July 1994

Legendary Guitarists of Rock 'N' Roll Police Work in a New Era Poetry Slam

Conquering the Colorado and the Brahmaputra

Andersen Consulting's Advice Merchants

When the School of Visual Arts was founded in New York City in 1947, it was thought that an effective way of announcing its existence would be through the use of subway posters.

This strategy worked wonders, generating a groundswell of inquiries and applications. Since then posters have emerged as one of the most important mediums of institutional advertising in the United States.

The school's subway posters, such as this one, have brought the institution international acclaim.

Artist: Don Eddy

SCHOOL OF VISUAL ARTS

Art Director: Silas H. Rhodes Designer: Richard Wilde

SPAN}UIY}994 I usually begin this letter talking about a subject that relates to one or more of the articles that appear inside.

But I am seized this month by a subject we dealt with in an article in May. I refer to former Foreign Secretary J.N.

2 Poetry Was Never Like This

Dixit's review of the book, India and the United States: Estranged Democracies.

7 In Search of T .S. Eliot's Hidden Face

The book, by retired American diplomat Dennis Kux, has had a greater echo in India than anything that I could have imagined. The timing, of course, was propitious.

The book, published by Sage Publications India Private Limited, New Delhi, appeared just as a convulsive wave of critical press comment about American policy seemed to be cresting and just before Prime Minister P.Y. Narasimha Rao departed on his visit to the United States.

But absent these two developments,

the book still would

be resonating widely.

The reasons are several. Kux deals with Indo-U.S. relations in a historical context, something that Americans don't do too often. I think Indians appreciate this, because they have a special proclivity for interpreting events through the prism of history. The book's tone is nonpartisan. It neither praises nor condemns. Rather, it analyzes the events and personalities of our bilateral relations in a dispassionate way. The title is particularly apt; "estranged" is just the word that comes to mind when one reflects on relations between our two great democracies.

I think the book has been well received for the very reason that it is not about India or the United States per se, but about the relationship. Both sides are sensitive-if not hypersensitive~to criticism. Kux, a former ambassador, does not criticize; he is not judgmental. Instead, he concentrates on revealing the terms, conditions, and history of the bilateral relationship, leading the reader to consider these factors in an analytical,

practical,

realistic way.

Kux recently completed a two-and-a-half-week

and

visit to

India, in which he held public and private meetings with leading diplomats and other government officials, journalists, businessmen, and academics in Bombay, Calcutta, Hyderabad, Madras, and New Delhi. Underscoring points from his book, Kux asserted that much of the estrangement in our bilateral relations has emerged from misperceptions of the world situation by both countries and by disagreements over national security issues. He emphasized the silver lining he saw in the emergence of a wealthy and politically active Indian ethnic group in the United States, the phenomenal growth in Indo-U.S. trade and investment, and the visit of the Prime Minister, which he said had cleared the air of much of the recent misunderstanding between the two countries.

"The time is ripe now for forging a more constructive relationship

between

our two countries,"

9 10 13 14

Neighborhood Beat Making an Arrest Spills and Thrills

by Clay Pearson With Charles Gruber

by Harvey Rachlin

by Bob Shacochis

by Richard L. Davis

Guitar Legends

29 The Legend of Jerry Garcia

33 38 40

by Manju Jaidka

Police Work in a New Era

21 Braving the Brahmaputra

24

by Richard Conniff

Andersen's Army of Advice

by Bill Barich

by Ronald Henkoff

Focus On ...

On the Lighter Side

41 Architect of Fantasy

by Ronn Smith

Front cover: Jerry Garcia, leader of The Grateful Dead, has been a rock-and-roll icon for a quarter of a century.

Back cover: Rafters pause in their journey down the Colorado River to contemplate the wonders of the Grand Canyon.

Publisher, Stephen F. Dachi; Editor, Guy E. Olson Managing Editor, Krishan Gabrani; .;!ssistant Managing Editor, Swaraj Chauhan; Senior Editor, Amrita Kumar; Copy Editors, A. Venkata Narayana, Snigdha Goswami; Editorial Assistant, Rashmi Goe!; Photo Editor, Avinash Pasricha; Art Director, Nand Katyal; Associate Art Director, Kanti Roy; Artist, Hemant Bhatnagar; Production Assistant, Sanjay Pokhriyal; Circulation Manager, D.P. Sharma; Photographic Services: USIS' Photographic Services Unit; Research Services: USIS Documentation Services, American Center Library, New Delhi.

Photographs: Front cover-Harry Benson. Inside front cover-courtesy School of Visual Arts, New York, N.Y. 2-6--© MCMXCII Steven E. Gross. 7-illustration by Nand Katyal. 9-l3-Barry Fitzgerald. 14-20-© Dugald Bremner. 21-23-Air Marshal B.S. Sikand (retd.). 24-28-Harry Benson. 29-32-courtesy Dennis McNally, Grateful Dead Productions, Inc. 33-35-courtesy Arthur Andersen & Coy. 38 top-Avinash Pasricha; film stills courtesy Photo fest except center top courtesy Paramount Pictures Corp. 41-© Joe Giannette, Guthrie Theater. 42-© Martha Swope, Brooklyn Academy of Music. 43 bottom left-© 1991 Chris Buck; top right-© R. Feldman, American Repertory Theatre; bottom right-© George Tsypin. 47-Barry Fitzgerald. Back cover© Dugald Bremner.

Kux told an

overflow audience at the India International Centre in New Delhi. If that happens, and I am sure it will, some of the credit for it can go to Ambassador Dennis Kux.

-S.F.D.

Published by the United States Information

Service, American

(phone: 3316841), on behalf of the American

Embassy,

Center,

New Delhi.

24 Kasturba

Printed at Thomson

Gandhi

Marg,

New Delhi

Press (India) Limited,

110001

Faridabad,

The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Government.

Use of SPAN articles in other publications is encouraged, except when copyrighted. For permission write to the Editor.

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Poetr Was Nerver Li e T is

H

ello, friend, and welcome to the Green Mill, an Uptown Chicago jazz club where the bucolic murals are yellow with varnish and ancient cigar smoke, and the fixtures haven't changed much 'since the 1920s. "Machine Gun" Jack McGurn once held court here, and entertainer Joe E. Lewis got his throat slit to discourage him from taking his talents elsewhere. But that was then. Tonight the emcee is a tall, skinny guy with his hair pulled back in a pony tail who is talking about-what?-poetry.

"Here's a news update," he begins. He has a manic gleam in his eyes and a workingclass accent in which a word like "news" is drawn out as ifit were spelled "nooz." "We went to San Francisco and we kicked their. ..." What he is talking about is competitive poetry: Second City versemongers going eyeball-to-eyeball with the best of the Bay. "Some of them were pretty lame," he adds. "But we held back, too. Oh, by the way, I'm Marc Smith."

"So what?" the audience shouts.

He grins. Then, for the benefit of out-oftowners, he adds: "Some of the poetry tonight will be very good. Some will be very bad. If it's bad, snap your fingers. That means it stinks. Ifit gets worse, stamp your feet. If it's god-awful, groan. And if it's so bad it's good, which happens sometimes, yell 'Belmont!' That's the name of a local street. We don't know why we do this, we just do. Please, audience, do not applaud a mediocre poem. Just stare at the poet, and eventually he's going to get the idea."

What Smith is talking about is not a poetry reading but a poetry

Facing page: Marc Smith (left), originator and promoter of the poetry slam, presents the grand pdze of $10 to store manager Andrew Rashkow, aka. Drew Jay. Below: Two judges hold up score cards, indicating dim view of the performance by established Chicago poet, Jose (El Cheyo) Bono.

Above: Unemployed machinist E. Donald Two-Rivers talks of homelessness: " ... the Chicago winds are .../wild mustangs/that hammer meanness/into the streets .... "

"slam," a noisy, almost oxymoronic idea that got its start in Chicago eight years ago. The slam isn't a kind of poetry, like rap or imagism or cyberpunk video poetry or even iambic pentameter; it's an event in which all of the above may do literary battle, and a cowboy poet can get whomped by a free-verser introduced in boxing-ring cadences as "The Po-lish A-mer-ican Pur-rit-ty Boy from Ni-agara Falls." More than 20 cities in America and abroad now have an active competitive poetry scene.

This is a development some university poets greet with dismay.

They scorn the slam as a verse "gong show" or worse, and part of Smith's shtick is to return this contempt in four-part harmony.

The competition starts to the tune of "Makin' Whoopee," with the audience joining in on a verse about academic poets being beamed up out of their solemn lecture halls and onto the stage at the Green Mill, in front of 200 beer-drinking aesthetes: You see 'em squirm, they start to twist, How did they get here, a place like this?

They make it plain, This ain't their game, slamming poetry'.

high-minded purpose of reconnecting the American people to poetry, any poetry. The idea is to get people relaxed, keep them entertained, and in between slip them brieflessons on the emotional power of poetic language. Smith is almost visionary on the need to rescue poetry from its lowly status in the nation's cultural life. A 44-year-old former construction worker, he is barely eking out a living these days as a full-time poetry-slam promoter. He attended his first conventiolUll poetry reading with his manuscripts hidden in a folded newspaper. "The very word 'poetry' repels people," he says.

"Why is that? Because of what schools have done to it. The slam gives it back to the people. It's like football: You don't have to be a professional. We need to have touch-football poets. We need people to talk poetry to each other. That's how we communicate our values, our hearts, the things that we've learned that make us who we are."

But stop right there, fickle reader! I can see your mind going slack and gummy at the merest hint of anything to do with the "p" word that is remotely didactic. I see you harking back to the high school teacher who tricked you into mistaking a restaurant menu for something by the Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, thereby forever shattering your confidence that you could understand what poetry was or might be. Or maybe you are thinking of the college professor who deconstructed the cryptoimperialist subtext in "The Song of Hiawatha."

You are thinking, in other words, that poetry is, at worst, a pretentious flimflam and, at best, a bore.

So let us get back to the slam, an event deeply rooted in Chicago's unique psychology, which is to say that it is enthusiastically combative, a little rough at the edges and full of populist appeal-populist with maybe an added hint of image-consciousness, now that the children of the city's bluecollar workforce have clambered up into more genteel occupations. It's said that "a fistfight has always been the best metaphor for Chicago," so in the new Chicago a metaphorical fistfight between poets makes a kind of sense.

Nobody actually gets hit, you understand.

Smith, who originated the event, called it a slam in part for the un effete sound of it, and also to commemorate a grand slam * he saw the Chicago Cubs' Ernie Banks hit when he was a boy.

What happens on any Sunday evening at the Green Mill is that poets of all stripes present themselves at an open-mike session, followed by a featured poet, followed finally by the slam, in which two or more combatants face off. All of them risk a discerning, sometimes vocal reception.

When a poet in the open-mike session reads a bumptious poem, pandering to what he thinks the crowd will like, Smith jumps in before the poet can start another effort. "Is this one a poem and not a story?" Smith calls out from the audience, tongue-in-cheek but also perfectly serious. "It was hard to find the music in that other one."

In the slam itself, the poets risk more than mere heckling. *A grand

sial!! is the baseball equivalent

(i.e. runners boundary.

on firsl. second.

and

third

thus scoring four runs-himself

Il occurs

to a sixer in cricket. bases)

and

the batter

and the three runners

hits

on base.

when

the ball

the bases are loaded beyond

the outfield

This is, after all, a competition. The method of scoring is subject to change without notice but it always works, as if this were the Olympics. After each contender performs his or her piece, three judges chosen from the audience hold up their scorecards-6.2, 7.5, 9.1, or whatever. The highest total score wins the round. On this particular evening, the bout will go to the first poet to take three rounds.

The worst they can do, Smith announces to soothe the quaking egos of the evening's poets, is to "tie the lowest score ever, because it was minus infinity, for the dirtiest, dumbest, stupidest poem I have ever heard in my life." As an afterthought, just in case, Smith playfully reminds the judges that minus infinity squared is a positive number.

The best they can do is to draw the audience up by its collective soul into a moment of attentive and absolute stillness. Patricia Smith (no relation to Marc) does it, for example, in a poem about seeing a neighbor lose her baby in a house fire: I locked my eyes on the flames like a brainless child, like a hungry woman with heat my only language, while the woman's screams wrote a bitter poem on the hot air and lean shirtless boys belched Budweiser toward the flames.

The winner of one week's slam goes on to bang heads (please, metaphorically) with subsequent winners, leading in time to the coronation of the Uptown Poetry Slam Champion, who is in effect the performance poetry king or queen of Chicago. All this for grand prizes of 10, 25, 50, even 100 bucks.

It is good poetry for the money, too. If the measure of Chicago writers is how well they handle what the city dishes out, then they succeed, with poems full of Chicago's rawness and beauty, its bluster and its depravity-a word which, in this"r;ase, does not refer exclusively to its political life. David Kodeski, a young man with round steel-rimmed glasses and a bookish manner, gets up and delivers a poem about the refined urban pleasure of loathing yuppy (bleeps) as they infiltrate yet another neighborhood with briefcases "Full of important papers/And the receipt from today's business lunch.'" (The trouble is that his object ofloathing turns out, on closer examination, to be his pal.) A poem about fervid love (hooted down for emotional mushiness and exceeding the three-minute time limit) is followed by one about a coupletslinging cowboy poet wandering in a land where the "whores are six feet tall and tough as barn siding," and then, in the sort of violent mood swing to which slams are prone, by a chilling, precise poem about a father who rapes and murders his fouryear-old child.

Smith himself closes the evening with "Ground Zero," a favorite with locals, about an ordinary Chicago guy entering a fat-cat political banquet on the blast waves of nuclear apoca~ lypse. He delivers it with the gallows gusto of the pilot who goes down with the bomb at the end of Dr. Strange/ave. In Chicago-hey!-they know how to have a good time.

We'll switch now to satellite feed for a spirited debate

Poet Patricia Smith, winner offive slam championships in Chicago, took the poetry slam idea with her when she moved to Boston.

She is shown presiding over a slam event in a Boston bookstore.

between two Chicago-area poetry experts. Paul Hoover, a novelist and avant-garde poet who is editing an anthology of experimental poetry from 1950 to the present, has serious reservations about the slam. He says it reduces poetry to a product: "They set out not to discover a truth in language, or to create a poetry of invention, but to please an audience."

Whereas the poetry he prefers is rigorously difficult and innovative, slam poetry he regards as dated. People think it's hip, he says, but in fact its roots go all the way back to the Beat-style poetry of the 1950s. He believes the slam reflects the "decline of books at the hands of television and rock music." Dancing like a butterfly but stinging like Ambrose Bierce on a bad day, Hoover says "the slam is to poetry what [the personal confession talk show] is to television. It keeps your attention."

In the opposite corner is Reginald Gibbons of Northwestern University in nearby Evanston, Illinois. He edits TriQuarterly, a highly regarded literary magazine, and has performed for audiences at the Green Mill. "I don't know how anybody can see this as a threat to Western civilization," he says. "It's not something against book poetry. It's something more. Performance is a different kind of animal. Most of the people who read or perform are not going to be very good writers." But that's also true of the unsolicited manuscripts he gets at work. Occasionally, he has found enough "fierceness of composition" to publish slam poetry in TriQuarterly.

The most significant thing about the slam, though, is "there are audiences that want to go out and make an evening of listening to words."

The slam, like rap, makes poetry cool. Cool enough that even some of the slammers are becoming increasingly uneasy about commercialization.

Bob Holman, who started a slam in Manhattan, put together a performance poetry film for the Public Broadcasting Service. Later, he met with executives at the cable channel MTV, where the format of rock videos and standup comedy was growing thin enough to make poetry a possible alternative. "They said, 'Content is making a comeback.' It was like they were talking about a pair of sneakers.

They told me that 'meaning' was going to be very big in the 1990s." Madonna, looking for the next big trend after torpedo brassieres, has announced that she plans to include "Beatnik-style poetry" in her next album.

The raucous atmosphere of the slam makes it easy to forget that the performers take it seriously. "It's a combination of¡ poetry and theater," says Lisa Buscani, a 28-year-old slam star, disguised by day as a mild-mannered editorial coordinator for the Chicago Dental Society. Buscani doesn't mumble. She doesn't slouch to the microphone at the Green Mill with a three-ring binder full of dog-eared manuscripts.

She is resolutely "off manuscript," meaning that she has memorized her pieces and delivers them as if they came straight from the heart, or possibly the spleen. Performance for her means the dubious raised eyebrow, the "who me?" hands splayed on chest, the overly emphatic pronunciation of the t in "neat," and the index finger jabbed up at a tyrannical teacher of vivid memory.

Paul Hoover is correct in saying the slam language is not intellectually difficult. "People need a lot of image meat," says Lisa Buscani. "They need to be able to sink their teeth into your metaphors and similes. You can't get away with some of the airier stuff you get away with on the page." The writing has to be understandable on first hearing, rather than 15th reading. Moreover, it tends to be about subjects ordinary people can identify with, or as Buscani puts it, "It's not about Zeus coming down and schtupping swans."

If some critics regard these traits as defects, Buscani sees them as simply "part of the form, just as a haiku has so many syllables." Slammers are quick to name print poets whose work would stand up in the slam format-for example, Dylan Thomas ("Yeah, no problem. Tens right across the board.

Well, depending on the judges"). On the other hand, a selection from Chicago's most famous poet, Carl Sandburg, gets kiboshed. Marc Smith springs Sandburg's "Death Snips Proud Men" from memory one night at the Green Mill, then has second thoughts: "I think Carl was screwed up on that. He never rewrote enough."

On the card that evening is a single, five-round bout, featuring a new poet, Andrew J. Rashkow, who uses the name "Drew Jay" because it's shorter and easier for the hip crowd at the Green Mill to remember. They might not be so receptive, he thinks, ifhe let on that, by day, he manages a store and sells "lifestyle furniture, closet organizers, silk flowers .... " His opponent, "Happy Poet" Billy Lombardo, a youth director for a local parish, just spent his Sunday afternoon working crowd control at Wrigley Field. Like most slammers, these two are not yet 30. In the evening's early sessions, they sit with friends, gauging crowd reaction and sizing up other poets: "Dave Kodeski's pretty tough. He mixes it up well. He's got some humorous stuff, and he can be serious too."

The moon is full, at least inside the Green Mill, and even during the open-mike session the poets appear to be engaged in battle, if only with their own hormones. They deliver poems about-shall we say?-Iove, full of phrases such as "I feel the strong burning desire of you in all that I do ... " or" ... his body a temple of testosterone." A poet presents a piece of "rhapsodic pornography" about the Gabor sisters, accompanied by Hungarian folk music on the cello.

