THE ORGAN GRINDERS
by Roger Pinnell
(excerpt)

           Only as you hear the closing "Clank" of the chain-link with its crown of concertina wire, only as the Napa Valley light starts to creep below the stucco walls, do you feel the reality tighten in your belly like an anxious embryo. Oh shit, you think, locked in like all the rest. This is where we were headed the whole time, crowded into Curt's old Pontiac? This is why we drove all the way up from the city?
           "Cut that lie out of their brains!" Valentín cries with typical sardonic flare, mimicking Katherine Hepburn's hysterical mother from Suddenly Last Summer. He ducks down from the van and lugs his bass inside.
           The vineyards with their leaves bruised purple and strange by October have not warned you of this claustrophobia. The bucolic lane of quaint yellow cottages on the drive leading in now seems a deliberate deception. The paunchy security guard, the disclaimer form you signed at the gate, all these signals accumulate and ratchet up as you feel the tingle and heat of the acid dig in.
           Orderlies in spearmint green scrubs stride in and out of the cavernous social hall with a sober self-importance. As soon as the band is loaded in, your entire entourage meanders outside as if feeling the need to plot an escape or military coup. Three carloads have followed the van; in an idle moment you count twelve, all friends or lovers of Gale Force Winds and her Safe Sextet. "A dozen eggs about to crack," you tell yourself. Someone cackles. You realize you've blurted it out inadvertantly. You sit and drink from a bottle of Calistoga at a scarred picnic table bolted to the patio.
           "Oh that's right," says Valentín in resignation, "that's why we got the acid, isn't it? Not a martini to be found in here." You drink one glass of water then another, but your thirst remains. The Gothic spires of the original Napa State Asylum you'd seen in a vintage postcard shop in North Beach are nowhere in sight. Instead you see a stretch of drab modern blocks; ivy forms scattered maps along beige walls. You stare at the initials and blunt symbols scratched into the table's plastic surface. Gale touches a hieroglyphic outline of a stiff cock-and-balls with her fingertip.
           "Remember the day we first spoke to each other, back in San Diego?" you ask her. "You told me ‘The penis is just a phallic symbol.' "
           "Oh Rex, you incurable romantic, you," she says.
           "I think I spit out my coffee, laughing."
           "I've gotta go put my face on." She disappears inside.
Soon the orderlies make way for a man in a burgundy shirt, utterly unassuming yet one who clearly commands more respect. "OK," says the man decisively, "can I have a few words with the band and their friends before we open the doors?" He wears no white lab coat, no tie. "Tonight we encourage you to talk with, to interact with and especially to dance with our patients. They're excited about the Autumn Moon Dance and--" Your attention trails away in the competing echoes of the room. Your eyes stray to Valentín's triangular face and darting eyes, and you fixate on the way that soft face contradicts his impudence, even indifference toward people he has screwed over. You recall the many nights you and the others waited in vain inside that musty Tenderloin basement room for Valentín to show up for rehearsal. Your head absorbs each sound in the hall: from an orderly to the security guard, traffic on the highway just outside and the doctor's voice, like a radio station whose signal drops away in a blizzard of sounds, then comes back in shards: "--and we want our patients to feel a part of the world, not isolated from it."
           All eyes look up as you hear the jolt of two, maybe three sets of double doors shutting at once with automated authority, sealing off the hall. Men file in. Staid, seemingly contemplative men wearing neutral street clothes, followed by a demure Asian woman whose hair seems transplanted from the stiff bristles of a steel brush, and the few aging patients who still wear hospital gowns.
           Patients collect at the lip of the stage as Gale and her Sextet saunter into their opening number, Look Me Over Closely. You wait for the lights to dim. They never do. The bright hall reminds you how far removed you are from any nightclub. Gale's sinuous, full-bore voice puts meat on the bones of the Marlene Dietrich version. Gangly men contort their jawlines in a muddle of leering, shock and glee. You grin in admiration as this crowd leaves no buffer zone in front of the stage, the way the black-clad hipsters in San Francisco rock clubs are prone to do. Like back at the Skeleton Club, you think, people falling over each other, right up to the lip.
           In her garter hose, her ruddy face thrown into contrast by glow-in-the-dark mascara and blond hair pulled up into hot cross buns, Gale's passion for the original song is as palpable as her perversion of it. And Valentín, with his hair slicked back and his vintage dinner jacket, rocks back and forth, edging as close to Errol Flynn Hollywood as he can ever hope to get.
           After a few songs, you make a path through the crowd to the door labeled "Men." Just inside the door, three patients snigger and glance up at you. The odor of coffee fills the bathroom, overpowering the stench of urine. A battle-scarred silver/gray percolator, the kind you once saw every Sunday at the church Coffee-Chat, sits on the floor. A tiny red light flickers feebly at the base.
