54. God’s Pajamas

            Something punched a hole in the world.  Something tore the sky in half, and colors and noises and God's pajamas fell out. The air rained kaleidoscopes. The sun sang arias. The trees put their hands behind their backs and whistled, the grass kicked up its heels, and the birds told jokes. Everything that had happened before was gray, circumspect. Now the door flew open and Gypsy Rose Lee walked out in a balloon bra, followed by Harpo Marx, and and Karl Marx, and Marlene Dietrich, and Ghandi, and nothing was as it had been.

            What happened was simple enough. A delivery truck had arrived. Charlie had never actually seen a delivery truck before, outside of Three Stooges and Laurel & Hardy movies. Delivery trucks were things that happened in black-and-white films and big cities. And yet. . .there it was, parked in the driveway outside the house, in the country, a big brown delivery truck from the May Company, all the way from L.A. Or at least the Valley.

The day had begun as another gigantic, sprawling late summer afternoon, with the sun bellowing, and the hot air pressing on everything, daring anyone to do anything.  The day was all dressed up, life was all dressed up, maddeningly and achingly full of possibility, and Charlie, as usual, had nowhere to go. He didn't feel like riding his bike to the high school swimming pool again, even though he had caught a glimpse of Kathi Warner there in a bikini, and it was just too hot to play basketball, and midday TV was a living death of "The Match Game" and "Ben Hunter's Matinee,” which was screening the talking-mule classic, "Frances Joins the WACs." It really was just too damned hot. Too damned hot to do anything.  But there was everything in the world to do---somewhere, out there. . .beyond the meadows, the housing tracts, the freeway. . .

Wasn't there?

He'd phoned his friends, but. . .nobody home. Everyone was away on vacations in their big station wagons, on the way to Yosemite and Yellowstone and Big Bear and all those places he always heard about, but never visited; or they were away at summer school---a horror he had always been spared---or Boy Scout camps. He was alone. His pop was at work, and Laine was away on one of her increasingly frequent solo "jaunts" downtown. She had finished her big book and was awaiting word from her agent.

 It was another 'nothin' to do' day, one of thousands.

 Was this all there was to life, until you became an adult and had to go to work all the time?

 The boy sat on the ledge in the dining room, in front of the picture window, arms wrapped around his long legs, in summer uniform of cutoffs and white T-shirt. He hummed to himself, looking out on the town below and the great panorama of hills and mountains that looked like old volcanoes, and rugged backdrops for John Wayne movies (mostly because they were), and The Hill that he and Will had once trekked to, and he wondered what in hell people were doing out there, somewhere, far away. He watched the hawks and buzzards do slow orbits over the field below, with their deceptive laziness, and the redoubtable oaks with their rich, dusty, olive-green summer leaves, and he watched. . .the stillness. Yes, life was out there. . .there was so much out there, somewhere, wasn't there? But. . .where? What was it? How do you get there? What do you do when you get there?

            He got up and buried his face in a chunk of watermelon over the kitchen sink, spitting out the seeds and wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. He had already played all the James Bond soundtracks on the big stereo in the living room, real loud. He knew every note, every timpani beat, and the scenes that went with them, which he replayed in his mind---or sometimes used them to embellish private daydreams. One involved getting lost, far away, in another country, maybe, and then somehow making his way back, all alone and on foot, to The Oaks, having trudged through thousands of miles of mountains and deserts. He would return changed---muscled, tanned, world-wise---and astound all who had given him up for dead. . .

Charlie returned to his place on the ledge by the kitchen window, and Sweetie the dog began barking.

There it was.

Or was it? Was it really there, parked in the driveway, blocking the view of the great field? Big, militarily brownish green, with the name "United Parcel Service" on the side? He hadn't heard it arrive. But Sweetie was barking like burglars were creeping up the hill from all sides, with shotguns, so it must be there. His eyebrows went way up, and stayed way up. This was a UFO landing.

Sweetie redoubled her barking when the parking brake was set with an audible zzzzzip.
            "Quiet, girl, it's all right. I think."

            The delivery man wouldn't have to knock, because the boy had already opened the door, and was standing there, unsure.

            "Bogle family?" smiled the guy in a brown jumpsuit, stepping out of the truck.

            "Uh. . .Yes," said Charlie. He was, after all, the official representative of the family.

            "You've got a package from the May Company."

            It wasn’t a mistake.  This guy had driven all the way from the May Company, and had managed to find this house, way out the freeway, way out at the end of The Oaks, through all those winding streets, and up their one-way, winding driveway. How had he done it? But he had! They had their ways, these city people. Well, it must be some furniture or maybe one of those weird paintings Laine sometimes ordered. Yet the man handed over to Charlie a slim, square package; an official-looking cardboard package with a little. . weight to it.

            "Mr. Charles Bogle?" he said.

            "What? Yes. Uh. . .it's for me?"

            "If you're Mr. Charles Bogle, then yes, sir, it certainly is," said the delivery man, smiling.

            Yes, sir? Mr. Charles Bogle?

            "Sign here."

            The kid had never been asked to sign for anything in his life. He'd only seen people do it in movies, and his pop on report card. He signed. He felt like a million bucks.

            "Thanks a lot, now," the delivery man said, smiling. "Hot day, isn't it?"

            "Yeah. Thank you very much," said Charlie, staring at the package.

            Shutting the door, the boy rushed to the kitchen, grabbed a knife out of a drawer to slice the thing open. First slit the sides, quickly but carefully, carefully. . .don't damage anything. . .now pry back the cardboard sides just enough to look inside. . .