"I have one about love, one about pain," a poet begins.

"Which one do you want first?"

"Pain!" the audience shouts.

Finally, a poet hits all the hot buttons with one called "Sex and Politics." The poem recounts a woman's experience returning from Germany, where she heard "poetry of meaning," poetry defending the flame of democracy, only to be mortified back home in the Green Mill to hear poems only about sex. In this poem, the woman takes a piece of the Berlin Wall from her pocketbook and (in the spirit of the slam) flings it at the sex-obsessed poet onstage, hitting him square in the face. Unfortunately, this serves to increase his ardor. ...

Now it's time for the main bout. The winner will be taking on the reigning Uptown Poetry Slam champ. Marc Smith introduces the judges for the slam: A teacher of English as a second language, a leader of workshops on stress and alternative medicine, and a couple, Mario and Lisa. "They both wait tables. Lisa says Mario is a good listener. Mario says that Lisa has a great sense of humor and is funny. They're sitting very close together. How cute." Rule number one, he informs thejudges, is "You must listen to the poem. We find that when you don't listen, the audience gets very angry."

Drew Jay picks up the theme of the evening and runs with it.

His mind is a temple of testosterone. Like articles in Cosmopolitan magazine, his poems fall unequally into two categories, "Sex?' and "Other." He reads in a brash, self-confident voice, his eyebrows popping over glossy black eyes. His hair is slicked back, and he has a vulpine smile. "This one's about a date I had," he says, at the start of the third round.

"They're all about dates you had," Smith complains from the audience. (He is like the chorus in a classical Greek play: "I come up and make my little comment, and at least the audience hears one person is in tune with them and is speaking their mind.")

Billy Lombardo, on the other hand, wins points for sounding like a nice South Side Chicago kid. He has a frail, vulnerable voice, and his poems start in everyday life and then veer off. In one, for instance, his father whacks him on the head for tucking in his shirt at mass one Christmas, and suddenly Billy is thinking about the Bethlehem innkeeper of biblical ill-fame, the one who had the incredible bad luck to turn away Joseph and Mary: and his bones are shifting in his ...grave every Christmas and making that hollow sound cheap wooden wind chimes make and he's turning and saying, 'lee' me alone, lee' me alone ....'

I'm telling you, it was ...crowded. there was a census going on do you understand that? it was like ...Woodstock in Bethlehem. the place was jammed with pregnant

women.

There is strategy in play here. The contenders choose their poems carefully. If one poet is known to have a killer poem about a father, the other may try to preempt it by reading one about a mother. If one poet is serious, the other may try to heighten the mood or demolish it with humor. "What do you think I should do now?" they ask their friends when a rival is scoring big. Smith reminds the crowd between rounds that there is-oooh-$SO at stake.

After four rounds, slickness appears to be triumphing over substance ("Come on, judges, pay attention," someone mutters), and Drew Jay is even with Billy Lombardo. Afterward, Drew Jay recounts his strategy for the final round: "They wanted fluff. I was just playing to the audience."

Drew Jay's last effort is a humorous piece about-are you sitting down?-a relationship. L~mbardo responds with a poem about schoolchildren at lunchtime. The judges hold up their score cards. Unbelievable! Lombardo loses by twotenths of a point.

The crowd takes it badly, though not badly enough for Smith to call in his "official judge escort service." He manages to smooth over the moment with one of his own poems. Then the audience heads out into the street. On an evening when they might otherwise have sat slack-jawed at home, staring at the television set, they have instead spent three hours listening to language and ideas. They may yet go home and look up that Sandburg poem.

They may discover that the state ofIllinois has a living poet laureate, Gwendolyn Brooks, who is pretty cool. They may get the crazy idea that poetry belongs not to literary magazines or universities or even poets laureate, but to them, and that it has something to do with their own lives. And thengood God!-they might sit down and write the stuff. Considering the state of poetry in America, Marc Smith figures worse things could happen.

0 About the Author: Richard Conniff, afrequent contributor to Smithsonian magazine, is editor of The Devil's Book of Verse, an anthology.

The author follows diverse trails across the United States in an attempt to reveal T.S. Eliot's humorous side.

I was advised to give up the idea.

I was told it was a wild goose chase. I was warned of the hazards ahead, of cumbersome impediments, of the tortuous road winding above the mountains, the difficulties of the arid terrain with mountain mouths of carious teeth that could not spit. There I'd see red, sullen faces sneering and snarling from mud-cracked houses. Yes, they did everything possible to dissuade me.

Yet I persisted.

Perhaps it was my subconscious desire to be a female Lancelot. To be lauded for my undaunted perseverance, diligence, tenacity, and what have you. Or, more likely, it was just my thick-skinned stubbornness that egged me on. And, yes, I persisted. From sea to shining sea. From the Atlantic to the Pacific. From Boston to San Francisco. From Milwaukee to San Antonio. Looking for clues, for evidence, for silent witnesses to support my growing conviction that the object of my

quarry had to be exposed. He just had t<? be unmasked and presented to the world.

That T.S. Eliot (yes, the T.S. Eliot) had a hidden face that must be revealed. A funny bone that had remained hidden much too long!

Now, let me think, what exactly started it all? I think it was my random reading of Lewis Carroll, and the tremendous respect I have for the wisdom of Humpty Dumpty (what would we ever do without it?) that made me see the Master in a different light. For I found echoes from Alice's Wonderland in :nuch of the Master's writings: Exempli gratia, take the word "outgrabe" in the following stanza of "Jabberwocky": 'TWASbrillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves And the mome raths outgrabe.

The word is explained thus by Humpty Dumpty: "Well, 'outgribing' is something

between bellowing and whistling, with a kind of sneeze in the middle; however, you'll hear it done, maybe-down in the wood yonder-and, when you've once heard it, you'll be quite content."

To be very honest, I tried very hard to "outgribe," but with no success. I locked myself in the 100 and attempted this triple combination of bellowing-whistlingsneezing, but all I managed to produce were unearthly sounds which had my neighbors pounding frantically at the door, quite convinced that I was dying an agonizing death. Of course, I was sheepish, and could not concoct a convincing enough explanation for my experiment with sounds.

My only consolation was in the belief that T.S. Eliot would have understood. For, Eliot seemed to know the meaning of "outgribing."

Somewhere in his personal correspondence, as I snooped around, I discovered evidence to this effect. In a letter to a friend, he once mentioned certain "Bolovian gods" called "Wux." The name, he insisted, must be pronounced with care: First, the W. The W is halfway between the WH as pronounced in the Gateshead & Newcastle district...and the HW of Danish ....

Second, the U. The U is very long and might be rendered OOUHOUHUH. There is a slight, a very slight, Caesura in the middle of the U, which is expressed in pure Bolovian, by a slight belch, but no European can render . this, so do not try.

Third, the X. This is a combination of the Greek ksi and the German schch. If you attentively cough and sniff at the same time you will get nearer to it.

DONT try to pronounce WUX. I cautioned you. Else you will suffer the same fate as dear old Pro fer. Krapp of Koenigsberg, who dies a martyr to the cause of Bolovian Phonetics. He lived for three months on beans, then on Asparagus, then on Chestnuts etc. trying to

get the right accent. And then he got acute dyspepsia and colic, which spoilt his temper, so that he swallowed his front teeth and died in a Phrensy.

That is what first set me going. I was certain that this was simply the cliched tip of the iceberg: There was much more to it that must be unearthed. And I must find out what.

My search took me, among other places, to the Houghton and Pusey libraries at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts; to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas in Austin (see SPAN, April 1993); to the University of California at Los Angeles; to the New York Public Library; and to the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University in Connecticut. I followed trails, countertrails, and red herrings to way out places in Providence and Kentucky. And no matter where I went, I found bleary-eyed scholars buried nose-deep in manuscripts, working in all earnestness toward some distant scholastic goal. Truly inspired, I joined the hordes.

The Eliot papers at the Houghton Library offered ample evidence of Lewis Carroll's influence on Eliot. The Queen's Book of Red Cross (1939) has a poem entitled "The Marching Song of the Pollicle Dogs," which is full of "Portmanteau" words inspired by Carroll. (Remember Humpty Dumpty's explanation of a word like "slithy" in "Jabberwocky"? " ...'slithy' means 'lithe and slimy' ....You see it's like a portmanteau-there are two meanings packed in one word.") Eliot's poem has several such words: There are dogs that are mimsy and mum ....

There are dogs that are frowsy and frumpious ....

There are dogs that are frowly and grumpious ....

But I say if you're surly and scrumpious, Just you tread on may tail.

Each portmanteau adjective gives a new perspective on the canine species. Eliot's attention in the poem is focused on

"Pollicle Dogs." Pollicle is made to rhyme with "rollical," "frolical," "amphibolical," and even "diabolical."

In vain, I looked for "metabolical."

As I sniffed and poked through Eliot's uncollected letters at Beinecke Library at Yale, I came across further proof of Eliot's sense of humor. Verses that are now grouped under the title "King Bolo and his Big Black K ween" were mailed to Conrad Aiken in 1916. It is interesting to note that this piece of "scholarly ribaldry," as Wyndham Lewis described it to Ezra Pound, was sandwiched between serious matters: King Bolo's big black bassturd kween That airy fairy hairy un She led the dance on Golder's Green With Cardinal Bessarian ....

King Bolo's big black bass turd kween Was awfly sweet and pure She interrupted prayers one day With a shout of Pig's Manure.

K. B. b. b. b. k.

Was awfly sweet and pure She said "1 don't know what you mean!"

When the chaplain whistled to her.

Other "Colombo" poems from the "King Bolo" papers in the Pound collection at ~he Beinecke are bawdy, often verging on the obscene. But Eliot, in a letter to Pound, defended himselfthus: "No, Podesta, I may be laughter-loving, as the squamish [sic] would say and as T gladly admit-but so was Aphrodite-but I am Not COARSE." Among the many files of uncollected

papers in the Berg collection at the New York Public Library, I came across a reply Eliot sent to a tea invitation from Virginia Woolf: "I shall look forward with pleasure to taking tea with you on Tuesday, at 37 Mecklenburg Square, on a chair without a leg and from a cup without a handle."

The language is undoubtedly inspired by Edward Lear's "The Courtship of the Y onghy Bonghy Bo." In case you've forgotten it, this is the one about a besotted lover whose worldly possessions are little more than "Two old chairs and half a candle,/One old jug without a handle." His love (which is the love of a poor man) is turned down by a worldly wise Lady Jingly, and he is left heartbroken. This is a poem Eliot refers to time and again in his writings.

While leafing through the Eliot papers at the Harry Ransom Center, I stumbled on a letter to the editor of a journal in which Eliot defended himself against a harsh review of one of his books by Ezra Pound: "Now, Mr. Orage, Sir, I am going to set around the chimbly and have a chaw terbacker with Miss Meadows and the gals; and then I am going away for a 4tnight where that old Rabbit [Pound] can't reach me with his letters nor even his post cards .... " Rummaging further, I actually discovered a recipe (yes, a recipe!) by T.S. Eliot in A Symphony of Cooking, a book published by the St. Louis Society in 1954.

Now, that's something new. T.S. Eliot and cooking! Perhaps I should keep the subject in mind for future reference. Then once more I could go from sea to shining sea, from coast to coast (or maybe from pillar to post), seeking clues, evidenc~, silent witnesses. This time not to hunt out Eliot's funny bone, but to prove his culinary expertise! But for now, let me examine, sift, and organize the discoveries made so far.

0 About the Author: Manju Jaidka, seen at left studying Eliot manuscripts at the New York Public Library, teaches in the department of English, Panjab University in Chandigarh. As a postdoctoral Fulbright scholar in 1991-92, she worked on "T.S. Eliot's Popular Sources. "

Police Work in a New Era Although computers and radio-equipped vehicles are vital to modern police work, personal contact between the police and citizens remains essential to controlling crime in the United States.

Most Americans are acquainted with how their police go about their duties through television. The TV screen abounds with images of police arriving at a crime scene, sirens wailing and lights flashing, to take control of whatever situation the scriptwriter has put them into. If one discounts the exaggerations for dramatic effect, the scriptwriters are accurate on some counts.

In most American cities, police work is essentially reactive.

Police respond to calls that come in via 911, the nationwide emergency phone number. When not answering 911 calls, they patrol in police cruisers, crisscrossing their territory and watching for signs that something is not right. Seldom does a policeman walk a beat day in and day out, mixing at street level with neighborhood residents.

In the United States of yesteryear, up until the 1930s, policemen traditionally walked their beats. Each neighborhood had its own police officer, and he was a man to be reckoned with. He sorted out domestic disputes, put the fear of the Lord into unruly youth, and otherwise presided over the peace of the neighborhood in an informal, often extralegal way.

Then came the police cruiser (two policemen in an automobile), enabling fewer policemen to patrol a broader area and respond more quickly to emergencies. Police departments the country over were quick to adopt this method of patrol and response. But policing by cruisers had its negative side. Despite patrolling the same area, a two-man team in a police cruiser remained strangers to a neighborhood, their uniforms an impersonal symbol of authority. There was little rapport between police and community. They seldom met except at a crime scene or when riot threatened. In the poorer sections of cities, such confrontations developed into a "us against them" mentality, with the police cast as the enemy. And this separation was further aggravated by the fact that the police, who are paid reasonably well, could afford to live outside the neighborhoods they patrolled, often outside the city that employed them. They came to work as commuters.

The current strategies of police deployment and tactics have been generally effective, but in some American cities the tension between the police force and the community has engendered crises. The most celebrated case in recent years occurred in 1992 in Los Angeles (see SPAN, December 1992) when white police officers were videotaped by a bystander beating a black motorist, Rodney King, who had resisted arrest after a high-speed automobile chase. The acquittal of the four defendants in a trial sparked violent riots. In a second trial, two of the officers were convicted of violating King's civil rights.

To avoid such crises and reduce crime at its roots, several cities have adopte!=l a different approach to police work called "community policing." Instead of being captive to the 911 phone number, police are assigned to specific beats, often working out of police substations located in the neighborhood.

They walk their beats. Some of them even move into the neighborhood to which they are assigned.

Their duties are expanded, too. Instead of concentrating on making arrests-though they do this when required-they focus on ameliorating the causes of crime. If a series of muggings occur, for example, on a poorly lit street corner, a policeman assigned that beat would be expected to call up the city utility department and demand better street lights. One county executive, whose police department has adopted community policing, told his department heads that "any call coming in from a community police officer is to be treated as if! called myself."

SPAN presents two stories that highlight these changes in police procedures and give a feeling of what it is like to do police work in America. "Neighborhood Beat" on the following page features a program in Elgin, Illinois, where police are assigned to a specific neighborhood and actually go there to live as well as work. "Making an Arrest" (page 13) describes the legal complexities and the often unforeseen dangers in the seemingly simple act of arresting a suspect.

0

Neighborhood Beat

Three-year-old David Steele sticks close to Officer Terrance Allen. Whichever way the officer turns, little David is right there. Allen is a godsend to David, because his presence means David can play outside almost anytime he wants to.

Terrance Allen, a member of the police force of Elgin, Illinois, a city of 77,000 some 50 kilometers northwest of Chicago, is one of several officers assigned to an experimental police program called the Resident Officer Program of Elgin (ROPE). The program assigns police to work-and live-in troubled neighborhoods as a means of establishing community-police ties that will help the fight on crime.

ROPE deviates from standard police practice around the country. Officers typically live outside the neighborhoods they patrol. In a few cases, officers in ROPE already live in the neighborhood they are assigned to police. Others, like Allen, must move in and establish a home.

ROPE moved Allen and his family into Illinois Court, a government-subsidized apartment complex for low-income families that was threatened by gangs, shootings, and drug dealing. The expectation was that Officer Allen's presence day and night (though he is not on duty 24 hours a day) would be more effective in deterring crime than the occasional patrol of police officers riding in a cruiser.

And that is how it worked out. Today, David Steele and other children, including Allen's own son and daughter, play outside without fear of stray bullets or menacing street gangs. Further, Allen's neighbors see him as a visible symbol of the city's commitment-long overdue in their judgment-to do something about the unsafe conditions under which they lived.

Elgin police chief Charles Gruber implemented ROPE in 1991 as one approach to fighting crime in Elgin's declining neighborhoods.

Elgin has suf-

fered many of the same problems that have plagued other midwestern American cities since the mid-1970s: A distressed central business district, increased gang activity, and the alienation of those living in crowded and substandard housing.

When Chief Gruber arrived in Elgin in June 1990, he found an ethnically, socially, and economically diverse community. Its population had increased 20 percent over the last decade and today reflects a mix of70 percent white citizens, 19 percent Hispanic, seven percent black, and four percent Southeast Asian.

Chief Gruber implemented ROPE by first identifying neighborhoods where drugs and crime were rampant and residents were afraid to leave their homes because they believed the police department could do little to protect them. A police sergeant and five patrol officers were appointed as a special team to patrol the area and make arrests or otherwise

Officers Terrance Allen (left and center) and Bill Wolf (right) give a new meaning to police work by living with the people they police. "The crime rate has come down, but the biggest change is that residents believe the neighborhood to be a safer place," says Wolf.

suppress criminal activity.

"Many residents have the impression that the police department is ineffective in dealing with gangs," Gruber says. "They feel helpless and alone. So we saturate the area with heavy police protection on a short-term basis. However, we know that as soon as we leave, the problems will return-so we have to take the process a step further."

This meant providing a sustained police presence in targeted neighborhoods by opening police substations, a kind of neighborhood police station manned by officers assigned there full-time.

In March 1991, for example, Gruber sent a special police team into the Crestwood-Huntington Park housing project, source of numerous complaints of burglaries, drinking, loud music, fights, drug activity, and shootings.

The housing authorities donated an apartment to be used as headquarters for the police team.

When the team had finished its work, the apartment was converted to an aroundthe-clock police substation manned by three officers.

One of them is Officer Jesse Rouse, a 22-year veteran of the police force. At first he didn't want to work there. "I thought it would just be aggravation after aggravation," he says. "There are 430 apartments here, and we had no idea how many people lived in them because as many as ten people share one apartment.

"When I first came out here, people were sitting outside on cars and in doorways, playing music, drinking beer, and urinating in the street. On Sundays, soccer goals were set up in the street, closing off one portion of the complex. We met with the management and made a map of the complex, identifying problem apartments and residents who were causing the most trouble. And then I began walking the neighborhood.