           "Want some?" a man with doorknob features asks you. "We got extra." The conspirators try to suppress their chortles, as 13-year-olds defying their rigid Pentecostal parents might.
           "We're not allowed to drink it. Coffee. Caffeine," a much older man tells you. "Why do you think we hang out in here?" Hair the color of bleached desert bones crawls out of the man's ears and nostrils, yet is utterly absent from his scalp.
           "Here you go," the first man says, "we got a whole stack of these." He holds out a flimsy paper cone, the type normally found at water coolers. "You gotta drink it fast; it leaks."
           "Smells great, but I'd never get to sleep. No thanks." You hurry to a urinal. On your way out, you attempt a collaborator's smile at the men gossiping in low voices over the percolator. "Those coffee grounds on the floor? Better get rid of ‘em. They're a telltale sign, you know?"
           "He's right," the old veteran says, "a telltale sign." You push the door open, your mind fighting off memories of the sterile white Styrofoam cups and matching walls of your parents' church, in the room where the choir would file in for weak coffee following the sermon.
           Gale sings Organ Grinder Blues more like a hedonistic Ethel Merman than Ethel Waters, with a brass-band set of pipes deep inside a more carnal soul. You lean against a wall and watch Gale use her heft and lack of inhibition as weapons, as raw fuel. Trumpet and clarinet poke in rudely. You hear the grit in Gale's voice as she plunges into the climax:
           "Organ grinder, you've found that sweet lost chord,
           So start your grindin'/ and grind your room and board."
           The band stomps out the last note as you would a cigarette. The crowd lunges into perplexed applause and a few wails of disbelief.
           "Some people say never let ‘em see you sweat," Gale tells the crowd. "We say, if you're not sweaty, then what's the point? But honestly guys and gals, we need a breather. We'll be back." You slide your way out to the patio, needing some air yourself.
           "We're all up here for a reason," Curt tells you, as if continuing some fevered debate. He scratches his chin.
           "Yeah, for some high-voltage electroshock, and about time, too," says Valentín.
           "First Gale and Valentín, then you, and now me—we all split San Diego for a reason. We all ended up in San Francisco."
           "Yeah, so they can gossip about us down there," you say. "Our drug habits, our sex lives, our--"
           "It's when they stop talking about you that you have to worry," Valentín tells you, a heated reassurance in his voice. "My parents finally realized I might never come back, not even to visit. Even my dad got off my back about my boyfriends and all that."
           Gale aproaches you, blotting her brow with a handful of bunched-up toilet paper, the rouge and mascara veined with perspiration now.
           "Sweatin' to the oldies, eh?" you ask. She puts her lips to your ear.
           "I was getting moist in secret places."
           "Acid always makes my nose cold," you tell her.
           She laughs and says, "Well, time to sing for my supper."
           As the band files back onstage, you glance up and tell the moon, "I'm not afraid of you," but soon lower your eyes to the concertina wire that shudders in the Indian Summer wind. You stare for a minute or two at the spikes of spiraling metal; they seem to live and breathe.
           Leisurely, the band starts into an Edith Piaf song whose title evades you. You know these opening chords; the melody with its deep undertow pulls you back inside. Out of the clot of patients and friends floating at the foot of the stage, a woman, obese and black, faces you at close range. She wears an institutional mumu, pale blue and speckled with tiny, perfect diamonds.
           "You wanna dance?" she asks. You try not to stare at the thick sweat-shine on her eyelids. Your instinct urges you to make an about-face and flee back outside.
           "OK, sure," you tell her. You lead her into the mass of dancers and begin an awkward merger of bodies. The woman rings you with her fleshy arms, yet beyond this she does not move. You embrace her with your skinny arms, but can only stretch partially around her body.
           "What's your name?" you ask.
           "Bethesda." She does not bother to ask yours. She just zeroed in on me, you think. Just appeared from out of nowhere. You begin to sway her in a lumbering, sluggish circle, as the tempo dictates. Why this song? Why a goddamm slow dance? Through her loose gown, your hands dig into her boneless waist. She angles her head back to look you in the eyes.
           "Do you wanna have sex with me? Outside?" she asks. "I wanna have sex with you."
           Your voice is a garbled message on an answering machine. "No. No thanks." Bethesda shoves her hand down the front of your Levis and grabs your penis, a slick ambush coming from a slow-eyed woman of such massive girth.
           And as white blood cells surround a foreign body, as if they'd wiretapped the folds of the woman's torso, three orderlies pop out from the bowels of the crowd.