            He had heard the albums while briefly visiting Jake in his tiny Isla Vista apartment, north of Santa Barbara, up the coast. He had gone there on a Sunday drive with his father and Laine, and they had stayed for about twenty minutes---long enough for the old man to give Jake twenty bucks, and for Jake to have played little bits of both albums.
              "Pop," Jake had said. "You can’t leave yet. You've got to hear to what The Beatles have done. It’s really interesting.”

               "Taxman" on "Revolver" was jarring, from the coughing at the start, to the loping beat, to the upstart idea of singing nasty things about being taxed. Downright disrespectful. Then Jake had explained about "Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band," and how the Beatles were pretending to be another band, putting on a show, and using orchestras and strange instruments from India. . .Or maybe they had really become another band, with a new name altogether. . .

The boy hadn't even seen the album cover. He only heard Jake talk about the music, and had heard the beginning part, up through Ringo's song. Something was going on---something very weird and. . .new. Jake knew it, and he was trying to alert Pop. Charlie knew he had to hear it again. He had to have it, somehow, but in his house, only Fred Bogle bought records. Yet. . .The Beatles pretending to be another band? That was like Superman. Secret identity. . . Ringo singing the first big song? Ringo? And what he’d heard at Jake’s place didn't sound anything like the Beatles. The instruments were weird, loud, and there were horns and strings---just like in classical music.

The boy had noticed that things seemed to be changing lately; he had been vaguely aware of it, the way you sort of notice a shift change in a restaurant.  He had watched it all on TV, the long hair and loud music and lots of bright "psychedelic" colors, and he’d seen the articles in “Life” and “Look” about this drug, LSD, and how it “expanded your mind” and made you see weird things. Well, he’d always loved bright colors.

            And now The Beatles were changing, too. He’d watched with puzzled fascination at the films of them accompanying those weird and wonderful songs, “Strawberry Fields Forever,” and “Penny Lane.” The moustaches, the strange, staring looks in their eyes. . .  

             Now, incredibly, he held in his hands, that X-ray afternoon, two albums: "Revolver," and "Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band." How? Why? Laine must have wanted them because they’re sheikh, he thought, whatever that word means. She couldn’t have bought them for him, could she? She hated his preoccupation with music. Well, it didn’t matter! He ran his fingers over the covers, eyes agog at Beatles who looked like sage old men with walrus moustaches and Alice in Wonderland soldiers' suits. . .fuchsia, electric blue, shimmering crimson, mad lime green. The albums smelled nice, somehow, the way new albums always did. . .and there were "Pepper" cutouts inside, like a game, and all the words---the words were printed on the back! So you could read along while The Beatles sang to you. . .The words must be important, for the group to have put them right on the album. . .
            Charlie glanced at the clock. . .2 p.m. He opened the cabinet door of the big twelve-foot-long burnished dark wood console that contained the stereo and speakers. The old man’s one personal splurge. He lifted the door of the compartment that contained the Garrard turntable. He checked the volume on the Scott amplifier, turning the dial up fully half-way.

            He dropped the needle on “Sgt. Pepper.”

            There was crowd noise.

            He was part of the crowd. 

            Everything Charles Bogle had been up to that time was filed away under "pre-summer of 1967."   

He cranked the volume higher, to “7” out of “10,” and read every one of the joyful, poetic, poignant, mysterious words on the back of  the album, as it played. But no, he didn’t. He kept getting distracted by the sounds, the weird and razzle-dazzling noises: the buzzing, the violins, the twangs, the harps---harps!---and things that were like broken calliopes from The Twilight Zone. How could words like these fit into this music? Oh, but they did. . .

            Sounds that seemed more like colors. Colors on the album cover that seemed more like sounds: glowing chartreuse, phosphorescent red, luscious yellow, Superman-blue. . .a singing white daisy on John Lennon's shoulder. . .

            For the benefit of Mr. Kite, there will be a show tonight on trampoline. . .

            Those swirling scary organs and broken bells and. . .What kind of weird electronic music had The Beatles mastered?

            Follow her down to a bridge by a fountain, where rockinghorse people eat marshmallow pies. . .
            All synapses on deck! Everybody on deck! Yes, this was good. This was weird. This was good and weird.

             And his world receded---the fields, the sun, friends, family, his bike, basketball, even the oak trees. It was all secondary. In a way, none of it ever came back---not all the way back.

            He sat alone on the big white couch that Laine had proclaimed off-limits, the album in his lap, head bent forward slightly, as Lennon’s quavering, soaring, pinched voice told of tangerine trees and marmalade skies, and the celebrated Mr. K., and McCartney sang of a girl leaving home, and George droned ominously from a sea of sitars and strange Indian drums about losing your soul. . .And the boy’s head was full of effervescent, sparkly, twinkly, exuberant sounds, and stories about strange creatures called meter maids, and people talking about the space between us all, and barking dogs, clucking chickens, orchestral upheavals that sounded like Wagner, baroque keyboards somehow playing rock ‘n’ roll, and vivacious, raw-nerve harmonies, old-fashioned, homey clarinets, thundering saxophones driving, driving beats. . .

            We’re Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. . .we hope you have enjoyed the show. . .Sgt. Pepper’s one-and-only Lonely Hearts Club Band. . .we’re sorry, but it’s time to go. . .

            Charlie wasn’t thinking, couldn’t think, but if he had thought, he would have thought that the best stuff of the world out there somewhere had just sent him a post card. 

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