"I walked around and met as many people as I could and explained what we were doing. Then I started telling the troublemakers that things were going to change, and this kind of nonsense was going to stop. I'd give them ten minutes to pick up their bottles, put the beer away, and move along. Gradually, it began to work."

For Rouse, the change in attitude of the people who live in the complex has been one of the most dramatic turnarounds in his police career. "The kids love me," he says. "On school days there will be 250 kids at various bus stops in the complex, and I know most of them. I break up scuffles and stop the swearing and tell them we're not going to tolerate that kind of thing anymore."

Officer Cecil Smith had a similar experience at The Mill, another troubled housing project where a substation was established.

"The neighborhood was

overrun by prostitution, gangs, and open drug dealing. We got together with the management and weeded out the troublemakers. I'd say the problems are 80 percent solved," Smith says.

After the program's initial success at Crestwood-Huntington Park and The Mill, police administrators turned their attention to the Neighborhood Housing Services district, which was struggling to overcome the image of a downtrodden neighborhood, even though Elgin Academy, a prestigious college-preparatory school, was located there. Patrol officer Brian Gorcowski, who lives near the academy, was assigned to work in his home district. He has taken police work to new levels. Besides being a neighbor and friend-the people know and trust him-he brings to his patrolman's job prior work experience as a marriage counselor, a social worker, and employment counselor. In his first six months on the job, he took it upon himself to find work for three people in his neighborhood.

"One guy was well known to the police and didn't really trust me. He says he wanted to work, but his criminal record kept him from getting a job. So I called people at factories around here and was able to get him a job," says Gorcowski.

"I told him he had to give his employer a good day's work, and so far he has. I didn't hear from him until several months later when I received a call from him about 11:30 p.m. He told me that he didn't want people to see him talking to me-I suppose it would hurt his reputation on the street-but he just wanted to thank me for the job."

Gorcowski has found that his neighbors only want to deal with him. "People

want to tell me things because I am their police officer. They know me because I live here, and I'm going to be here for two years," he says.

A three-year resident of the area, Vera Van Wambeke, would never let her children leave their yard before Gorcowski arrived. "Now because Brian is here, the neighborhood has settled down. I feel a lot safer and so do all the kids. When kids get into scrapes, Brian gets to the bottom of what really happened and they respect his decision."

Christmas cards from neighbors hang on Gorcowski's apartment wall as testament to the respect they hold for him.

Patrol officer Allan Holder, who lives and works in the troubled historic district, concurs. "The special police team moves in and cleans up the neighborhood, and we come in to maintain what it accomplished," Holder says. "The people see us in action. They see us run off the troublemakers and then move in to make sure they don't come back. The good people really appreciate us and are glad we're here."

Norda Landers, one of those "good people," is a 27-year resident of the area.

Landers can't say enough about her neighbor and police officer. "He's just been such a positive factor," she says.

"The neighborhood was going downhill, but now the gangs have disappeared, and it's nice again. Al Holder and I even had coffee together this morning."

Patrol officer Terry Allen's wife and children moved into the Illinois Court housing project with him-but not until he was sure it was safe.

In December 1991, Allen stood with his son and another preschooler in front of his apartment. Though the complex bears the scars of previous battles, the environment has Bill Wolf at his desk in his residential changed to reflect a workassignment. His plans include building a ing man's neighborhood.

"When they used to send community database with his computer. a squad car here, no one wanted to come," Allen says. "When I moved in, people were pretty skeptical. I didn't get any cooperation, but I never felt

uncomfortable.

Gradually, as people saw I was serious, they began to help me. One resident even asked his guests to leave because they were causing trouble.

Now we don't have congregations of people out here anymore. The kids are even able to come out and play in the summer."

To help improve his new neighborhood, Allen passed around a questionnaire asking residents to identify problems. When he learned that the largest single complaint was unsupervised children, he initiated field trips, camping at a nearby Boy Scout camp, and other programs. "Kids can't stay away from me," Allen says sheepishly.

But is finding work for the unemployed and taking kids to day camps a part of police work?

While evaluation of an experimental program like this is difficult, the results are encouraging. "When I called Washington, D.C., to ask for federal assistance in evaluating the program, they just laughed," Gruber recalls. "They said we couldn't do that because we know it won't work. But it is working and may drastically alter traditional approaches to police work. It builds trust with the community and improves the perception that the police are trying to make life better. However, there is no quick fix to deteriorating neighborhoods in our cities-i t takes time and commi tmen t. " Ironically, calls to the police for help have increased in areas served by ROPE, probably because the resident police officers are encouraging such calls. As a result of ROPE, serious crime is down, says Gruber, "but we also must look ~t the teenage-pregnancy rate and the school-dropout rate to see if we are having a positive impact.

"If we can enhance the quality of life and make the area safe enough for people to live in without the fear of crime, we allow the value-setting influences in young people's lives to thrive. If we can remove the perception of fear, abandonment, and alienation to allow society's normal moral structure to prosper, we remove the fundamental causes of crime."

0

Intriguedwithpolice life, writer Harvey Rachlin decided to investigate their world. So with 860 police recruits, both male andfemale, he attended the Nerr York City Police Academy. Six months later, after graduation, he accompanied several rookies as they put their police training into practice. Out of that experience, Rachlin wrote The Making of a Cop, a day-by-day account of the rigorous discipline and intensive instruction recruits receive.

Police are defenders of the public safety, but they must also be protectors of the individual rights of suspects. When investigating a possible crimeJor instance, the police must ensure that no unreasonable searches or seizures are made, as guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Thefollowing excerpt isfrom Chapter 3 of The Making of a Cop, which illustrates some of the investigaton' procedures that police follOlr \I'hen apprehendillR slI5peCls.

Late one evening, a police officer riding through a plush residential neighborhood spots a scraggly looking man in a beat-up old car. The car is parked on a dark, dead-end street. The officer's suspicions are aroused, but what may he do?

An impoverished homeless lady approaches a police officer and accuses a well-dressed businessman across the street of taking her money. What action may the officer take?

A cop orders a teenager, whom he observes looking in car windows and trying the doors, to stop, but the teenager walks away. How may the cop respond?

A college student is pulled over for passing a stop sign. He is nervous because inside his pocket are ten glassine envelopes of cocaine. May the officer, sensing this unease, search the student or his car?

These scenarios illustrate the questions of what police officers legally may do, what they are legally prohibited from doing, and what rights individuals have in possible criminal circumstances. It is the police officer's job to enforce the lawto issue summonses and to arrest criminal offenders, but at the

same time interfere with citizens' rights as little as possible. Every police department has procedures for its officers to follow in various situations, but it is laws and court decisions that really define police conduct. In law class, using case examples like those above, and discussion and debate of criminal law and how it is applied, the recruits slowly acquire the basic knowledge they will need on the streets.

First, a cop must be legally justified in taking an action. He must be well educated and informed because he will have to act quickly. On the street, crimes are often committed in seconds, and there is little time to consider the legal ramifications of an action. May the officer stop a suspicious person?

Use force? Ask questions? Conduct a frisk?

Search an automobile's glove compartment'!

Open a locked briefcase? Draw a gun? Shoot?

All these are actions whose justification might seem obvious to the public in a given set of circumstances but which for the police officer require prudent but instantaneous evaluation and decision-making.

Of course, a cop's entire tour of duty is not spent arresting perpetrators or handing out summonses; in fact, most of the calls police respond to are service-related-taking charge at accidents, handling family arguments, r~ndering assistance of some sort.

Civil disputes, where criminal activity is absent, are important to cops in that such situations ultimately have an impact on how the police are perceived by the public. Such day-to-day interactions bring police in contact with the people of the city. Derring-do police action may not be called for, but courtesy, compassion, and being agood listener can go a long way to create a positive police image.

It is in handling criminal matters that the police fill their roles as society's defenders, guardians oflaw and order. But cops are only people, after all, and their decisions may sometimes be clouded by a variety of human failings common to us all; and whether they're making an arrest, searching someone, or trying to obtain a confession, cops are bound by laws too.

The legal issues involved in approaching suspicious people on the street or in deciding exactly when to make an arrest are complex. Various police actions may be taken only when certain levels of proof are present to justify them. Acting in haste or improperly can result in a criminal going free and a cop looking stupid. Unfortunately, that happens not so much because of concrete mistakes, but, rather, often as a result of making a wrong judgment call. It may take a cop years to come (Continued

on page 44)

Above right: A river journey through the Grand Canyon in Arizona is one of the great American adventures. Right: Author Bob Shacochis (far left in the photo) holds on tight as the oarsman in rear steers the boat through Colorado River rapids. Above: High drama ensued when the author was swept through a rapid that was 90 percent speeding mud.

Spills and Thrills Text by BOB SHACOCHIS

With some eagerness and some anxiety and some misgiving we enter the canyon below and are carried along by the swift water. ...

-MAJOR JOHN WESLEYPOWELL, August 13, 1869, descending the Colorado River into the Grand Canyon for the first time

Photographs

by DUGALD

BREMNER

Some eagerness, surely, almost 125 years later, among us aboard the dories ....Here at the head of Granite Rapid, though, the morning of day seven on a 16-day, 446-kilometer descent of the Colorado River, anxiety and misgivings abound. For six days we've had our splashings, our watery rock and roll; we've been [slapped] by mad flocks of waves, clawed at by boiling swirlies, chastened by eddies that whipped us around; but really

we're still greenhorns, teased but not tested, virgin rats in our aquatic intercourse with this most dangerously seductive of rivers, and ~e know in our chilly bones that day seven will be different, a big rapids day from start to finish, including the notorious, homicidal Crystal.

Up in the bow seat of Bronco's wooden dory, I look below us to the most concentrated stretch of liquid violence I've ever considered entering of my own free

will. When surf on the coast gets this volatile, we know we're in for a hurricane.

As Bronco positions us in the current to drift down the slot, my adrenal glands are as parched as my tongue, and Broncofirst among some very notable equals at the oars on this trip----Bronco, by God, is hyperven ti la ting.

Hold everything, I want to say. Can we talk about this?

Bronco's lungs expand his barrel chest to its fullest capacity, and then he exhales loudly with gale force, like someone preparing to swim a long, long way underwater. I've spent a day or more river-running with each of the other four boatmen, none of whom displayed this particular respiratory technique at the tops of rapids.

It's all new to me, even the Southwest, which I've somehow missed in all my years of American restlessness. I've mostly spent my life around oceans, in them, surfing, and on them, aboard all manner of worthy and not-so-worthy craft. And when your boat, near or far from shore, sinks from under you, the water rising to your waist, your chest, your neck, it's clear you're not having fun anymore, this isn't what you had in mind when you hopped aboard, and now you have to go about the nasty, tiring, desperate business of saving yourself and others.

Bronco's huffs and Bronco's puffs give me cause to reflect on this, and more, as we descend to meet the dragon .... Granite [Rapid] thunders. [but] Bronco's breathing is the loudest sound in my ears, increasing surreally, like a nightmare sequence in a movie. He's doing this, he says, to calm down and center himself, which should make me glad, but it's alarming the hell out of me.

"My heart rate is in the red zone," I call back to Bronco where he sits in the cockpit, gently working the oars, gliding us into an entry position that is deliberate and precise.

"Mine's running a little fast, too," he About the Author: Bob Shacochis is a critically acclaimed novelist whose best-knolVn lwrk is a collection of short stories called Easy in the

Islands.

allows, exhaling like a bear.

"Oh, good," says Pete, a middle-aged school principal who's sitting next to me in the starboard seat. "I thought it was only me." Jack, Pete's 74-year-old father, is in the stern-his heart is just fine. The three of us had made a pact to ride this day with Bronco, through Granite and Crystal, and on day 12 through Lava Falls, some of the most challenging, barely navigable rapids in the world, which I fully expect to swallow us whole.

And before I forget again, I should tell you the name of Bronco's boa t, which for some reason I keep blocking out.

It's the Niagara.

We begin to accelerate toward the ledge. "PA Y ATTENTION!" Bronco yells, but truly we are undivided in that respect.

It all happens fast, like a relentless flurry of punches. Catapulting off the point of the tongue toward the first wave, something wonderful occurs-the speed of the action eclipses fear; whatever apprehension you experienced seconds before is gone, replaced with a sublime, job-oriented lucidity, enabling you to concentrate on the common goal-keeping the boat right-side up. The boatman's task is to stroke away from hazards-rocks, pourovers, holes, hydraulics-and to jockey the bow into a straight-on cut through the chaotic waves. The passengers' responsibility is to keep the boat trim, often by highsiding-everybody in the boat quickly throwing their weight toward the high, or upraised, gunwale, as a big wave lifts one side of the boat and perilously lowers the other. Invariably there are times when a gunwale is lifted so high, its angle so radical, that you are called upon in your capacity as a highsider to stick your torso out over the heavenward gunwale and insert your head directly into the jaws of the dragon. With each rapid we've run in the six days since we rowed out of Lees Ferry, I've discovered that my inner mechanism for highsiding comes equipped with a hair trigger, inspiring me to pop up and over the side as if a grenade has landed in the boat.

Bronco pivots the bow around into the first icy wave, which clobbers us, but we smack through, drenched, and instanta-

neously get crunched by a second and a third. Whatever Bronco puts in front of us, Pete and I are going to highside into oblivion. Peaks rise up at us from all sides; Pete and I are being pounded, jumping around, doing our best to eat or be eaten. We rocket up through the collapsing crest of a standing wave, and then suddenly we're through, wallowing over the billows of the tail, the boat filled with water, the waves still moderate and to my eye alone a threat.

"SIT DOWN, BOB!" hollers Bronco, and I do, finally, appreciative of the fact that we're still afloat.

"BAIL! BAIL! BAIL!" By now all's well, and we're eddying out into a rescue position to wait for the rest of our tiny fleet to follow. It's impossible not to express our exuberance; Pete and I are whooping, praising Bronco's expertise, and aboard a motorized raft-what they call a baloney boat because of its sausagelike pontoons-two dozen passengers who stopped to watch our run are cheering the spectacle of the bold and nimble dories.

Frankly the acclamation is well deserved, because our [oarsmen]-Bronco, Factor, Dugald, Elena, and Moqui-are among the best boatmen on the planet....

The rest of the boats slam through the rapid, a serious nine-plus on the Colorado River guides' one-to-ten rapid-rating scale. "You're not gonna find any bigger than Granite," says MoquL his eyes wild with excitement. Elena, at the oars of the Hidden Passage, agrees.

"Total hammerage," she says, and thrusts back into the current.

Running the Colorado River is still, I suppose, the Great American Adventure.

Thanks to the conscientious principles of the river guides, as well as the vigilant custodianship of the National Park Service, the timeless canyon superficially, at least, resembles its unvisited past, though today it is an exceedingly managed environment. It is regulated, controlled, husbanded, and institutionalized, euphemistically "free," and to label it "wilderness" is to employ a depressingly liberal usage of the term. [In 1991], the park hosted four million visitors, 22,000 of whom made it at least partway down the

Left: Peace at last. The boat crew sets up camp along the riverbank at sunset. Below: Bronco is a legendary boatman on the Colorado River.

river, competing for scarce campsites on the eroding sandbars and deltas and clogging the more accessible side canyons.

And yet once you're in the Grand Canyon, walking or floating, the presence of the government monolith recedes, not quite to an abstraction, since its rules and codes remain a check on behavior, but enough into the shadowy majesty of the place to forget about.

None of our boatmen has ever known a free-running Colorado [the way Martin Litton knew it]. A former director of the Sierra Club and the founder of Grand Canyon Dories, Litton first descended the Colorado in 1955, becoming only the 184th person since John Wesley Powell to float the canyon from beginning to end.

The following year, the U.S. Congress authorized the construction of Glen Canyon Dam, 25 kilometers above Lees Ferry, trading 300 kilometers of astonishing landscape for Lake Powell and the transforming miracles of technologyirrigation, flood control, electricity-so that the desert's other limited resources might be exploited beyond good sense. By 1964, when the last of ten million tons of concrete had been poured, the Grand Canyon was endowed with daily high and low "tides," which fluctuated as much as

six meters (today it fluctuates 1.2 to two meters). Where it was released from the dam, the Colorado now ran blue-green rather than the chocolaty red that gave it its name; and the water was perpetually cold, seven degrees Celsius near Lees Ferry, warming to about 13 degrees Celsius in the lower canyon, able to support a prolific trout fishery but no longer suitable for many of its native species. Except for what its side streams, such as the Paria and the Little Colorado, contributed, the river was deprived of millions of tons of silt and sediment, and was incapable of nourishing its beaches. One of Glen Canyon Dam's most significant and altogether unanticipated impacts, however, was its generation of an environmentalist movement, which in the mid-1960s, under the leadership of Litton and David Brower, rallied successfully against the Bureau of Reclamation's plans to flood more than half the length of the Grand Canyon with two additional dams at Marble and Bridge canyons ....

Norman Nevills guided the first commercial trip down the river in 1938, yet by 1964 only 900 people had made the passage in the 95 years since Powell. But in 1970, nearly 10,000 adventure hounds scrambled aboard whatever floated anq set off through the canyon to cheat death, as the boatmen enjoy saying, in the hot, stinking desert. Two years later, more than 14,000 lined up ... to take advantage of what was now truly a de facto industry, a somewhat disorganized and still carefree system for the mass consumption of adventure, so that by 1973 the Park Service, not blind to the writing on the wall, froze commercial and private river use at the previous year's levels. The ceiling has crept up over the years but with the quota essentially set, the 20 or so commercial outfitters sanctioned by the park found it in their interest to begin raising prices.

Which in turn attracted a more affluent clientele, which in turn began to dictate the fundamental texture of the experience, demanding shorter, faster, trips, better food, more sophisticated equipment, more information, more jokes, more ice-cold beer, and as much of a guarantee of a safe and sane expedition as their lawyers were

prepared to insist upon.

In the end, the Grand Canyon was saved, its incomparable virtues intact, but it was also sanitized and domesticated. It isn't and never will be Disneyland, though that's exactly what some passengers appear to want, nor has it been emptied of opportunities to question your better judgment for accepting its challenge. And time spent on the river, especially in a dory, isn't remotely like time spent fattening yourself on a cruise ship, though occasionally some guides will behave like that's where they trained.

Yet even [now] the river, the pristine canyon, and the dories can still turn you into a euphoric fool, howling at the apricot moon, ever so grateful to be alive ....

