them receded from Eric’s bewildered gang, Jamie felt the intimate touch of Eric’s hand lightly now upon his shoulder, gentle yet purposeful as it guided him directly toward Kristin where she stood sheltered among her own kind.

Let’s go over and say hello why don’t we? Eric suggested.

When he had begun his daring journey less than a minute earlier, it had never occurred to Jamie that such an exalted destination would be its end. His legs began to tremble and his muscles to melt.

I hardly know Kristin, really, he said, although no sooner spoken than he realized that he did know her rather well as a classmate—they had borrowed each other’s homework answers, shared a desk in science lab, bumped into each other at the library, and waved to one another at church every Sunday. Somehow though, none of these contacts seemed intimate enough to ratify such a daring direct assault as Eric was leading him into.

Sensing the all too familiar fear of juvenile anxiety, Eric tightened his grip, keeping Jamie on pace to their destination. Just let me do the talking, he said. "You can start things off with Hey Kristin. You can do that, can’t you?"

Reassured by the thought that Eric would do the talking, Jamie strode more firmly toward the celestial circle of girls. Once again his mind drifted into a fog of pop culture and he momentarily imagined himself saying something cool. Hey Kristin. It had a bright upbeat slangy sound to it, far surpassing the more mundane hello. It sounded like a phrase from a foreign language—a rivederci, Kristin, he imagined himself suavely uttering in a confident baritone, pulling the phrase from some Italian postwar romantic comedy.

Sticking with English, he said, Hey Kristin. You know Eric, right?

Appreciating the improvisation, Eric took it from there.

Basking in the sunshine of Kristin’s welcoming smile, Jamie stood silently by, admiring in amaze the smooth words, the mellow surfer-dude lingo of Eric in pursuit of his prey.

Eric Idleman was eternally poised upon the levitating edge of every new wave rolling shoreward. He could sing, he could dance, he could ride a motorbike. When an unknown song came forth from the mysterious innards of his Japanese portable radio, he could tell you instantly whether to buy the 45 or whether you’d be wasting your dimes on a platter no one would want to hear. On weekends Eric didn’t go to the beach to laze around on a colorful oversize towel like everybody else, he actually got up on a surfboard—and he didn’t fall down unless he wanted to. His hair was more perfectly blond than the other surfers and his tan was a deeper shade of bronze. His physique was perfecto and his motor skills unsurpassable.

But it wasn’t enough for Eric to be cooler than everybody else—he was also smart, smart enough to hold his own against Kristin’s vigilant guardian Pamela Peel who was known to be a deep thinker and a getter of straight A’s. During that epic first contact with Kristin, Eric was clever enough to recognize that Jameson Ashkettle and Pamela Peel had something in common besides their nearsightedness—he wove them too into the web he conjured around Kristin. At Eric’s prompting, Jamie found himself able to converse easily with Pam about a book he was currently reading, Anna Karenina, a massive tome with which Jamie struggled mightily, reading it only because it was his mother’s favorite novel and he wanted to gain some perspective on this parental personage to see whether he was in fact destined to be her child or whether he could instead have been anybody’s child. He had long since given up on acquiring any understanding of his distant father who seemed no more reachable than one of the heads at Mount Rushmore. His father had once handed him a copy of Billy Budd—was he trying to tell Jamie that parentage is all duty and has nothing to do with engagement and love? Apparently so. His mother’s warmth and cheer more than compensated for an icy father, yet Jamie still didn’t feel as though Anna Karenina brought him any nearer to that central mystery of his true elective origins.

He would almost have been willing to blurt out these half-formed thoughts to Pamela, so close did he suddenly feel to her, not merely physically which was thrilling enough, but also inwardly. Unfortunately she had scant appreciation for his chosen text. I suppose the scene with the burnt-out candle was nicely managed, she grudgingly conceded. But I think the days of women throwing themselves under trains are long over.

Thanks for giving away the ending, Peel, Eric said.

Tolstoy is not about endings, Idleman, she countered.

