Barbara Michaels - The Dark on the Other Side

His newfound friend was on the alert, and signaled him with a jerk of the head when the performer appeared, but Michael didn’t need the signal. Even in this crowd he would have spotted Kwame.

Such is the power of suggestion that Michael had unconsciously expected the performer to be black-with a name like Joe Schwartz, yet, he told himself. But the sparse expanses of skin visible were of the sickly tan that people choose, for some obscure reason, to call white. The hair was extensive; it made the efforts of the other boys look epicene. Now that, Michael thought admiringly, is a beard!

It swept down in undulating, shining ripples to the boy’s diaphragm, where it mingled with the waves of long brown hair. Although the night was chill and damp, Kwame wore only jeans and a sleeveless embroidered vest, which flopped open with each step, displaying a cadaverous chest. He was barefoot. But his guitar had been carefully swathed against the damp. It was a twelve-string guitar, with a shining surface that might have been produced by Stradivarius or Amati. Expensive, loved, used, and tended like a baby.

There was a tiny podium or stage, about the size of a dining-room table, at the far end of the room, and at another gesture from the waiter, Michael took his cup and moved down to an unoccupied booth near the stage. The other habitués were doing the same thing. Kwame, who had seated himself cross-legged on the floor, placed the guitar across his lap and sat waiting. His eyes moved incuriously around the room, and as they met Michael’s, the latter was conscious of an odd shock. Drugs. The eyes were unmistakable… And why, he wondered cynically, was he shocked? He read the newspapers.

There was no announcement, no introduction. When everyone had seated himself, and silence had become profound, Kwame began to play.

Michael’s first reaction was negative. Kwame’s harsh voice had little appeal for a post-adolescent square who concealed a secret weakness for old Perry Como records, and Kwame’s playing, though competent, was not remarkable. The songs were a mixture of legitimate folk music and modern rock imitations of folk music; a few of them sounded vaguely familiar, but Michael was not sufficiently knowledgeable about the popular repertoire to identify them. All had one theme in common: peace, love, innocence, and the annihilation of all these by man’s cruelty. The mushroom cloud billowing up around the kids playing in the daisy field, the blast of an explosion annihilating the kids in the Sunday School…Kevin Barry lost his young life again, and the lambs were all a-crying. But it was effective. The images were sure fire, they couldn’t miss.

Two of the songs were different. Kwame ended his recital with them, and by that time Michael had succumbed to the same spell that held the rest of the audience. He couldn’t have explained why he was spellbound, none of the elements of the performance were that good. But in combination…

Then Kwame swept his fingers across all twelve strings in a crashing dissonant chord, and broke into a vicious, and extremely funny, satire on the Congress of the United States. Like the others, Michael ached with containing his laughter; he didn’t want to miss the next line. At the same time the cruelty of the satire made him wince, even when he shared Kwame’s opinion of that particular victim. The laughter burst out explosively at the end of the song.

Kwame didn’t give it time to die, but went right into the next number. It was a very quiet song. It was about love, too, and about peace and innocence; but these verses allowed beauty to survive and triumph. The words were very simple, but they were selected with such skill that they struck straight home, into the heart of every compassionate hope. They were articulated with meticulous precision; and as he listened, Michael felt sure that Kwame had written the song himself-and the one that had preceded it. The boy was a magician with words. He made strong magic, did Joe Schwartz… And then, with the suddenness of a blow, Michael realized who Kwame was.

The performance ended as it had begun. Kwame simply stopped playing. Some fans came over to talk to him; and Michael looked up, blinking, to see the waiter standing by him.

“Thanks for telling me,” he said. “I enjoyed that.”

“He’s a good kid,” the waiter said.

“Do you suppose I could buy him a drink, or-”

“He don’t drink.”

“…a cup of coffee? Or maybe a steak?” Michael eyed the protruding ribs of Kwame.

The waiter grinned.

“This isn’t Manhattan,” he said obscurely. “He’ll talk to anybody. Hey, Kwame-friend of mine wants to meet you.”

Kwame looked up. He saw Michael, and his beard divided in a sweet smile.

“Sure,” he said. His speaking voice was as harsh as the one he used for singing, but several tones higher. Two of his fans trailed him as he approached the booth and he gestured toward them, still smiling.

“Okay?”

“Sure,” Michael said. “Join me.”

They settled themselves, Kwame placing his guitar tenderly on a serving table against the wall, where it would not be jostled by passers-by. The waiter lingered.

“You haven’t had dessert,” he said, giving Michael a significant glance.

“Oh. Oh! That’s right, I haven’t. Will you all join me?”

They would, and their orders left Michael feeling old and decrepit. Banana split, chocolate cake à la mode with hot fudge sauce, and a double strawberry frappé sundae for Kwame. Michael ordered apple pie and gave the waiter a nod of thanks as he departed. He ought to have realized that Kwame would be a vegetarian, and he was glad to have been saved from the gaffe of asking the boy if he’d like a steak. It would have been tantamount to offering someone else a nice thick slice off his Uncle Harry.

The food was a useful icebreaker; conversation, at first, was difficult. Kwame spoke hardly at all. Smiling dreamily, he was far out, someplace else. His friends, a blond girl (were they all blondes these days?) and her escort, who had a long cavalry-style moustache, treated Michael with such wary deference that he felt he ought to have a long white beard-and a whip. Yes, that was what they reminded him of-two captured spies in the enemies’ clutches, refusing to speak for fear of giving away vital information. Name, rank, and serial number only…

They loosened up after a while, as Michael plied them with coffee and sympathy, and he began to enjoy himself. They weren’t any more articulate, or sincere, than his generation had been; but they sure as hell were better informed. The much-maligned boob tube, perhaps? More sophisticated; superficially, yes, the little blonde was discussing contraceptives with a wealth of detail his contemporaries had never used in mixed company. Which was okay with him; his hang-ups on that subject weren’t deep seated. He wondered, though, if basically these youngsters were any wiser than he had been at their age. They knew the facts; but they didn’t know what to do with them, any more than he did. Maybe he was just old and cynical. He felt old. When he looked at Kwame, he felt even older.

Time, and the double frappé, had had their effect; whatever drug it was that Kwame had taken, it was beginning to wear off. He sat up straighter and began to join in the conversation. His comments had no particular profundity. But the young pair responded like disciples to the utterances of the prophet. When Kwame cleared his throat, they stopped talking, sometimes in the middle of a word, and listened with wide, respectful eyes.

Michael, whose mental age was rapidly approaching the century mark, found himself strangely reluctant to introduce the subject he wanted to discuss. He was relieved when Kwame gave him an opening.

“You’re twenty-five now? You must have been a student, six years ago.”