Bring a wagonload of sundry starlets down to the water and the dories would still be the prettiest, most tantalizing shapes on the river. Adapted by Litton and fellow river [runner] P.T. Reilly from the McKenzie River dory developed in Oregon (which itself evolved from the original seagoing dory built by Portuguese fishermen), the Grand Canyon dory is honeycombed with watertight hatches, flat-bottomed like the old scows, but lightweight and rigid, responsive as a surfboard. It has high, upturned ends like the toes of Aladdin's slippers and is splaysided like a tapered seedpod burst in the middle. You won't find a more intimate, spunky, felicitous, or graceful vessel for carrying passengers and gear through white water.

It kicks and bounces, bucks and dips, perches and stalls, and busts right through cresting tons of water; it can exhilarate you profoundly; and, let's face it, it can scare you bad, because the dainty bastard flips.

Flipping is an accidental and unwelcome sport that all the boatmen with usexcept Dugald Bremner in the Ticaboohave engaged in more than once in the time they've rowed dories on the Colorado. Dugald, in 35 dory trips, has never flipped, and he'd rather not talk about it, for fear of tempting fate ....

There were 30 of us: The boatmen, one cook, two oarsmen, and one swam per for the two support rafts, [20] passengers

about to have the adventure of a lifetime, and me. May and June are normally two of northern Arizona's driest months, but it poured the week before the trip, and we left Flagstaff, [a city 100 kilometers from the Canyon], under stormy, brutish skies, not a beam of the desert's blowtorch sun in sight until we crossed the ditch at Navajo Bridge. Below, I caught my first glimpse of the river (dirty) and canyon (unimpressive) and thought, stupidly, big deal. On the launch ramp at Lees Ferry... the midpoint between the Colorado's headwater and its mouth at the Gulf of California-Bronco introduced us to "your best friend for the next 16 days," which was not a case of [beer], as some might have hoped, but our life jackets.

And so we shoved out onto the mighty river. I stuck in my hand, which took about ten seconds to turn blue, and prayed: Lord, I am a sinner, but please don't make this be my penance-just a little sunburn, maybe a few red ant bites ....

At 31, Elena Kirschner was the youngest of our boatmen. "She has to be twice as good as a male guide," Martin Litton had said of her. "She doesn't have the same muscle to correct her mistakes, so she simply never makes any." To that assessment I would only add that Elena left no doubt in my mind that she cut the smoothest, most efficient lines on the river.

Rapids have distinct voices-the smaller they are, the more high-pitched-and long before we had it in sight the one ahead at Badger Creek growled a throaty warning to us. Then I saw it, and it looked terrible, it looked cruel, with a flash flood churning down its side creek to contribute to the overall effect. My life jacket was glove tight, my eyeglasses cinched so close to my face they were nearly contact lenses. I looked at Elena, and she was unnervingly serene and composed.

Going through Badger Creek Rapid reminded me of the old World War II movies, the aerial sequences, dogfights, and bombing runs, imperturbable pilots throwing their planes into steep banks or climbs while the flak explodes all around the crew members, jostled back and forth like rag dolls. That's the sensation I best recall, plus being fire-hosed with freezing

water, my teeth chattering miserably at the bottom of the rapid, where Bronco waited to ensure that all was wel!.. ..

On day two we halted for a rest stop and lunch at North Canyon, [which we] then hiked up .... By any standard, the afternoon was quite dramatic. Early on, the sun was blasting down, which was wha t all of us had expected, wea therwise.

We had stripped as much as decency would allow-which was a lot, here in the hot, stinking desert-had slathered ourselves with sunblock, and were even looking forward to getting a little wet to cool off. Ahead, the salmon-hued Redwall limestone was lifting out of the river, the rim was more than 300 meters up, and by now we had entered the Roaring Twenties, another source of consternation,. a series of wretched cataracts that had claimed its share of victims in the early days of river running and exploration ....

At 21 Mile Rapid we were doused quite nicely. Vivian and I cheerfully bailed the bow well. But before we had traveled another three kilometers to Indian Dick Rapid, a purplish and choleric weather system began to rumble over the North Rim, and although this didn't discourage us, by the time Indian Dick had given us a good lashing we were wetter than fish and abominably cold, no sun at all to warm us as we seemed headed into a cloudburst.. ..

Tympanic thundering bowled down the alley of the canyon, lightning arrowed all along the rim, and we rowed backward, downstream, into a rising wind. I looked over my shoulder to see a squall hanging sheets of rain like gauze curtains one behind the other, deeper and deeper down the canyon until the red walls disappeared into a fizz of obscurity. It was beautiful, at

least for the next 30 seconds, until it creamed us. Dugald pulled with herculean strokes into the gusts, the lightning, the thunder and the downpour, and swung us around at the last moment to enter Cave Springs Rapid, where it began to hail into our faces. Vivian and I tucked our heads between our knees, and, however reluctantly, I was beginning to get the strange idea that this was fun.

The Grand Canyon is Earth's own living scrapbook of its history, g,age upon page of eloquent strata leading you back through aeons. Ninety years ago [conservationist] John Muir, on the same wavelength, proclaimed the canyon "nature's own capital city," and there's not much original left to say about the place. Muir also suggested that "the prudent keep silence," a cautionary reference to the Grand Canyon's well-merited reputation for being writerproof, an unparalleled spectacle of inconceivable scale and scope, fearsome and wondrous and indescribable. Of course Muir went on, as all the canyon's wordsmiths have, after first confessing to the woeful inadequacy of their talents, to shovel a dense and flowery prose into the ditch, all of it appropriate if not especially readable, attesting to the canyon's Tuscan hues and wantonly American light, its monumental imagery and startling architectural mimicry, its temples, cathedrals, spires, pagodas, terraces, shrines, castles, and battlements ....

Kenton Grua, also known as Factor, [has] had a running love affair with the

Fromfar left: Morning rituals; evening dinner; exploring a side canyon; and examining damages to the boat.

canyon since the late 1960 and is the spiritual heir apparent to men like Powell, Nevills, and Litton .... A balding 41 with a wiry ponytail, Factor has Viking blood in him, looks like a medieval crusader, and is the river industry's savant, honored by fellow boatmen with his unusual nickname because he's a factor in everything that happens down in the canyon. "Let's stop and Factorize that," the boatmen might say, or "Got caught in a Factor eddy," if they were there when Grua, in his mild-mannered delivery, began expounding on one of his favorite subjects-geology, botany, biology, natural history, anthropology, archaeology, the secret locations of ruins and artifacts, dams, water levels, boat building. He's floated the canyon more than anyone else alive (about 200 times), and in the floods of 1983, after being told by the Park Service not to do it, he set out from Lees Ferry under an almost-full moon with two crewmen in his dory. In 36 hours and 38 minutes, including a flip at Crystal, he broke the speed record (two-and-a-half days) for traveling the full 446 kilometers of the canyon in any kind of boat.

We rode together on a lazy, sunny Sunday, chitchatting our way down the river as it calmed [50-60 kilometers from our starting point]. "I don't have as much testosterone as I once had," Factor said, smiling, but I doubted it. We discussed the days when he had been under Litton's mentorship, and he told me he could now work on the river year-round, guiding for the scientific missions in the winter, but

even so a boatman couldn't earn enough to buy himself the cheapest house in Flagstaff, and that's the trade-off ....

At the junction of the Little Colorado we beached the boats, and Moqui led us 800 meters upstream on the Chiquita, made us put our legs through the armholes of our life jackets so that we wore them like diapers, and then directed a whitewater clinic, persuading us to jump into the disgusting flood and be swept through a rapid that was 90 percent speeding mud, our feet in the air in front of us, our butts bumping along the rocks.

I wore my eyeglasses, and the first wave I raced through blacked out the lenses like paint so that I spun blind down the thick flush. We hated it so much we did it twice.

Now we were begging for [more exciting] stuff. We ignored Tanner Rapid (four on the ten-point rapid-rating scale), regarded Unkar (seven) with scorn, never even saw Nevills (six), scouted Hance (ten) with some trepidation but then scooted through without much fanfare ....

Back to day seven, where all this began, the river has risen to 340-420 cubic meters per second, a medium flow. I am permanently covered with a thin film of silt. A searing, dehydrating wind is blowing, and the water is busy. We're in the schist of the Inner Gorge, the rim is 1,600 meters up, Granite and Hermit are behind us, and Crystal's coming on.

From far away we listen to the dragon roar of Crystal, and then we're there, on shore, taking our time, scouting the beast.

Just a few years ago the boatmen wouldn't take passengers through Crystal on the dories; they'd make them hike around while the boatmen went through alone. Now the water level is low enough to chance it, yet it's still a terrifying run.

Right at the top is a colossal hole and below it, almost six meters high, is what's known as New Wave, tossing and writhing furiously, and below that, more gigantic crests and a rock field.

"That's death," says Moqui, pointing at the hole. "You'll flush out, but the boat will be trapped in there."

Bronco asks us to gather around. "All right, who's going?" he asks solemnly.

"This is serious. If something happens, you're on your own. The boatman won't be able to help you because he's going to be too busy saving his own ass."

"What do you think?" someone asks him.

"I can't tell you what to do," he says.

An Australian couple decide to walk around, but everybody else is going.

Penny, an amateur photographer from Virginia who's here with her husband and two grown-up sons, gives them each a kiss. Moqui and Elena hug each other tightly. "Good luck, good luck," we each say to one another. Pete, Jack, and I follow Bronco back to the Niagara, knowing that we'll be the first to go. My knees are shaking, but what the hell. We push into the current.

Bronco isn't hyperventilating this time-he's as focused as a man can get-then we drop down through lateral waves fighting to shove us into the hole, skirt the hole, flash past Thank God Eddy, and Bronco has nailed the dragon bastard, not a drop of water in the boat, and we struggle into Photographers Eddy to monitor the other dories blazing down the gullet, everyone acing it, and each new success making us wild with joy, tears in our eyes at the sight of these boatmentheir brave hearts bigger than all the rapids stacked together-and these quick, enduring moments of excellence that have entered the world.

We advance euphorically through the rest of the Jewels; mile after mile of snarly beauties. A boat passes us, and Pete and I

stick our heads together, happy and silly, making an obnoxious outboard engine whine, but there's a general commotion behind us. We've lost sight of Factor, back around the bend. Dugald saw him enter Sapphire, but he has yet to exit.

Then down he comes, slowly slugging through, Vivian and a German woman in the stern, appalled, the woman's husband up in the bow, bailing furiously as the river gushes in at the waterline where the canyon has driven its fist through the dory. We've no alternative but to pull ashore and patch the hole, which takes two hours, a roll of duct tape, acetone, a can or so of epoxy, a sheet of nylon-mesh screen, and enough self-criticism to make a Maoist wince.

On, on we go, the divine presence of the canyon crouching above us and Bronco barking at me to sit down. For five days more we patrol the hot core of the ditch, stopping frequently to wander spectacular canyons-Elves Chasm, Blacktail, Deer Creek, Matkatamiba Canyon, Havasu Canyon .... The rain is a distant memory, the sun fries us, but there are real moments of enchantment. [Someone] observes that what modern society wants most is experience without risk, [but] we are headed for Lava Falls Rapid (ten), which I'd like to think exempts us from the trend. More than anything, I suppose, this means the river has done its best to ready me for the Falls, and I am ready.

We pass Vulcans Throne and an ancient volcanic neck jutting up through the river and pull ashore for our final scout of the river. Bronco is very somber, so are we, so's everybody. We scale the hot basalt trail to the lookout point, speaking in low voices. My first sight of the run is reassuring, but the more I study it-the ledge hole at the top, the impossible trio of waves at the bottom, the mine field of rocks, the ferocity of the forces that have shaped it-the more I am acutely aware of its extraordinary wrath. This is the queen, and unlike Crystal, she can't be outfoxed-we have to plow right through much of the worst of it. For the first time the boatmen each take their passengers aside and, pointing down into the maelstrom, explain the technicalities of the

Rattlesnakes pose yet another hazard to explorers at the Grand Canyon.

run, making them visualize, step by step, what to expect. The first major threat is an insane V-wave at the bottom of the tongue; Bronco would try to pierce it on the left, counting on the right swell to propel us through and sweep us away from the wall if it didn't flip us first. Since I am in the starboard bow, Bronco admits, squinting at me, that wave is mine, more than any body's, to wrestle into submission. I want to tell him, Count on me and Pete, but I can't find my voice. .

The drop through the Falls is four vertical meters in just over 90 meters.

We're all going-Dugald and Factor in a second run. Nobody is walking around.

As Bronco points us into the left side of the V, the right lateral pinches closed over the vortex and wallops us, geysers detonating, but it throws us violently away from the basalt wall and into the right-side channel, though not as far left as Bronco had hoped. We rocket down the groove to face the monster threesome: The dory is 5.5 meters long, and the first wave stands us straight up on its slope with still more wave above our heads. The stern fills with water, but Pete and I are stretched out over the bow post, and we knife through, into the trough below and back up so high that Pete and I can see outside the canyon down to Flagstaff, and again water floods the stern up to the cockpit while Pete and I are high and dry

as we assault the third wave and shatter through into the clear, screaming hosannas while Bronco screams BAIL!but we're waterless up front, two highsiders in deep rapture, and as we congratulate our great good fortune we look upstream in time to watch the Dirty Devil in the jaws of the dragon, and she's upside down.

Moqui has flipped.

It happened at the top in the V-wave.

The dory turned sideways, nobody highsided, and she came back over on them. Vivian and Monica, the German woman, were in the stern. Vivian thought, The boat can't flip, it simply can't-they talk about it but it doesn't happen, and the next thing she knew she was trapped under the hull, then flushed out down the right wall, through the catastrophic waves, and then she was backstroking in an eddy toward shore, an ostrich-egg-size lump over her right eye. Moqui stayed with the boat, but Monica and Steve and Chris-the sons of the couple from Virginia-flushed into the left channel, swallowing water, until they were through the rapid and Moqui was struggling to pull them up to safety on the hull, where they could grab the flip lines and help him right the dory, which they did, before it went on below into Lower Lava Rapid and disaster.

Back at the top of the Falls Elena finesses the V-wave, but the first big wave below spins her around, tumbles her out of her seat backward, her feet momentarily pedaling air. The boat exits the wave stern-first, but Elena regains control and comes through fine, looking downstream to see Moqui in the middle of recovery, then rows like mad to rescl!e Vivian, who's been in the cold water far too long.

Moqui muscles the swamped Dirty Devil to shore with his three stunned and gasping passengers. Bronco pushes into an eddy, and we tie up to the raft and clamber over the rocks to get in position opposite the big waves, throw lines ready for more trouble .... [Dugald and Factor make the daunting run successfully, although Factor was] compelled to drop both oars in the middle of the Falls and highside himself or

else suffer the consequence ....

We regroup and head around the bend to make our camp, the champagne corks pop, we toast Vivian, now a member of one of the most elite clubs on the planetsenior citizens who have swum Lava Falls-and we toast Moqui, who has flipped ten times on the Colorado though five have been at Lava Falls, and yet he still insists this is his favorite rapid of all, and I think I know what he means. I think I've finally got the picture, because I want to go back through Lava, I want to do it again, now, I want to do it ten or 15 times, I'd like to try to row a raft down it, and then, mad fool, I'd like to give it a go in the inflatable kayak, after a year or so of training, and then God only knows where the depth of my delusion might lead me.

For those of you who've ever wondered, this is how an apparently rational person, under the influence of a great river and a mighty canyon, can be fundamentally transformed, eventually to be certified as a lunatic.

I still have yet to see the Grand Canyon of the Colorado from high up on its rim.

I'm told I might find it crowded with tourists but that once I step up to the edge I'll be alone, looking at the world fall away, down the hot walls into the cold gut of it all, where in another wink of geologic time these boatmen, their hearts uplifted and raised into the light, will have metamorphosed into another rich page of the canyon's history, becoming the legends to be read and remembered by all the generations of [river runners] yet unborn. 0

Braving the Brahmaputra As Bob Shacochis notes in his companion article, the Colorado is no longer a vlrgm river. Despite its thrills, the Grand Canyon has become "sanitized and domesticated" by National Park regulations and millions of tourists.

Yet, throughout the world many magnificent untamed rivers await the adventurous.

In late 1992, a joint Indo-U.S. rafting expedition successfully challenged one of the most remote and difficult of these, the Brahmaputra in northeast India.

Brahmaputra, which means "Son of the Creator" in Hindi, begins in western Tibet, flows leisurely 1,000 kilometers due east, then turns sharply south. This turn and the subsequent drainage into Assam creates the fast, volatile flow that makes for world-class white-water rafting. In 250 kilometers, the river's elevation drops more than 2,750 meters, cutting through gorges about a kilometer deep. When it enters India, water flow is already a respectable 700 cubic meters per second (similar to the Colorado). But in Assam, the flow triples to more than 2,000 cubic meters per second. This big volume of pushing water creates numerous massive rapids and a strong shore-to-

Above left: A stretch of the Brahmaputra River in Arunachal Pradesh. Above: At Bomda Rapids the expedition encountered waves as high as four meters.

Two of the four rafts ultimately overturned there.

shore current throughout its length.

Shaukat Sikand of New Delhi and Steve Currey of Provo, Utah, jointly headed the Indo-U.S. Brahmaputra Expedition.

They planned a ten-day descent between the village of Tuting, just inside India, and the town of Passighat at the edge of the Assam valley. The intervening 180 kilometers contain more than 75 sizable rapids. Most are relatively benign, similar to the Tanner or Unkar rapids on the Colorado that Shacochis describes. However, at least 16 are as volatile and unpredictable as Hance, Lava Falls, and even Crystal. These have uniquely Indian names: Rikor, Bomda, Ningguing, and, the worst, Kaiko-a two-kilometer stretch of explosive, building-sized curls and stoppers.

Steve and Shaukat are experienced rafters. In the mid-1980s, Shaukat trained on rivers in the United States, including the Colorado. He then returned home to sponsor several rafting expeditions throughout northern India. Steve rafted for years in North America and had rafted in India twice before.

The two assembled a team of 17 North Americans and ten Indians, including five experienced guides. The youngest (22) was Pilot Officer Deepak Ahluwalia of the Indian Air Force.

The oldest (73) was Shirley Johnson of Beverly Hills, California. When asked why she, a retired grandmother, would travel literally halfway around the world to brave a remote, turbulent river-and pay for the privilege, Shirley simply answered: "Why not?"