Kristin had read the same book—oddly enough it was also her mother’s favorite, or one of many, Kristin’s mom being a voracious and indiscriminate reader who usually preferred the sorts of stories where endings are all-important because they reveal who done it. Kristin sprang to the defense of Tolstoy but quickly ran out of topics.

Seeing his opening, Eric deftly maneuvered not only the conversation (Did Anna have to die because she failed to find the right man?) but the footsteps of the conversants until they found themselves detached from the crowd, a foursome. It had all started with Hey Kristin and now here they were talking literature together.

That night alone in his room Jamie tried to recreate the great event in all its particulars but couldn’t quite see how Eric had accomplished so much from such a small beginning. Accomplish he had, however—next Sunday Eric and Kristin were going steady.

Going steady was a term familiar to everyone yet ill-defined—it was a state that fell somewhere between dating and true love. It was a matter of who you talked to and hung out with and walked around with. Fair-haired Eric Idleman walked around with golden-haired Kristin Clover all that long summer of 1960, usually in the company of Jamie and Pam. The latter pair were the dark-haired ones, the ones who turned nobody’s head, the ones who didn’t stand out in mixed company. Yet they both got top grades in school and that was enough to draw them together.

Jamie liked Pam. He wasn’t going steady with her—it was not within the realm of social possibility that they could be going steady because she was a year older, a head taller, and in the next grade. But he liked her, and he sensed that she liked him.

At summer’s end the four of them, Eric and Kristin, Jamie and Pam, a clique of their own, sat on the church lawn beneath a drooping willow, listening to Eric’s portable radio. When a certain song was played, a Number One song that summer, Eric pierced Kristin’s heart with his mournful gaze as he sang along with the Everly Brothers, enhancing them into a trio of persuasive sorrow. Eric had a good voice, a compelling voice—everyone agreed he could sing on the radio and be a star, if he wanted to: When you see me shed a tear / And if you know that it’s sincere / Don’t you think it’s kinda sad / That you’re treating me so bad / Or don’t you even care—

Kristin did care, and at long last she willingly surrendered herself to Eric in a gentle storm of Shakespearean intensities, unwittingly initiating that era known forever after as The Sixties.

Chapter Two

SATURDAY AFTERNOON POOL PARTIES

Kristin and her mom made for a lonely household of two, a household that lacked the multivocal choral cacophony of life in its dramatic mode. Gentle Kristin and her accommodating parent created a life that tended to sing in monotone. Eric’s entrance from offstage upon this placid scenario seemed to set everything in motion as though his appearance had been scripted in advance, if not exactly rehearsed.

Kristin’s mom generously welcomed Eric into the household, laughingly objecting each and every time he addressed her as Mrs. Clover. Kristin sometimes wondered who had really seduced who in this little family drama as she watched Eric and her mom sitting together on the patio sharing each other’s smokes whilst talking philosophy, politics and religion. It wasn’t that Kristin had nothing to add to the conversation, but she definitely felt more comfortable when Jamie and Pam came over on weekends to splash around in the pool and listen to music and eat hot dogs. Pamela was always eager to join the sophisticated conversation that went on between Eric and Mrs. Clover, whereas Jamie tended to be tongue-tied and shy, content to sit quietly with Kristin, listening to the adults as it were, and Kristin was glad to have a silent companion.

During those long afternoons and evenings in the late summer of 1960 there was a titanic political battle raging in the outer world, involving the fate of everyone and everything. Two great powers were contesting for supremacy, two mighty demonic entities known as Nixon and Kennedy, about whom Kristin knew but little, other than Nixon frightened her and sweated too much whereas Kennedy had wavy hair and a gorgeous glamor of a wife. In the end one of them prevailed, the one favored by her mom and Eric and Pam, but it didn’t seem to amount to anything as far as Kristin could see, nor did Jamie give it much note either, enrapt as he was by visions of a distant future cosmos in which the human species had spanned the galaxy, a book he was reading titled Foundation by a writer named Asimov who lifted his sights above the mundane struggles of the four-year election cycle.

