Demon Box

I was happy to be getting out of the U.S. That book about me and my Kool Aid cronies had just come out and I felt the hot beam of the spotlight on me. It burned like a big ultraviolet eye. The voltage generated by all this attention scared me a little and titillated me a lot, and I needed a breather from it before I became an addict, or a casualty. Stand in this spotlight, feel this eye pass over you. You never forget it. You are suddenly changed, lifted, singled out, elevated and alone, above any of your old bush-league frets of stage fright, nagging scruples, etc. Self-consciousness and irresolution melt in this beam’s blast. Grace and power surge in to take their place. Banging speed is the only thing even close. Drowsing protoplasm snaps instantly to Bruce Lee perfection—enter the dragon. But there’s the scaly rub, right? Because if you go around to the other end of that eye and look through at the star shining there so elevated, you see that this adoring telescope has a crosshair built in it, and notches in the barrel filed for luminaries: Kennedy… King… Joplin… Hemingway…Anyway, we headed to London, flying high (as Country Joe put it) all the way. As the DC-8 began to hum down through the thick English fog, everybody realized that after our transatlantic antics a customs check was almost certainly coming up, and what couldn’t be flushed had better be swallowed.

Up to the bustling British customs table we floated, a big-eyed baker’s dozen from America, in leather and furs and cowboy hats and similar fashionable finery. The weary officer sighed sorely at the sight, then politely searched us for three hours, even the cylinders of the two Harley-Davidsons. It was well into the afternoon by the time our fleet of taxis headed for London, escorted through the wrong-side-of-the-road traffic by Angels Old Bert and Smooth Sam Smathers on their two huge choppers. It was clammy gray twilight by the time we all arrived at Apple.

There was a small flock of the faithful at the door, waiting with that radiant patience of reverent pilgrims. Frisco Fran, a long blond mama of thirty-five, with a feeling for Old Bert and Old Bert’s new Harley, and a $6,000 mink coat over her T-shirt and greasy jeans, looked at the little gaggle of fans on the Savile Row steps, then up at the crisp white office building, and observed, “I feel like I’m going to see the Pope, or something.”

In the outer lobby a chubby receptionist welcomed us with a cheeky wink for the men and an embossed invitation for each of us. She looked like Lulu in To Sir, With Love. After a confirming call from higher up, she let us into lobby #2, where all the rock & roll managers greeted each other—Yanks, Limeys, even a visiting Frog—embracing and slapping five and jiving each other rock-&-roll-wise. This got us through lobby 2’s door into the crimson-carpeted keep of lobby #3, where George Harrison finally came down to shake everybody’s hand and escort us into the very core of the Apple organization—endless offices, wandering halls with gold records on all the walls, a huge recording studio in the basement that looked like Disney had designed it for Captain Nemo and hired Hugh Hefner to decorate it—finally to a doorless doorway upstairs opening on a large room that we could use as our digs, we were told, during our stay. All eyes popped at the accommodations. The room was full of food: roasted pigs suckling apples, smoked turkeys, cheeses, breads, cases of champagne and ale stacked to the ceiling… for the big Apple Christmas party coming up, we were told. Old Bert immediately dropped his ratty bedroll to the floor and booted it beneath a table full of glazed goose and stuffing.

“Looks like home to me,” he proclaimed.

Ringo dropped in for ‘arf a mo’ to welcome us, and once we thought we caught a glimpse of Paul down the hall, though some said it wasn’t Paul, that Paul was in New York getting engaged. But he was bright-eyed, lovable, and barefoot so it might have been Paul. Also, he was small.

“They’re all so… so…”—Spider, a tall ex-UCLA-track star gone hip and hairy and thirty, searched for the precise word—“diminutive.”

“They’re all the size I thought Ringo was,” Smooth Sam added.