The expedition's four state-of-the-art rafts shoved off on November 21, blessed on departure by a traditional Indian puja. The colorful image at launch time of bright blue helmets and yellow boats against the stark greens, browns, and whites of the jungle and river left a lasting impression on Shirley and the other expeditioners. Although a road crew paralleled the descent for support, direct contact was often impossible due to steep I,OOO-metergorges, dense forests, and the lack of tracks to the river. Often the only sign of other human presence would be thin bamboo suspension bridges strung across the gorges 450 meters above the river. In fact, for two whole days-days three and four-expedition members were unable to communicate with anyone else.

Such isolation can become an almost mystical experience, with the river assuming a personality of its own. Along languid stretches of the Brahmaputra, the deep blue of the clear sky, the rich green of the jungle, and the cold clarity of the water blended to create for the participants a profound sense of tranquil oneness. Then, with a rush, each stretch of rapids would become an intense contest between spirits. The Son of the Creator dwarfed its challengers and regularly upended boats and occupants. Yet, each time, the river would yield to simple human determination to succeed.

Shirley remembered not only the beauty of the region but also the simplicity and charm of the tribal people the expedition team encountered. Natives in the region are called Miyang and are part of the larger Adi tribe, scattered throughout the northeast. Mostly of Mongoloid descent, the Miyang

are animist in their faith and pursue a hunter-gatherer culture. They are familiar with the outside world, but they prefer to maintain a simple lifestyle. Women's costumes are colorful and creative. Men wear ornate necklaces as a sign of wisdom, authority, and (when passed on to sons) continuity within the tribe. Some are former cannibals. Usually shy of strangers, the Miyang greeted their novel visitors throughout the trip with food, dances, and a fruit-based alcoholic beverage called apaong.

Spills on the river were inevitably dramatic. At Ningguing on

Above: Battling it out in Bomda Rapids.

Left: Shirley Johnson dances with Miyang natives. the second day, Shirley's raft, piloted by guide Ajay Maira, took a curl the wrong way and upended. From the left rear, Shirley saw her son, Jim, sitting in the front, lifted straight up by the curl and flung spread-eagled overhead. Everyone was dumped. Shirley floated down river underneath the inverted raft, giving Jim considerable cause for alarm. Bobbie Beam, also in the raft, saw her personal kit break open and spill into the river. She lost $1,500 in cash, her passport, and other items.

Finally, the raft was righted and no one was hurt.

Two days later, at Rikor, the same thing happened to Canadian guide Kim Hartlin's raft. A deceptively short stretch of 200 meters, Rikor had massive waves more than three meters high. The following morning, Bomda Rapids proved even worse. Although the guides spent more than an hour assessing the approaches, Kim and Ajay-both for a second time-flipped their rafts. Fortunately, there were no injuries.

Below Bomda, the river leaves its steeply rolling topography and narrow jungled gorges and begins to broaden into fertile lowlands. The Miyang hunter-gatherers are also left behind, and their southern cousins can be seen herding and farming. Villagers have a domesticated beast called a mithun, similar to a cow, but larger, with a head like a water buffalo.

Mithuns live a respected existence: They are considered signs of

wealth and are often given as part of wedding dowries. Village farming follows a process called jhom (pronounced "joom") cultivation, which is essentially slash and burn. The process is prohibited by the government, but enforcement and education are difficult in such a remote region. A lot of forest continues to be destroyed, and hillside scars can still be seen as one descends the river.

Dispelling the illusion of increasing tranquillity, the expedition finally encountered the massive Kaiko Rapids on day six. With four-meter curls and stoppers, these rapids were every bit as turbulent as Rikor and Bomda-only Kaiko was more than two kilometers long! Both Ajay and Kim, having been doused on previous days, understandably were reluctant. They voted to portage around. Shaukat pressed to make the attempt. Finally, four guides, including Shaukat, decided that each would take one boat through. The rest would walk.

The ride was heart-stopping. Shaukat remembers the thrill of going one-on-one with the river: Wholly alone, finessing each curl with his oars; the raft lifted high by screaming waves, then plunging sickeningly into three-meter troughs; the pure sense of elation as the river-though still churning and defiant-finally yields to persistence. In the event, all four boats made it through intact. It was the first time ever that this stretch of the Brahmaputra had been successfully run.

Kaiko was the climax. But the Son of the Creator had one card left for the denouement.

Before reaching Passighat, the river turns leisurely due east before making another sharp turn to drain into the Assam valley. Along this stretch, the expeditioners easily negotiated the last major rapid on day nine, then picked their final camp site where the river narrowed slightly through a canyon. Nice beaches beckoned on both sides, and a sheltered area on the north shore was chosen. Guides and guests stowed rafts, pitched tents, and served dinner in a now-familiar routine.

However, during the night, in probable answer to the indignity of having been conquered, the Brahmaputra served up a raging storm-one final act of defiance. Sixty-kilometer winds and rain tore at the tents and soaked their hapless occupants.

Gear was drenched and scattered. No one was injured, but no one got any sleep, either. It was the worst experience of the expedition.

Lest one think it pure coincidence, however, the storm left the south side of the river untouched.

The next morning, day ten, the still damp yet high-spirited group arrived at Passighat, the end of the trip. With the ring of mighty rapids still in their ears and souls, they climbed out, packed up, and headed home. The challenge to the Son of the Creator was over.

0 About the Author: Richard L. Davis, a colonel in the U.S. Air Force, assigned to the American Embassy, New Delhi, enjoys freelance writing as a hobby. He has published several articles focusing on education and political-military affairs.

Guitar Legends PHOTOGRAPHS BY HARRY BENSON

Guitarists are the divas of rock and roll. When a lead guitarist leaps into the spotlight and sets off a storm of sound, he and his gleaming instrument become one. Spiritlike, they have the power to move listeners to ecstasy, longing, and catharsis.

It is no wonder that the guitar is the seminal instrument in the rockand-roll band. Nearly all the sounds familiar to rock guitarists are found in some form in pre-World War II era recordings by blues virtuosos, most of whom were poor black men, self-taught and often using homemade instruments. The migration of blacks from America's rural South to northern cities in search of work took blues guitarists into large, crowded halls and created the need for an

instrument powerful enough to be heard in the urban din. The solution: The electric guitar, an evolutionary instrument that came from the experiments and collaborations of musicians, guitar makers, and engineers during the 1930s and 1940s.

Aaron Thibeaux "T-Bone" Walker was the first blues guitarist to make full use of the new instrument. Muddy Waters and Chester "Howlin' Wolf" Burnett, whose raw, sexy, savage guitars reflected a more modern sound, followed. Then, in 1955, came Chuck Berry with a hypnotic, new sound that helped launch the rock-and-roll era. In the decades since, thousands of rock guitarists have taken Berry's "licks" (distinctive patterns of notes and rhythms), enlarging and embroidering his sound. The consensus among musicians and critics alike is that the greatest rock guitarist who ever lived was Jimi Hendrix, the charismatic musician who died in 1970 of a drug overdose.

Charles Hirshberg, in a special is&ueof Life magazine devoted to rock and roll, quotes another guitar giant, Frank Zappa, on Hendrix: "The sound of his music is extremely symbolic-[intense] grunts,

B.B. KING Perhaps the best-known and most influential of all bluesmen, King, 68, gradually developed a vibrato sound while "bending" notes that became his trademark. Today he plays a custom-made Gibson guitar he calls "Lucille," named after a woman who caused the biggest bar jight he ever saw.

BONNIE RAITT Raitt, 44, who taught herself to play guitar at age nine, grew into one of America's best white blues musicians, and is today among the jinest slide players in rock. Extremely versatile, she recently performed in concert with her father, John, a top Broadway star in the 1950s, and the Boston Pops Orchestra.

LESPAUL Still experimenting after all these years, Paul, 78, a major jigure in the development of the instrument, built hisjirst electric guitar in 1941; he sold the idea to the Gibson company, which has issued Les Paul guitars since 1952. He and his wife, Mary Ford, recorded a string of popular hits in the 1950s, her voice complimenting his "talking guitar."

BUDDY GUY Guy, 57, learned the blues from records on the radio in his native Louisiana, experimenting on a homemade guitar before he had a real instrument. The artistry of his characteristic biting, penetrating style inspired premier electric guitar manufacturer Fender to introduce a polka-dot "Buddy Guy" Stratocaster.

tortured squeals, lascivious moans, electric disasters, and innumerable other audial curiosities are delivered to the sense mechanisms of the audience at an extremely high decibel level. It is impossible to merely listen to .... It eats you alive."

In 1992, notes Hirshberg, a number of the world's greatest guitarists performed at the Guitar Legends Festival in Seville, Spain.

One of them, Robbie Robertson, describes the event: "At the end of the evening, we all came out onstage and played with Les Paul.

He invented the guitar that is the mainstay of so many musicians .... Everybody was jamming, doing their thing, and Les nodded over to me to take a solo. I started playing these high, ringing harmonics. And Les was looking up at the sky, just following it with his ears as it was reverberating around the amphitheater, as if he was wondering: Where is that sound coming from? And I thought to myself: Isn't this funny? Years ago this man affected me in the same way. I'd look up into the sky and think: Where is that sound coming from?"

0

CHUCK BERRY With his instantly recognizable wailing, chiming guitar style, and his trademark "duck walk," a crouched gliding shuffle, which heftrst used during a 1956 performance, Berry, 62, represents the crossroads of all the traditions. He links black and white musical cultures, blues and pop, and rock 'n' rollers of the 1950s and latter-day rock bands.

ERIC CLAPTON British-born Clapton, 48, was first idolized as a guitar hero while he was still in his teens and lead guitarist for the Yardbirds.

Masterly performances with his own revolutionary group Cream (notedfor its lengthy improvisations and experimental harmonies), with Blind Faith, and with Derek and the Dominoes solidified his status.

CARLOS SANTANA Santana, 46, entered into rock's pantheon when he and his band stopped the show at the legendary Woodstock festival in 1969. His group, anchored by his singing guitar, was the first to successfully merge the percussive rhythms of Africa and Central America with electric rock.

EDDIE VAN HALEN With his drummer brother Alex, Van Halen, 36,formed the nucleus of one of the most successful heavy rock bands of the 1970s and early 1980s. His extraordinarily dexterous guitar work, highly regarlied by audiences and musicians alike, characterized the band's sound. Until he married, he said the mock_ Fender Stratocaster guitar he assembled was his greatest love.

ROBBIE ROBERTSON Robertson, 50, and his group, the Hawks, backed Bob Dylan in the mid-1960s as Dylan moved into electronic music; the Hawks later became The Band and developed a huge following of their own. Robertson's searing guitar work led Dylan to praise him as a "mathematical guitar genius ...

How did Jerry Garcia and his band, the Grateful Dead, become the top concert draw in America? For a start, they discovered the benefits of interactive rock long ago, and have kept up a dialogue with Deadheads everywhere ever since.

Here is Jerry Garcia, the rock star in middle age. He has always been our most improbable pop-culture idol, somebody to whom the playing matters more than the posing. At 51, a halo of gray hair fringing his head and his gray-white beard indifferently trimmed, he resembles the proverbial unmade bed. The merest of filaments divides the man from the performer. His clothing onstage is his clothing offstage-a T-shirt, baggy sweatpants, and a pair of sneakers. The absence of style is a style itself and suggests an inability to abide by anybody else's rules. He's the rebellious child grown up, not so much above his youthful audience as insistently a part of it. In refusing to be adulated, he inspires a kind of love. Hunched over his guitar and scarcely moving a muscle, he becomes a larger instrument through which the music travels. While the crowd focuses on the notes that drift from his fingers into the air, he does his best to disappear.

In a sense, Garcia is defying gravity. Nobody else in the history of rock and roll has ever watched his popularity advance on an exponential curve with each passing year. Until recently, with the repackaging of such geriatric rockers as Aerosmith and Rod Stewart, most performers could be counted on to go down in flames before their 40th birthday-better to burn out than to rust, as Neil Young once put it. Garcia himself upheld the old tradition by nearly self-destructing a couple of times. When he turned 50 in 1992, he weighed almost 135 kilograms, smoked three packs a day, survived on junk food, never exercised (he needed a roadie to carry his attache case), and had a serious drug problem. He appeared to be headed for an early grave, but he had the good luck to collapse instead.

Forced to confront his mortality, he changed his ways, adopting a vegetarian diet, cutting down on cigarettes, taking long walks, swallowing vitamins in megadoses, and even hiring a personal trainer to tone a body that had given new meaning to the concept of shapelessness.

I caught up with Garcia shortly after he launched his recovery program. Like most veterans of Haight-Ash bury in its prime, I felt a special kinship with him and wondered how he was weathering his transformation into an American icon. For aeons, his band, the Grateful Dead, have had their head-

quarters in Marin County, where I live, so I phoned the office and arranged a meeting backstage at the Oakland Coliseum before a concert.

Garcia is a native San Franciscan. He is the second of two sons, and his father, Joe, a musician who had led both a Dixieland band and a 40-piece orchestra, named him in honor of Jerome Kern. Joe Garcia liked to fly-fish, and on a camping trip one spring he was swept to his death by a raging river. Jerry, who was five at the time, witnessed the drowning. In its aftermath, his maternal grandparents, who lived in the bluecollar Excelsior District, took him in. He was a sickly, asthmatic child with a rich fantasy life. Although he was given piano lessons, he did poorly at them and showed no special aptitude for music. He preferred to read, immersing himself in E.C. Comics and the sci-fi novels of Ray Bradbury and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and he also drew and painted in his sketchbooks.

His mother, Ruth, reclaimed him when he was ten. She owned a sailors' bar and hotel downtown, and Jerry became its mascot. He had already developed a knack for independence, roaming the Excelsior while his grandparents were at their jobs, and he liked to hang around the bar, later describing it as "romantic and totally fun." School bored him. Homework was a dumb idea, he believed, and he had to repeat the eighth grade, because he wouldn't do any. In an auspicious conjunction of the planets, the onset of his adolescence coincided with the birth of rock and roll. He was particularly fond of Chuck Berry, Gene Vincent, Little Richard, and Buddy Holly. For his 15th birthday, in 1957, he asked his mom for an electric guitar like the ones he had seen in pawnshop windows. She must have had a nose for trouble, I thought, because she gave him an accordion instead. otes froin Oakland on a mild December evening: The Coliseum, a cavernous, echoing concrete structure, has the architectural distinction of a bunker. About 15,000 Deadheads, a sellout crowd, were waiting behind sawhorse barricades in the parking lot when I arrived. I had assumed that there would be a rousing party going on backstage, but the Dead are so old and have done so much partying that now they hole up in separate dressing rooms and conserve their energy before a show. Roadies were taking orders for dinners, which the band members would eat between sets, and were moving equipment around. One roadie had the task of caring for Garcia's custom-built guitar, which is the nearequivalent of a Stradivarius. It's called the Tiger, because the luthier who made it-Doug Irwin, of Santa Rosa-inlaid a tiger of brass and mother-of-pearl in the guitar's ebony face.

Wherever the Dead go, the Tiger goes, too. They tour three times a year for three to four weeks at a time, and often bring their families. For the last couple of years, they have been the highest-grossing concert act in the business, with last year's receipts amounting to more than $32 million.

Garcia was in his dressing room, sitting on a couch before a picked-over tray of fruit. When I walked in, he rose to greet me.

Up close, he was much bigger than I had expected-broad-

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shouldered, and with an aura of physical power. He looked both fit and alert. Some musicians extend a hand delicately, as if it were a baby bird about to be crushed, but Garcia's grip was firm and strong. It spoke of his unguardedness. The tip of one finger on his right hand was missing, chopped offby his brother in a woodcutting accident when they were boys.

Garcia's eyes were merry behind tinted glasses. He sat down. again and leaned forward, eager to start. He's a wonderful talker, in fact, and converses in much the same way that he plays, constantly improvising and letting his thoughts lead where they may. There's an intensity that comes off him in ripples when he's enjoying himself, and it doesn't seem to matter who or what the source of his pleasure is. If he were to formulate a philosophy, it could probably be boiled down to this: If it's not fun, don't do it. He had performed thousands of concerts, and yet he was truly looking forward to another one.

In an ideal world, he said, he'd be playing somewhere six nights a week-twice with the Dead, twice with the Jerry Garcia Band, a small group meant for more intimate venues, and twice with an acoustic group on his five-string banjo.

Before Garcia turned to rock full time, he fronted a jug band, Mother McCree's Uptown Jug Champions. In some respects, he finds acoustic music more challenging to play. He had recently made an acoustic album with the mandolinist David Grisman, and he was pleased that it had been nominated for a Grammy. He and Grisman have been collaborators since they met at a bluegrass festival in 1964. A lot of Garcia's friends are old friends, people he has known for 20 or 30 years.

I complimented Garcia on the album, and it seemed to unsettle him a bit. I had heard that he was his own severest critic.

"That makes me feel good about myself," he said, with a shrug, as if he were not yet convinced of his talent.

Among the tasty things about the album, I went on, was the variety of its selections-Hoagy Carmichael's "Rockin' Chair," Irving Berlin's "Russian Lullaby," B.B. King's "The Thrill Is Gone."

Garcia allowed that he liked music of every kind and delighted in experimenting. He mentioned that he had once sat in with Ornette Coleman, the jazz master, at a recording session.

"How was that?" I asked.

He laughed. "Like filling in the spaces in a Jackson Pollock painting! arnette's such a sweet man, though. He gave me a lot of help."

The curtain was about to go up, and Garcia needed some time to get ready mentally. He still has bouts of stage fright. To relieve them, he uses a mental trick that he learned in the 1960s, when any food or drink around was liable to be dosed with psychedelics. Once, at the Avalon Ballroom, he saw an enticing chocolate cake backstage, but he was sure that somebody had doctored it, so he contented himself with a lick offrosting rather than a slice. The cake's baker soon turned up and announced that the frosting had 700 hits of STP in it. Sinking, Garcia went

on a very bad trip indeed. He imagined that some Mafia hit men were in the crowd, waiting to kill him. The only way he could survive, he thought, was to be humble and play for mercy~for his life.

"And it worked!" he exclaimed, laughing again.

'Tm still alive!"

I stayed around for the concert. The atmosphere was festive, and the audience was batting balloons back and forth. Oddly, I didn't smell any marijuana~a scent that, along with the refractory odor of patchouli oil, had characterized the Dead concerts I used to go to at the fabled Fillmore Auditorium. Some people were obviously stoned, but they had done their smoking in private. The average Deadhead is often portrayed as a glassyeyed, long-haired wretch in a tie-dyed T-shirt, but I didn't see many of those types. The fans were mostly middle-class white people in their twenties and thirties. They had the look of yuppies masquerading as hippies for a night, eager to bask in the recollected glow of the 1960s.