Books. That was something they all had in common, the four kids and Mrs. Clover too, who laughed at the serious stuff the children were reading while she turned the pages of her summertime page-turners. Eric was the boldest reader of the group, attaching himself to Dostoyevski and Nietzsche, striding with determination through the strangeness, eager to report what he had seen and heard. Pamela too was a determined reader who deliberately chose her texts as though in contest with Eric’s choices, seeking out women’s voices—Katherine Mansfield, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, wanting to believe that the epic battles that shaped our politics need not involve only the Nixons and Nietzsches. Pamela was not exactly an early feminist but rather an instinctively antithetical reader who recoiled against Eric’s complacent assumption that only men spoke authoritatively on matters of moment.

Kristin’s reading by contrast was an eager seeking out of great families, widely flung groupings of many-twined persons such as the Brontë sisters depicted, or George Eliot. Growing up in a household of two, Kristin yearned for something larger, some all-embracing whole. When Jamie would recount silly stories of the doings of his thirteen cousins, two dozen second cousins (whatever that may be, Kristin certainly knew not), and assorted uncles, aunts, grandparents, half-this and half-that relations spread hither and yon from one end of the nation to the other, kept up to date by the endless scribblings of the elder ladies of the clan posting their missives to one another, Kristin could only sigh and reopen her book, wishing upon herself the very fate that Jamie seemed to find burdensome and unwelcome.

But think of all the names, he moaned. I have to remember all their names, even those second cousins who live in Texas and I only met them once and I’ll never see them again.

And their names are? Pamela rejoined sarcastically.

Umm, I think one of them is Teddy? he replied uncertainly amidst laughter before burrowing down again into whatever sci-fi epic held him in thrall that week.

It was indisputable to Kristin that she and Eric were a couple. Week by week they merged their lives until Eric had all but moved in, a situation that both Kristin and her mom were happy to accept. As for Eric’s family, nobody knew anything about them except what Eric recounted, and what he had to say was never flattering. He claimed that they were happy to be quit of him, happy to reclaim the space he had been taking up in an overpopulated household.

But what about Pamela and Jamie, Kristin wondered. Were they a couple too?

Jamie and Pam did have a lot in common, but in Kristin’s eyes their likeness was achieved mainly by way of contrast with she and Eric. Whereas Eric was tall, muscular and sculpted, Jamie’s physique was the perfect definition of average (And what did the suspect look like? inquired the astute Perry Mason. I don’t know, responded the witness, just average.). Whereas Eric sported sun-tinted surfer-locks of dazzling golden lustre, Jamie’s dull brown hair tended to flop uselessly around his ears unless it got piled up into ridiculous waves when he applied Brylcream to it in an effort to look more like the Everly Brothers. Whereas Eric was beamingly beautiful, strong, self-assured, and a standout in every crowd, Jamie was a determined crowd-avoider. Whereas Eric’s seduction and embrace of Kristin had been confident and filled with the destiny of all foregone conclusions, Jamie seemed to be unaware of Pamela’s bathingsuited physical presence perched nearby on her deck chair at the pool each weekend. And whereas Pam’s figure in a bikini was barely more filled out than Jamie’s parallel physique, Kristin by contrast always had the appearance of having just stepped forth from the cover of Teen Queen Magazine. It was a classic fairytale of two worlds, the golden and the dark.

On the positive side of the equation, Ashkettle and Peel were both well known in their school as top-of-the-class scholars. As such, they had no problem conversing congenially with each other about the sorts of things scholars are wont to converse about. But Kristin knew very well that elevated conversation of that sort would never lead Jamie and Pam onward into the fruitful realm of french kissing.

Don’t you think we should make an effort to nudge Jamie and Pam a little closer? Kristin suggested to Eric as the school year began.

He gave the subject a suitably somber nod. It’s a weird situation, he pointed out, an older girl with a younger guy. So probably she’d have to make the first move.

It’s true Pam is a ninth-grader and Jamie only eighth, Kristin acknowledged, "but Pam is so scornful of everything normal in the world that she could care less about Jamie’s age. I really don’t think it would matter to her."

Eric himself was two