When the band came out, the Coliseum seemed to levitate for a second or two. The music kicked in, and the Deadheads started dancing. They danced right through both sets, on the floor or by their seats, for three straight hours, as if they had been drilled. It was pretty strange, really ... .The Dead in middle age were a curious sight, too~ ordinary guys, graying, and miles removed from any glitter. I could have been watching myself onstage, but that was always part of the band's appeal for my generation: We were them, and they were us. For the young people around me, I guessed, the show must have had the texture of a fantasy in which their parents actually listened to them and understood their deepest secrets.

The bond between the Dead and the Deadheads was extraordinary. Garcia would tell me on another occasion that the band consciously aimed for such a target. He felt that it happened at about 40 percent of their concerts but they could never will it into being ....

Owthe Dead, once nearly buried, have ascended: Early in their career, Garcia and company endured the usual music-industry scams and rip-offs, and they decided to take control of their destiny. Their first four albums had not sold well, leaving them in debt to their label, Warner Brothers, but they recouped with two straight hits in 1970, "Workingman's Dead" and "American Beauty," which were both primarily acoustic and were distinguished by the richness of the songs and the band's clean, crisp playing. That same year, they acquired a small shingled house on a suburban block in Marin to serve as their offices and began handling their own business affairs. In 1972, they tipped off their fans to their new free-form operation by inserting an apparently harmless message in the

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liner notes of a live album recorded on tour in Europe. "DEAD the message read. "Who are you? Where are you? How are you? Send us your name and address and we'll keep you informed."

With one gesture, the Dead eliminated the barriers between themselves and their audience, and established a direct flow of communication.

Although the Dead Freaks turned into numberless Deadheads and came to require elaborate attentions (there are 90,000 Deadheads on the American mailing list and 20,000 on the European list), the band's offices have remained in the same little house. It's as if the Dead were superstitious about tampering with the magic, and so booking agents, publicity people, and accountants are all crammed in like family. The Dead still meet about once a month in a boardroom to discuss their projects. Initially, the meetings were free-for-alls, Garcia says, but somebody dug up a copy of "Robert's Rules of Order," and they riffed on it until they had devised their own warped version of parliamentary procedure.

I stopped by the house shortly after the Coliseum show, walking in through the back door, as I had been instructed, because anyone who uses the front door is presumed to be an unwanted visitor. The universe that the Dead have evolved, a

FREAKS UNITE!"

parallel reality that permits them to function, is built on such fine points. In the old days, for instance, it was virtually impossible to apply for a job with them, but if you were to wander in and start doing something valuable they might hire you. Many staffers have been with them for ages, and they are very well paid. The band even floats them loans to buy homes and cars. The prevailing staff attitude seems to be a hybrid strain of hippie good vibes and nontoxic American capitalism.

As Garcia once said to me, the Dead are a rock band that disguises itself as a California corporation.

Garcia came in at noon, by way of the back door. Fresh from a session with his trainer, he claimed, only half-jokingly, that the unfamiliar oxygen racing through his system had granted him a weird new aerobic high. "Weird" is a favorable adjective with him. He uses it often to describe experiences he has enjoyed. If an experience is really weird, it gets elevated to the status of "fat trip." A fat trip is anything that pleasantly rearranges the brain cells ....

We settled into a funky room off the kitchen that could not technically be described as decorated, and I asked Garcia about his accordion.

"Oh, it was a beauty!" he said .... "It was a Neapolitan job.

My mother bought it from a sailor at the bar. A little later, I got a Danelectro guitar and a Fender amp. I taught myself to play, and pretty soon I was fluid in a primitive way. I picked up a trick. or two from my cousin Danny-he knew some rhythm and blues-but the most important thing I learned was that it was O.K. to improvise. 'Hey, man, you can make itup as you go along!' In high school, I fell in with some other musiciansbeatnik types, the pot smokers. My only other option was to join the beer drinkers, but they got into fights. I kept getting into trouble anyway, so my mother finally moved us out of the city to Cazadero."

Cazadero is in the coastal redwoods of Sonoma County. It's a wicked spot for a teenage exile, a damp, spooky resort town that is deserted for nine months of the year. "I hated it there," Garcia went on. "I had to ride a bus 50 kilometers to Analy High, in Sebastopol. I played my first gig at Analy. We had a five-piece combo-a piano, two saxes, a bass, and my guitar.

We won a contest and got to record a song. We did Bill Doggett's 'Raunchy,' but it didn't turn out very well. Things in Cazadero got so bad that I enlisted in the Army. I wound up in a 30-man company at Fort Winfield Scott, at the Presidio, right back in San Francisco. That company was choice! We did lots of ceremonies, stuff like flag-raising. The guys rotated from the city to Korea and Japan. I started going out at night to see my friends, you know, and I didn't always make it back in time for work. I was piling up the AWOLs, and the commander was worried that I'd queer the deal for the other guys. So he called me in and asked me, 'Garcia, how'd you like to be a civilian again?'

"In all, I did about eight months in the service. After that, I went to the Art Institute in San Francisco for a bit, to study painting. I wasn't playing guitar so much-I'd picked up the five-string banjo in the Army. I listened to records, slowed them

down with a finger, and learned the tunings note by note. By then, I was getting pretty serious about music-especially about bluegrass. In the early 1960s, a friend of mine and I toured the bluegrass festivals in the Midwest. We had a tape recorder and sometimes got to jam. We met all the greats-Bill Monroe, Reno and Smiley, and the Kentucky Colonels.

"When I got back, we formed our jug band. Bobby Weir was in it, and so was Pigpen (Ron McKernan) .... We did gigs around Palo Alto and Stanford University. I made a little money giving lessons, but we were usually broke. For a while, I lived in my car in a vacant lot in East Palo Alto. That's where I met Hunter."

Robert Hunter, the main lyricist for the Dead, is another of Garcia's old friends. "He was living in his car, too. He had these cans of pineapple in his trunk-I don't know where he got them-and I had some boxes of plastic forks, so we'd meet every morning for breakfast and use my forks to eat his pineapple.

"It was an exciting time. I'm a cinephile, and I remember going to see a Richard Lester film one night-A Hard Day's Night-and being blown away by the Beatles. 'Hey!' I said to myself. 'This is gonna be fun!' The Beatles took rock music into a new realm and raised it to an art form. Dylan, too~he's a genius. It wasn't long before the jug band became an electric band, the Warlocks. We recruited Billy Kreutzman as our drummer. He'd been working at the post office. I didn't think bass guitar was important, but the first guy we had was pretty bad, so we brought in Phil Lesh. Lesh was this wonderful, serious, arrogant youth, a composer of modernist music. He only played the trumpet then, but he had perfect pitch.

"The Warlocks worked the lounge circuit in bars on the Peninsula. We did pop covers, mostly, except for the last setthen we got weird and jammed. Our big break was getting involved with Ken Kesey and his bunch. They invited us out to La Honda. We brought our gear and played for about 20 minutes. Crash! Bang! It was like the war in Grenada, man! We were weirder than can be, and they loved it. When Kesey started putting on the Acid Tests, in 1965, we became their house band, the Grateful Dead. Sometimes we played for hours and were brilliant. Sometimes we had to be dragged onstage and only lasted for three minutes. The really neat thing was that we didn't have to be responsible." eadheads are everywhere at present. For the band, they are a blessing and a curse. Their fealty translates into huge profits, but they also imply an unwanted responsibility. Sometimes they make a prisoner of Garcia. He can't.wander about in Marin County or anywhere else the way he once did. When the Deadhead phenomenon began to snowball, five or six years ago, he was concerned about its cultlike implications and tried to sabotage it by being nonresponsive and pretending that it didn't exist, but since then he has seen that it's too direction less to amount to a serious threat.

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dersen

Consulting fields the world's largest army of advice erchants.

They are bright, ~ brash, young (average age: 27)-and on a roll. Andersen's revenues last year were expected to hit $3,000 million, nearly triple their level in 1988, the year before the consulting firm won its independence from Arthur Andersen, the big accounting group. Profits, a closely guarded secret, have probably run about 15 percent of sales each of the past five years. Takings that rich have helped make many of Andersen's 858 partners into millionaires.

Information technology, the everevolving force rapidly reshaping the global business landscape, drives this heady growth. Andersen leads the world in systems integration. That means its consultants configure the hardware, design the software, and train the operators for those massive multiyear, multimillion-dollar projects that transform the automatic teller network of a bank, the assembly lines of an aircraft factory, or the customer service center of a telephone company. If your company is contemplating a similarly seismic shakeup, you may find Andersen coming soon to an office near you.

Already its clients include half the corporations on the Fortune 500.

Andersen is intriguing, moreover, not just for what it does but also for how it trains, deploys, and informs its troops.

"They are a real exemplar of the global, decentralized, knowledge-sharing organization," says James Brian Quinn, a professor at Dartmouth's Tuck school and author of Intelligent Enterprise, an insightful book about how we'll work in the future. "They are among the best I've run into." In an era when a company's competitive edge increasingly depends more on brainpower than on machines, materials, or manual labor, a firm that knows how to manage know-how just might have something to teach you, what-

tarry in their offices either.

Each year Andersen stages more than 5,000 unique performances in more than 5,000 venues.

The various troupes reconfigure themselves in endlessly fluid combinations of age, expertise, and nationality. Some specialize in a specific industry, others in a particular country or region, and still others in writing software, building warehouses, training managers-or even helping drivers and pit crews run race cars faster and smarter at the Indianapolis 500.

Despite its name, Andersen Consulting is not exactly a classic management consulting firm in the mahogany-paneled mode of a McKinsey & Co. or a Boston Consulting Group. Andersen is not the place you're likely to turn to first if your paradigm needs a shift, your shareholder value needs enhancement, or your core needs a competency.

Andersen is more middlebrow, more nutsy-boltsy. The emphasis is on execution, not analysis. While it's true that most of the traditional strategy houses are these days eager to help you put some of their elegantly reasoned recommendations into practice, they still rely on small teams of highly paid professionals, usually MBAs. Andersen, by contrast; blitzes jobs with people power-masses of junior and midlevel consultants commanded by a small cadre of partners, an approach known in the consulting biz as leverage. The firm hires very few MBAs. Instead, it recruits people with undergraduate degrees from universities like Notre Dame, Michigan, Texas, Duke, and Purdue, then runs them through a series of rigorous training programs.

"Academic pedigrees don't take you very far here," says managing partner Shaheen, a high-energy workaholic who sleeps four hours a night, speaks with a southern Illinois twang, and talks so fast that he sometimes mangles syllables or skips them entirely. "You have to perform. Quality client service is what we are all about. Work all day. Work all night.

Andersen's Army of Advice Armed with multiple skills and expertise, and operating in some 50 countries, this giant firm helps businesses worldwide achieve success.

ever your line of business.

Think of Andersen as a multinational repertory company with 27,800 players, operating out of 151 offices in 47 countries. Its head office is in Chicago. but its head man, managing partner George Shaheen, 49, lives in San Francisco and spends most of his time traversing the globe. His deputies reside in Dallas, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Tokyo, and London, and they don't

Above right: CEO George Shaheen says, "Quality client service is what we are all about."

Left and left above: Andersen's R&D Smart Store lab in Chicago provides a glimpse of the supermarket of tomorrow. On display here are such futuristic products as a digital pen (left above), which allows customers to scan codes on groceries at home to order replacements via a home-delivery service, and a fully automated checkout counter (left). Top: With its information systems, the firm even helps drivers run race cars faster and smarter.

Deliver. On time. On budget. On schedule.:' This difference in approach and staffing explains why Andersen's 22,765 professionals pulled in more than twice the total revenues of second-ranked McKinsey in 1992, but a whole lot less in fees per consultant-$119,OOO vs. McKinsey's $383,00o-according to Management Consultant International, an industry newsletter published in Dublin, California.

Andersen derives more than two-thirds of this revenue from the labor-intensive business of systems integration-a market in which most strategy firms have either a limited presence or none at all. In systems integration, Andersen bumps up against a whole different class of competitors-including the consulting divisions of other Big Six accounting firms, specialty houses, and hard-up hardware makers like IBM, Digital, and Unisys, which are striving mightily to beef up their service arms. Last year' Andersen displaced IBM as the world's No. I systems integrator, with an estimated 20 percent share of a $10,800-million-a-year

market, according to Gartner Group, a Stamford, Connecticut, information technology research firm.

The trouble is that the stand-alone mainframe computer, the engine that powered both IBM and Andersen to preeminence, is rapidly fading. Replacing it is so-called client-server technology, sophisticated networks of PCs (personal computers), workstations, laptops, and (sometimes) mainframes that can distribute knowledge-and the power to manipulate it-throughout an organization.

Andersen's future as a market leader rides on its ability to crank up its client-server expertise. Says Mel Bergstein, a former Andersen executive who is now vice chairman of Technology Solutions, a small Chicago firm that specializes in client-server: "The new technology argues for small teams of very skilled people. Andersen's model of large, highly leveraged teams has served it very well, but will it remain relevant?"

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or now, yes. While boutiques like Technology Solutions may push the edge of the high-tech envelope, Andersen still seems in synch with the mainstream of the market. Despite all the talk about PC-based networks, many companies remain reluctant to abandon their investments in traditional mainframe-based systems. Says James Fischer, Andersen's managing partner for technology: "There's still a lot of mainframe work out there."

For Andersen, the real significance of client-server is that it renders technology too important to be left to technologists.

Corporate managers, once content to let propeller heads in the data-processing department worry about computers, increasingly realize that an effective information system is critical to any successful business strategy. As a result, says Shaheen, "we're being forced to move upstream in the enterprise and enter the executive suite."

Shaheen's goal is to build Andersen into the world's first and foremost fullservice consulting emporium, ready not only to rewire your computer systems

Andersen Consulting's philosophy: Work all day. Work all night.

Deliver. On time.

On budget. On schedule.

but also to recraft your strategies, reeducate your employees, and. reengineer your work processes (or, if you would prefer, take your computer processes off your hands altogether and manage them for you). Andersen calls this potpourri of services "business integration. " To flesh out this vision Andersen is hastily trying to graft a strategy practice onto an organization peopled primarily by technologists and tacticians. The firm has begun actively recruiting veteran strategists from leading competitors-a radical departure for an organization long fanatical about growing its own talent. Warns David Lord, editor of Consultants News, a leading trade publication: "It can be tough. Strategy people have a different culture. They don't always fit in.

And they command much higher compensation than the technical guys."

But it would be unwise to underestimate Andersen's potential to push both itself and the entire consulting field in new directions. It has done so before. As long ago as 1918,just five years after a 28-yearold CPA (certified public accountant) named Arthur Andersen launched his accounting firm, his auditors reached beyond counting beans and began advising clients how to run their businesses more efficiently. In 1954, Andersen consultants programmed and installed the world's first business computer, a payroll system for General Electric's appliance division.

By the early 1980s, Arthur Andersen's consulting practice had become so lucrative that its practitioners were noisily demanding more power and pay from the accountants who dominated the firm. In January 1989, after a string of nasty confrontations and high-level departures, the accountants manumitted the consultants.

Andersen Consulting and Arthur Andersen now constitute the two business units of Arthur Andersen & Co. S.c., a holding company with headquarters in Geneva. The sister firms sometimes work for the same clients, but each maintains its own budget, sets its own strategy, totes up its own profits, and nominates its own partners.

The bust-up enabled Andersen's consultants to expand aggressively. For a look at their vision of a true one-stop shop at work, consider the service rendered a group formed two years ago by Merck, the U.S. pharmaceuticals giant.

This was the ultimate consultant's fantasy-an utterly blank sheet of paper.

Five Merck employees were charged with creating from scratch a U.S. marketing organization for medicines made by Swedish drug company Astra. (The most prominent is Prilosec, an antiulcer drug.)

Astra/Merck had no computer systems, no sales force, no training manuals, no finance department, no personnel department, no market research departmentno departments at all.

Walk around Astra/Merck's new headquarters building in Wayne, Pennsylvania, now, and you can't tell the consultants-whose numbers have reached

as high as 120 companywide-from the employees, currently numbering 677.

To create a new kind of drug marketing organization, Astra/Merck and Andersen rejected the traditional functional silos in favor of 31 decentralized, cross-functional business units, each with its own customers and profit-and-Ioss responsibility.

All Astra/Merck salespeople will be able to swap information on market trends, medical research, and regulatory developments on a nationwide client-server network.

This approach is working so well that Astra/Merck may offer its marketing services to other drugmakers, such as startup biotech firms. The group's revenues were expected to top $600 million last year, and sales of flagship product Prilosec have risen 50 percent since January 1,1993. Wayne Yetter, the group's president, gives his consultants rave reviews: "The strength of Andersen is its deep bench, the flexibility to bring in whatever expertise is necessary at every stage of the project."

What is really extraordinary about Andersen's bench is how many of the seats are occupied by rookies. Andersen's ability to recruit and train young people-and then invest them with steadily increased responsibility-is legendary.

While its official headquarters may be in Chicago, the real heart of the organization throbs 72 kilometers away at its Center for Professional Education in St. Charles, Illinois.

Throughout their careers, often several times a year, Andersenites from around the world converge on the 60-hectare campus of this former Catholic women's college to take-and teach--elasses.

Andersen professionals spent an average of 135 hours in formal training in 1992, and the firm devoted $163 million, more than six percent of revenues, to education.

What goes on at St. Charles transcends training. It is a professional bonding experience, fostered by long hours, close quarters, and bone-grinding work. The first course neophytes take is a three-week marathon called Computer Application Programming School (CAPS). The stu-

dents--earnest, clean-cut men and women dressed in business suits and seated at cramped tables-spend II hours on weekdays, eight hours on Saturdays, and five hours on Sundays listening intently to an instructor who is not much older than they are.

The CAPS students learn two languages. The first one is Cobol, used to write batch-processing progra:ns that run on the mainframes that are still a critical factor in Ander-sen's success. The second-and more important-language is the "methodology."

Revered throughout the firm, the methodology consists of decades of Andersen's accumulated wisdom. If it were not now inscribed on computer disks, the information would fill about 3,000 pages of paper. The methodology sets out guidelines for analyzing a client's problems, proposing and designing a solution, building a prototype, and putting the solution into practice. Says Rosana Rumschisky, Andersen's marketing manager in Spain: "The second language of this firm is English.

The first is the methodology."

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or all the methodology's obvious value as an internal lingua franca, it can also spawn cookiecutter consultants who bring standardized approaches to tasks that demand customized solutions.

Worries John Smith, director of training at St. Charles: "The danger is that people overlearn the methodology and underlearn the judgment of when to use it and when not to." To discourage such ossification, Andersen updates the methodology every six to 12 months, incorporating actual experiences from people in the field. It also relies on its own consultants, rather than professional trainers, as teachers.

Andersen has parlayed its prowess in training its employees into the profitable business of training the employees of its clients-part of a fast-growing service it calls "change management."

Andersen deploys curriculum developers, industrial psychologists, and sociologists to help companies and their workers cope with

the temblor-size jolts that have become a regular feature of modern businessrestructuring, delayering, deregulation, and downsizing. At the heart of change, more often than not, are shifts in technology. Says Terry Neill, the partner in charge of Andersen's change management practice: "A new computer system spreads confusion, doubt. and stress.

The hardware may work, the software may work, but the system won't work if the people who are supposed to use it don't cooperate."

Andersen's multidisciplinary, knowledge-sharing approach has been especially effective in Europe, a continent racked by chassis-rattling change. In 1992, despite a punishing recession, Andersen increased European revenues 19 percent, to $1,100 million, more than double those of Coopers & Lybrand's consulting practice, No. 2 in the Old World, according to Management Consultant International.

Says Pedro Navarro, managing partner for Spain: "Our clients have become a lot less parochial. They want the best experts in the world."

The company has 2,500 professionals in Spain, more than in any other European country, but not many of them know much about aerospace. Nevertheless, Construcciones AeronilUticas SA (CASA), the state-owned aerospace and defense company, picked Andersen over three other firms to manage a five-year, $60 million overhaul of its manufacturing, engineering, and inventorycontrol systems. What sold CASA was the fact that Andersen had developed and installed Macpac-D, an automated manufacturing software package used

by Raytheon and other leading aerospace companies.

CASA Chairman Javier Alvarez Vara knew that Macpac experts from the United States and Britain would relocate to Spain to supervise the job.

Andersen has also made significant inroads in the former communist bloc, an attractive growth market for Western consulting firms.

Komercni Banka, carved out of the former Czechoslovak central bank, hired Andersen to oversee

its $100 million transformation to the largest commercial bank in the Czech Republic, a country where the economic, legal, and accounting systems are in flux.

Talk about change management.

As many as 75 Andersen consultants, representing 12 nationalities, have helped Komercni people learn essentials from how to assess creditworthiness to how to operate the new client-server network that links its branches.

Since 1991 the bank's customer base has grown from 10,000 to one million, the number of branches has increased from 83 to 450, and the bank has been solidly in the black.

The main challenge Andersen faces in Europe is managing its own explosive growth. Admits Vernon Ellis, managing partner for Europe: "The bigger we get, the more difficult it is to deliver experts." The harder it gets, also, to figure out who knows what. Andersen is in the process of wiring all its professionals to something it calls the Knowledge Exchange, a series of interactive' databases that will track client engagements, consultants' experience, and general market information for each of Andersen's major industry practices.

The Knowledge Exchange, based on Notes, a cutting-edge software package developed

by Lotus, will simplify Andersen's labyrinthine efforts to keep employees in touch. Consultants now rely on a sprawling old boy and old girl network, maintained by phone calls, faxes, meetings, periodic updates of the methodology software, plus frequent trips to St. Charles and satellite training centers in Europe and Asia. The Knowledge Exchange, already successfully pilot-tested in the United States, Britain, France, and Australia, should make the dissemination of information easier, cheaper, and faster.

Gushes Steven Freeman, a Chicago partner who has been using the Exchange for the past year: "This is it. This is the nonhierarchical, networked organization at work."

But improving the flow of information, something Andersen already manages better than most companies, won't make

up for the firm's shortage of experienced people. Since technology now packs such strategic import, the question some skeptics ask is, Shouldn't Andersen be serving clients with people who have a wider array of skills, broader perspectives, and grayer hair?

Yes, argues Julie Schwartz, an analyst at Dataquest, the Framingham, Massachusetts, research and consulting group.

Says she: "Andersen has come under fire for using relatively inexperienced people who get on-the-job training at the client's expense. The market is changing. Firms need people who have stood in the customers' shoes." While Andersen hired some 200 veteran outsiders last year, that's not exactly a tidal wave compared with the 3,800 freshly minted college graduates it took aboard.

A

ndersen's human pyramid may indeed have become too bottom heavy. At its base are those hordes of young people, whose salaries start at a relatively modest $25,000 to $35,000 a year. They face a very steep climb to the top. Perform well, and you can expect a promotion to manager in about six years and an annual salary of $55,000 or so. When you reach your eariy thirties, you might be named an associate partner, with yearly pay that starts at around $110,000.

But only a select few reach the next rung-partner-where annual compensation is tied to profits and typically begins at around $250,000 and heads north. Acknowledges A. George Battle, managing partner for market development: "In the past three ye.ars the number of new partners named has been too low for our good health." In the fiscal year that began in September 1993, Andersen initiated 80 new partners, 31 more than were named the year before.

Tapping more new partners won't, by itself, suffice to curb Andersen's attrition, which runs at an annual rate of 25 percent for people who have been at the firm less than seven years. Worries Pedro Navarro, managing partner for Spain: "Joining Andersen Consulting is like get-

ting an MBA. Stay with us for three to five years, and you can get hired away at double your salary."

Then there is the wear and tear that comes with all the long hours, the long trips-six months in Prague, say, or Madrid-and the short trips. In a recent three-week period, John Skerritt, the partner in charge of the financial services practice, traveled to Dallas, London, New York (where his office is located), Hartford, Chicago, New Jersey (for a partners' meeting), Australia, Japan, and Singapore. Says he: "This is a big issue for us. People need to have personal lives."

Andersen hopes that technological innovations like the Knowledge Exchange will curb the need for so much travel. In the meantime, the firm is trying to make life a bit easier for its peripatetic consultants. In Britain, for example, Andersen will help them arrange child care, get the car fixed, or find a plumber.

Even George Shaheen, the perpetualmotion machine, hopes to slow down.

Says he: "This dynamic style of management comes out of our hides. It's physically demanding. It's not a sedate way to live." He plans to spend about one week a month at Andersen's information technology center, a showcase for the industry's latest developments that is now under construction in Silicon Valley. The managing partner says he needs some time to sit in one place and think.

It's not hard to see why. Shaheen's once collegial consulting firm has grown into a professional service leviathan. The technology, the methods, the pyramids, the very single-minded approaches that have. made Andersen so successful may no longer make as much sense. As the firm's annual revenues climb beyond $3,000 million, it will undoubtedly become more difficult to sustain those double-digit growth rates. Still, Andersen Consulting, whose business, after all, is helping others cope with change, seems to be doing a pretty good job of overseeing its own transformation.

D About the Author: Ronald Henkoff ciate editor at Fortune magazine.

is an asso-

FOCUS Frank Wisner, Jr., is expected to arrive in New Delhi later this month to take up his new assignment as U.S. Ambassador to India.

"It is with great excitement and anticipation that my family and I look forward to service in India, a land whose/extraordinarily rich history and culture I admire, and with whose diplomats I have had many occasions to work over the past three decades of my life," Wisner told the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which conducted hearings on his nomination. The full Senate approved his nomination on June 8.

In testimony before the committee, Wisner praised Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao, whom he met during the latter's visit to Washington in May (above), for implementing economic reforms that have "resulted in a virtual explosion in U.S. business interest in India.

The United States already is the largest investor in India; we also are the largest trading partner.

"Hopefully our trade ¡and commercial ties will expand even faster in the years ahead, and I can assure you that this will be

Science fiction is the theme of the annual summer film festival to be held at the American centers in New Delhi (July 1-16), Bombay (July 18-30), Madras (August 2-13), and Calcutta (August 16-30).

The U.S. Information Service will screen seven films that reflect "Alternate Visions," the title of the festival.

The seven, Planet of the Apes, Back to the Future, Tron, Star Trek IV-The Voyage Home, The Lawnmower Man, Terminator 2-Judgment Day,

and Blade Runner, deal with issues of contemporary interest-particularly the danger of the misuse of science and the threats to ecology.

The first issue is predominant in Terminator 2-Judgment Day, where a technologically advanced, all-powerful computer and its army of killer machines unleash a nuclear holocaust that almost destroys humankind. Ecology is the focus of Star Trek IV-The Voyage Home. Here Captain Kirk and crew travel from the future back to our time to save Earth from annihilation by finding an extinct species.

Other films provide examples of the amazing work done by Hollywood special effects experts (see SPAN, February 1994). Noteworthy are the simple conversion of a De Lorean car into a time machine in Back to the Future, amazing makeup work in Planet of the Apes, the spectacular world inside a computer created for Tron, and the liquid metal robot in Terminator 2.

one of my top priorities ....lndia is emerging as a truly great economic power; the progress of India's newly liberalized economy is literally breathtaking and is building a fundamentally new dimension for Indian and American interaction."

The ambassador acknowledged that the two countries had differences over such issues as nonproliferation, human rights, and some trade matters, but said "our maturing relationship with India in this new era has made it possible for us to manage or resolve these issues." He vowed to "do all I possibly can to ensure that our relationship with [India] lives up to its full potential. We owe that much to our citizens.

"In this regard, I would like to pay special tribute to the hundreds of thousands of Indian Americans who have contributed so much as citizens of this country and who care a great deal about the way India and the United States get along."

Wisner most recently served as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. Previous assignments included stints as Under Secretary of State for International Security Affairs and as U.S.Ambassador to the Philippines, Egypt, and Zambia.

Circle Freight International (India), a part of the San Francisco-based Harper Group's Circle Trade Services Limited (among the largest freight forwarding/logistics companies in the world), hopes to double its revenue in India in the next two years.

Ramesh C. Manghirmalani, vice president of Circle Trade Services, who was in India recently, said that "even today we are a major player in this country." The Indian branch has 11 offices.

Circle Freight provides full logistics services in India including air and ocean freight and, for the first time, customs clearance through a license granted by the Government of India, according to Manghirmalani.

"We plan to expand our network in India to 15 offices with 120 employees," he said.

"Our international communications system, Indo net, will link our India offices to our worldwide offices."

The Harper Group was established in 1898 as a customs brokerage. Today, the Harper Group is a $400 million plus revenue company that provides services for air and ocean export and import, customs clearance, warehousing, distribution, integrated logistics, and comprehensive information services to companies worldwide.

"We contact over 150 companies each week to discuss Circle Trade Services," said Manghirmalani.

Welcome Attention "Were you late on China and Latin America? India may be the best emerging market of all."

This advice to investors comes from one of America's leading business magazines, Forbes, in its May 1994 issue. The magazine's cover displays an urban Indian family posing with its Bajaj two-wheeler scooter.

The Forbes story and other write-ups in American newspapers and magazines on the unfolding Indian economic miracle coincided with Prime Minister p.v. Narasimha Rao's official visit to the United States.

India, says Forbes in its seven-page feature, is finally winning economic liberation from an oppressive bureaucracy, with the result that it "now has the look and feel of the next China and Latin America." In fact, says Forbes, "There is twice as ml1ch American direct investment now going into India as into China." A big reason for that, adds the magazine, is the fact that India operates within the rule of law and respects individual rights and freedoms.

"Note this carefully," Forbes tells its readers. "None of the

large Western companies investing in India are doing so simply for cheap labor, China's main lure.

The more important attractions are India's large and increasingly open domestic market and the enormous pool of skilled labor. More engineers graduate each year in India than in China and South Korea combined."

Meanwhile, in a speech last month to the Foreign Policy Association in New York, Jeffrey E. Garten, Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade, said the Clinton Administration was singling out India and nine other "big emerging markets" for special attention.

The other countries in the group are Argentina, Brazil, China, Mexico, South Africa, South Korea, Indonesia, Poland, and Turkey.

"This may not sound like much," Garten said, "but the fact is that previous administrations have not focused on big emerging markets at all-all the commercial attention has been on Europe and Japan. The big

ONE IN A HUNDRED The Engineering College of the University of Colorado at Boulder recently celebrated its centennial by presenting medals "to the 100 people judged to have made the most conspicuous contributions to the Engineering College, the engineering profession, engineering education, or society relative to their age during the past century." One of the medal recipients was New Delhi's Hari K. Pargal, selected for his

emerging markets were always at the periphery, always seen as problem countries. We have had, inan extraordinarily short period of time, a lot of high level attention" on those markets.

This will mean, he explained, more visits to the countries concerned by top administration officials (for example, Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary and Commerce Secretary Ron Brown are among top Clinton Administration officials scheduled to visit India in the coming weeks and months) and adding more commercial experts to U.S. embassies in these countries.

According to U.S. Commerce Department estimates, the group of ten countries will likely account for more American exports than either Europe or Japan by the year 2000 and more than Europe and Japan combined by the year 2010.

service as former executive director of Engineers India Limited, and as a member of the Indian Ministry of Programme Implementation.

Pargal, an honors graduate of the University of Delhi in 1948, received his PhD in chemical engineering from the University of Colorado in 1954. He currently serves as a senior adviser to several industrial organizations and as a consultant to the United Nations Development Program and the United Nations Environment Program.

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"We were sent toplay at your house before you have a chance to send Jimmy over to ours. " Reprinted from The Saturday

Evening Post

© 1994.

"Here's that book you ordered,

Income Tax Made Easy." © Universal Press Syndicate.

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"Having completed theformation of the earth, on the seventh day the Lord rested. Then, on the eighth day, the Lord said, 'Let there be problems.' And there were problems."

Drawing by Dana Fradon; © 1993 The New Yorker Magazine. Inc.

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George Tsypin, one of the leading designers in the American theater, is softspoken and reserved when you meet him for the first time-not at all like his sets, which tend to be angular, aggressive, and sometimes even dangerous. Until you hear him discuss his work at length, it seems hard to believe that this affable man could design the kind of scenery that critics and colleagues have been known to describe as "unrelenting" and "obstinate."

Like an architect, Tsypin is always concerned about the materials out of

George Tsypin,famous for designing spectacular sets for some of America's most avant-garde theater and opera, created this setfor Georg Buchner's Leo & Lena (and Lenz), staged at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

which his sets are built. Although it is not always possible financially, Tsypin prefers using real materials, particularly steel. This gives his sets a solid, permanent quality that, in combination with the ephemeral nature of the theatrical experi-

ence, provides an invigorating tension.

Tsypin was born in Kazakhstan in 1954. His father was a painter and his mother, for a brief period, was an actress.

He studied urban planning (along with physics, literature, and mathematics) at the Institute of Architecture in Moscow and received a fine arts degree in 1977.

Although Tsypin wasn't actively involved in theater in Moscow, his circle of friends

did include theater directors, set designers, musicians, and poets. "I also entered different kinds of conceptual competitions," he explains. "One, in Paris, was called the Free and Spontaneous View on Contemporary Theater

George Tsypin (bottom left) often provides layers of images to his sets. Left: The Death of Klinghoffer, an opera at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York. Right: The Balcony (above) and The Screens (below), both by Jean Genet, at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. Minnesota.

for New Generations. That was where I found out about theater."

Tsypin moved to New York in 1979.

While supporting himself by working in the architectural firm of Haines Lundberg Waehler, he also studied theater design at New York University, receiving a master of fine arts degree in 1984. Tsypin was hired to design his first professional show-the Philadelphia Drama Guild's 1984 production of The Power and the Glory, written by Graham Greene and directed by William W oodman-as a result of showing his work at a portfolio review sponsored by the League of Professional Theatres.

This portfolio review also led to an extended professional relationship with Peter Sellars, the 37-year-old enfant terrible of the American theater. At the suggestion of a friend who had seen Tsypin's portfolio at the review, Sellars met with Tsypin and hired him to design The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas), the inaugural production of Sellars's short-lived American National Theatre at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Tsypin has worked with other directors but has a special affinity for Sellars's approach to theater. "The scope, the scale, is very large," he says. "Obviously, I don't do realistic sets, and Peter doesn't do small, kitchen-sink dramas. He does large, philosophical works, where you need to have this large scale. I also believe that I think like a director, so I can see the subtle moments in a show with actors, with music. It's always a collaboration with the director, but designing a set very much involves directing. I do think about the actors and how to get them physically involved."

0

to know exactly what to do and at what point to do it as he's observing someone go from intending to commit a crime to its actual commission.

To illustrate to a class of recruits the levels of proof necessary to make an arrest, instructor Frank Dwyer of the New York City Police Academy used an example of an incident he was recently involved in.

It was the middle of October, ten o'clock in the evening, and unseasonably warm-almost 20 degrees Celsius-a nice night for a walk. That was just how he decided he would spend his meal break as he walked out of the 20th Street police academy entrance ... toward the street. First he would grab an ice cream.

Dwyer wasn't in uniform. He was wearing blue pants, a white shirt, blue tie, and a gray button-down cardigan sweater. In his waistband was his off-duty revolver, a .38-caliber Smith and Wesson Chief with a five-centimeter barrel. Dwyer isn't afraid to walk any street in New York City, but there are some, he admits, where, with or without a gun, he feels unsafe. Being a cop and carrying a gun doesn't make you a superman. In some places, he knows, other people have guns too, and they're probably a lot more willing to use them. The neighborhood around the police academy is considered safe-safe, perhaps, because the academy is there as well as the police station, directly behind the academy on 21st Street.

New York City has an aural personality all its own-a pervasive blend of traffic, sirens, and other noises that to a resident are as unobtrusive as background in a movie. On a warm evening, the heavy air seems to heighten this a bit, as does the putrid odor of garbage rotting along too many side streets. Dwyer was used to it all, walking and watching, alert to his environment without singling out any particular aspect for his attention.

W

hen he got to Third A venue, Dwyer turned right. He passed a stationery store, a pizza parlor, a bar, and a few smutty storefronts before reaching a BaskinRobbins ice cream store. Inside, an Asian girl gave him a cup of vanilla ice cream, and then he headed toward Gramercy Park.

Walking down Irving Place, he noticed a young man, a Hispanic, emerge from a car. Dwyer was immediately struck by the jarring contrast of a ragged man alighting from a sumptuous car. There was plenty oflight, so he got a good look at the guy-about 170 centimeters, medium build, black hair, and wearing worn-out gray pants, a tattered short-sleeve pullover shirt, and sneakers. "I'll lay down money," Dwyer thought, "that that guy broke into that car." But this was only a hunch; Dwyer had no tangible proof that the man committed a crime or was about to commit a crime. The man moved forward, seemingly disoriented.

A hunch or gut feeling is called mere suspicion according to the legal standards of proof. A standard of proof is behavior observed or facts ascertained by a police officer that justify official actions. There are several levels of proof, each providing legal authority for certain kinds of police action.

Mere suspicion is the lowest standard of proof because it is nothing more than a hunch, even if it proves correct. Perhaps the disheveled man did own the expensive car, or had borrowed it from a friend, or was using the boss's car to run an errand. Who knows?

Legally, what action could Officer Dwyer take? Could he point his gun at the man and holler, "Police-don't move! Put your hands up"? No, that wouldn't be reasonable under the circumstances. What he had was just a man who didn't seem to belong to a car. That is not so strange or unreasonable.

Officer Dwyer could continue observing, or he could make what's called a common-law right of inquiry. This is a right that courts have granted the police when they harbor a hunch but have few facts to back up their suspicions. They are permitted to ask simple, general questions. In this case, Officer Dwyer may approach the man, identify himself as a police officer (since he's out of uniform), and say something like, "Excuse me, sir, are you okay? You seem confused. Is there anything I can do to help?" The man is not obligated to answer, however, and may walk away. If he does walk away, Officer Dwyer may not restrain him, block him, or use force to stop him.

The man's evident disorientation made Officer Dwyer suspect he was high on drugs, but if Dwyer were to frisk the man and find drugs or a gun, a New York court of law would probably suppress the evidence. The search is unlawful because a level of proof higher than mere suspicion is required to justify it. Officer Dwyer hadn't seen the man doing anything criminal, so the frisk would be regarded as an unwarranted intrusion.

In the polic~ academy, the law instructors liken the standardsof proof to temperatures on a thermometer, with mere suspicion at the bottom. As the temperature becomes warmer, more police action may be taken. Just above mere suspicion is reasonable suspicion.

As Dwyer watched the man wander away from the car, he decided that there was no rush to take any action. He would just continue observing. The man turned east onto 19th Street, and from the sidewalk approached the passenger windows of a number of cars, holding his hand over his eyes to deflect the light as he gazed in before trying the door handles.

Dwyer was pretty sure the man was about to steal a car or something inside one. It was more than a hunch: The man moved from car to car, looking in windows and trying door handles, trying to stay out of sight. It was late at night, and the man wasn't holding his keys in his hand as iflooking for his car.

The area is also one where auto theft and burglary are very common. If he was not burglarizing the cars, what sort of logical argument could the man make for his actions?

What could Dwyer do now? One legal option is the concept of stop, question, andfrisk. In a stop, question, and frisk, unlike a common-law right of inquiry, a suspect is not free to leave at whim. If a suspect refuses an order to stop, necessary physical force may be used. A gun may be displayed, but it can be used

only in a life-or-death situation when the cop is defending himself or another person. Stop, question, and frisk may be done for all felonies and more serious misdemeanors.

Dwyer would have been justified in stopping and questioning the man because of the elements just mentioned. "Should I grab him now? No, give him some rop\!, let him hang himself. I haven't got enough evidence yet. It wouldn't hold up in court."

The suspect suddenly turned and headed back to Irving Place. His attention was diverted by a garbage can in his path, and he rummaged through its contents. "What have I got?"

Dwyer asked himself. "A nut?"

Back on Irving, down to 18th Street. When the man crossed 18th Street, he spotted a Jeep, went up to it, and looked in the passenger window. Then he pulled out a screwdriver and wedged open the vent window. Reaching into the car, he popped the lock and let himself in.

At that moment, Officer Dwyer had probable cause to believe a crime was being committed, and could arrest the man.

Probable cause is a level of proof in which the facts of evidence would lead a police officer to believe that a crime was committed or is being committed by a person, and for which the person who committed the crime may be arrested.

For a conviction, a district attorney (D.A.) must convince a judge or jury beyond a reasonable doubt that the suspect committed or was attempting to commit an offense. Dwyer believed he now had enough evidence for the D.A. to successfully prosecute the case.

With the suspect inside the Jeep, Dwyer contemplated what action to take. Because he was not in uniform and was not assigned to patrol duty, it would be better to have the precinct cops make the arrest. He dashed into a restaurant and, with his shield in his right hand, identified himself as a police officer to the maitre d', and asked him to call 911-the emergency assistance phone number. He told the maitre d' what happened and asked him also to give the operator Dwyer's description.

Out on the street again, Dwyer watched the man move around inside the Jeep. Thinking fast, he ran through all the possibilities, wanting to be sure of the man's intent. "Could he possibly just be looking for a place to sleep?" he wondered hopefully. Probably not-the man's hands were busy, and he appeared to be searching for something.

Dwyer started to sweat profusely. Was he trying to steal the Jeep?

Now the man was fiddling with the radio, attempting unsuccessfully to pry it loose. Dwyer relaxed a little. The guy was just looking for something to rip off.

Givingup, themanstarted to get out oftheJeep. "I've got todo something right now," Dwyer decided, "or he's going to getaway before the precinct cops show up." He walked slowly over with his shield held up in his left hand and his gun in his right.

"Police, don't move. Stay in there." The perp [slang for perpetrator of acrime] didn't seemsurprised oreven seem to care.

His face was blank, confused.

He was still holding the screwdriver, Dwyer saw, a

potentially lethal weapon.

"Drop it!"

The man just stared at him.

"I said, drop it!"

No response.

Dwyer took another step toward him, mustering all his authority, and shouted. "Drop the screwdriver. Right now!"

The man's hand opened limply, and the screwdriver clattered to the floor of the car.

Relieved, Dwyer took a deep breath, and almost didn't react fast enough when the man suddenly lunged at him. But his reflexes took over, and as the two grappled, he managed to pull his gun just out of reach of his attacker's desperate grasp.

With his right arm held high to keep the gun away from the man, Dwyer felt his own chest exposed to the man's wild swings. "If he lands a solid punch," Dwyer thought, ''I'm gonna drop the gun." And if the man got his gun ...Dwyer's life was in danger, and without another thought he brought the gun down hard on the man's head. The man merely grunted, blood spurting from his skull.

Oddly, the blow didn't have much effect. An instant later the man threw himself at Dwyer again. A second whack on the head with the gun didn't faze him, and instead he appeared to have gained strength. With a burst of superhuman energy, the man suddenly grabbed the cylinder of the gun.

It was a deadly tug-of-war, and Dwyer's breath came in gasps as he struggled to keep the gun away from him. His arm was tiring. The man's blood was streaking Dwyer's face, in his eyes.

From deep within he drew a surge of power and wrenched the man to the sidewalk. As they wrestled, he managed several more blows to the !lian's head, but to no effect. he

situation was desperate. "Should I shoot him?"

Dwyer wondered, exhausted, fighting the man's druginduced strength. Something held Dwyer back, and he raised his eyes for an instant, catching a brief glimpse of faces, people suddenly materialized in a circle around him, watching ' the struggle. Their expressions were tense, frightened, uncertain.

"I'm a police officer," Dwyer yelled. "Call the police. I need help!"

After a brief hesitation, one of the watchers pressed forward and grabbed one of the perp's arms. Dwyer got his left hand free and unlocked his adversary's grip on his gun. The Good Samaritan, catching sight of the gun, dropped the attacker's arm and melted into the darkness. But Dwyer was on top, holding his gun high above the perp, who continued to swing and kick with all his might. Just as Dwyer felt he was about to pass out from the effort, he heard the sweet sound of sirens coming rapidly closer.

A few seconds later an unmarked car screeched to a halt beside them, and two plainclothes cops burst out.

"Will they know I'm a cop?" Dwyer thought, panicked. He was in civilian clothes, his shield out of sight in his pocket, and he had a gun. Fortunately, his rescuers sized up the situation

accurately, pouncing on the perp, shouting at Dwyer to stand aside. "The maitre d' must have given them my description after all," Dwyer realized with a great rush of gratitude and relief.

He slumped against the Jeep, winded, and watched as the plainclothes cops subdued and cuffed the still-struggling perp.

He moved across the street as several radio cars streamed in and the man was taken into custody. As he watched, a young waitress came out of a restaurant, joining Dwyer and a small crowd watching the police. Without his uniform, the woman didn't recognize Dwyer as a cop. She looked over at the bleeding man being handcuffed by the police, and then glanced at Officer Dwyer. "Isn't it terrible?" she said.

"What?"

"That every time the police catch somebody, they beat them up." Infuriated, Officer Dwyer explained what happened.

"Well, I hope so," she said sarcastically, clearly skeptical, then walked away. How quickly the public jumps to a conclusion of police brutality without knowing the facts! The woman could see only that the man was bleeding when" he was taken into police custody. The man broke into a Jeep and had fought viciously to take Dwyer's gun to use against him. Dwyer was tired and angry, but there was still much to be done.

A

fter the perp was taken into custody, Dwyer asked the anticrime officers to check the cars on 19th Street where the perp had tried the doors, and to get the license plate number of the first vehicle, the Mercedes-Benz, that the perp had emerged from, and to leave a note for the owner.

Without the license plate numbers, there would be no case.

Back at the 13th Precinct, Dwyer immediately headed for the men's room to wash his hands. He was a little concerned because the perp was obviously a drug user, and he had small cuts on his hand. He noticed strands of the perp's hair on his gun too, and that the trigger guard was bent.

Formal charges were brought against the perp: Unauthorized use of a vehicle (he went into the Jeep without permission of the owner); criminal mischief (he damaged the window); attempted robbery (for trying to take Dwyer's gun); criminal possession of a gun (for possessing the gun for a time).

The perp was taken to Bellevue hospital, where he would stay for 18 hours before going directly to Central Booking in downtown Manhattan.

Central Booking, the recruits learn, is a police facility in each borough of New York City where defendants are processed for arrest. Here, prisoners are photographed, frisked, fingerprinted, and put into cells; the arresting officer also submits paperwork to a desk officer there. Central Booking is where perps enter the criminal-justice system.

Since the perp wasn't interrogated at the station house, Miranda warnings were not given. A prisoner must be read Miranda warnings after an arrest and before an interrogation.

Based on the famous case [Miranda v. Arizona-see "The Police and the Suspect," SPAN, July 1979] decided by the U.S.

Supreme Court in 1966, a prisoner must be told that he has the right to remain silent and not answer questions, that anything he says may be used against him in a court oflaw, that he has the right to consult an attorney before talking with police and to have one present during any questioning, and that if he cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided without cost.

But Miranda doesn't have to be read unless there is ...custody plus interrogation-a questioning session that seeks to incriminate the prisoner. Miranda is so ubiquitous on American TV cop shows that the general public thinks every person taken into custody must immediately receive Miranda warnings.

Cops find this amusing. Frank Dwyer tells the recruits about people arrested by patrol officers who would immediately complain to a sergeant or lieutenant that they were never read their rights. The boss would tell them, "We don't have to read you your rights," and the people would be confused. Cops may ask pedigree information-name, address, date of birth-but don't need to read Miranda to a prisoner unless guilt-seeking questions are asked. Miranda is supposed to ensure that the prisoner knows he doesn't have to answer those questions unless he consents voluntarily.

Could a police officer or detective ask guilt-seeking questions to someone not under arrest? Suppose all a cop has is mere suspicion, and he goes to a person's home, knocks on the door, and asks if he may come in and talk. May he ask if the person murdered anyone, held up a store, burglarized a home, raped a woman, stole a car? Yes. But the moment the cop has enough evidence to make an arrest and take the suspect into custody, questioning must stop, and Miranda warnings must be read.

Consider a situation where a woman is shot on the street and falls to the ground. A crowd forms around her. A police officer runs over and, not seeing anyone with a gun, starts to give first aid. Then the officer looks up at the crowd and asks, "Who shot her?" "I shot her," a voice responds. Is that person free to leave?

No. He will be taken into custody unless he flees, in which case he may be pursued and apprehended for questioning.

Would the officer's question "Who shot her?" be admitted in court? Yes. Would the response "I shot her" be allowed? Yes, again, because when the officer asked the question, even though it was guilt-seeking, it was a general inquiry. The person who answered was not in custody, nor was anyone else, and he gave what's called a spontaneous or excited utterance. Obviously, at this point, the person who admitted to the shooting would be arrested and then given Miranda warnings before any interrogation began.

Since Dwyer's perp didn't have any identification on him, he was written up in the police reports as John Doe, a name traditionally used in English to indicate an unidentified person.

Dwyer completed an arrest report; a stop, question, and frisk report; and two complaint reports.

At Central Booking, the perp's fingerprints were run to Albany [the capital of New York State] and to Washington, D.C. His criminal record came back. It turned out that he was wanted on a warrant for skipping bail by not

showing up for a previous court date.

Officer Dwyer met with the assistant district attorney (A.D.A.), who wrote up the complaint. Initially, the A.D.A. intended to prosecute the case as a felony, charging the defendant with two counts of larceny and criminal possession of a weapon. Three days later, feeling it would be difficult to prosecute as a felony, the A.D.A. eliminated the felony charge, leaving all misdemeanors. The A.D.A. said he didn't feel a robbery charge would hold when the perp grabbed Dwyer's gun, because it might be argued that the defendant was not trying to steal it but get it away from his pursuer, who was threatening him. The criminal-possession-of-a-gun felony charge might not hold up either, because the gun had been bent and it wasn't known if that happened when Dwyer hit the perp with it or when they fell to the ground. The perp could have possessed a gun that was not functional, in which case the charge would be a misdemeanor, not a felony. The $1,000 bail was lowered to $100 when the felony charges were dropped to misdemeanors, but the defendant couldn't make the reduced bail and was sent to Rikers Island prison.

The standards of proof, as Officer Dwyer's law class sees, can change quickly. But beyond that, Dwyer's experience hits home, narrowing the gulf between theory and reality, the classroom and the real world. While the students know abstractly that their instructors are police officers, there is a sense that they are cops temporarily out of commission because they're not on the streets making arrests, helping people in distress, living dangerously. So it was with excitement that the recruits listened to the story; Officer Dwyer is not only someone who can teach recruits to become cops, he can aptly handle the job as well.

The incident also makes them uncomfortably aware of the risk every cop runs every day out on the beat. It's like seat belts, one recruit says later. You don't take safety seriously because you don't think "it" will happen to you. But when a cop close to you gets hurt or is involved in a serious altercation, reality sets in. Any of us, he laments, can get shot at any time. Any of us can end up fighting for our guns or our lives at any time.

The student officers' other concerns are many: Was Dwyer allowed to have his gun drawn? Could he have legally shot the perp? If so, why didn't he?

Dwyer explains that a police officer may draw his gun or shoot when he fears for his safety, the latter, of course, requiring greater danger potential. Many recruits can't believe that a civilian would not only not listen to a cop but would fight one, no less one with a gun drawn and pointed at him. They are surprised at how long Dwyer was in Central Booking-24 hours-for a relatively simple case. The Hollywood version of cops shooting a criminal one day and out on the street hunting more the next day has no basis in reality. "You're going to have to get used to it,"

Dwyer tells them. "That's how backed up the cases are. You'll be in Central Booking a long time."

A number of students also question why Dwyer didn't arrest the man the first time he tried a car handle.

"Why? What's the rush?" He explains why it is sometimes better to gather as much evidence as possible for the D.A. "Just because a guy has a screwdriver in his hand, and he's by some cars, that doesn't give you enough to arrest him. You want something solid."

"Couldn't you arrest him for trying door handles?"

"Perhaps, but are you comfortable with that? Sometimes it's tricky when to arrest someone. It's often a judgment call when to make an arrest. Wait for more if you can. It's like watching kids dilly-dally around a candy counter for minutes," Officer Dwyer says. "You know they're going to steal candy, but you have to wait before you move in. You'll see guys standing on a corner for eight hours of a day. You'll know they're dealing drugs, but you just can't arrest them without tangible proof."

A

s for the arrested perp, like most other cops, Dwyer followed the case up to a point. Then, disillusioned, he lost interest. The man was in Rikers Island awaiting trial. To follow the case, Dwyer would have to call the A.D,A. to find out the latest status. But caught up in the daily rigors of life, the cop who was so emotionally involved in the case, whose life was at one point in danger, becomes removed from it.

Dwyer explains: "You lock somebody up for doing A, and they get convicted of doing C. And you're sort of annoyed and disgusted with the whole thing. So why the hell should you follow the case? To see your good work go down the drain?"

What started out as a relatively decent case probably dwindled down, Dwyer feels. "I just became a cog in the criminaljustice-system wheel."

"Inevitably," he continues, "the defendant's court-appointed attorney plea-bargained a deal with the A.D.A." [A plea bargain is an agreement between a defendant and the D.A. whereby the defendant pleads guilty to a less-serious crime and receives a shorter jail term than he would if convicted of the original charges. Its virtue to the D.A. is that it saves the time and expense of going to trial in a crowded, backlogged court system.] Dwyer was never called as a witness in the man's trial and has no idea what the plea was. He says he doesn't think the jail time could have been more than six months.

One message the students learn is that, as police officers, they had better never lose a fight. If they do, they might lose their lives while the killer may only get arrested and may pleabargain later on. As they see the bad state the criminal-justice system is in, they become disillusioned, experiencing their first doubts that their ideals of making the streets safe will be met in the face of cold reality.

0 About the Author: Harvey Rachlin, a nonfiction writer who contributes to magazines including High Fidelity and Songwriter, is currently working on a book on the movie business.

He accepts it as a logical consequence of the Dead's tribal impulse. Besides, Deadheads are quick to be critical, he says, whenever the band is lazy, sloppy, dull, or just plain bad. Still, he isn't entirely comfortable with them, and never speaks a word from the stage, because he is afraid of how it might be interpreted.

Garcia puzzles over the Deadheads. He is trapped inside their obsession and can only probe at it from the inside. He thinks that the band affords its followers "a tear in reality"-a brief vacation from the mundane. The Dead design their shows and their music to be ambiguous and open-ended, he says; they intend an evening to be both reactive and interactive. A Deadhead gets to join in on an experiment that mayor may not be going anywhere in particular, and such an opportunity is rare in American life. The Deadhead world is multireferential and feeds on itself. A fan's capital is measured by his or her involvement with the band over time, by the number of shows attended and the amount of trivia digested.

And there's a lot of trivia. For example, a computer whiz kid in New Hampshire publishes an annual journal called DeadBase that attempts to quantify the entire experience of being a Deadhead. According to a survey in DeadBase '91, the average Deadhead had attended 75 Dead concerts in his or her lifetime and had spent $1,571.40 on band-related activities such as travel, lodging, and blank tapes during the past year. DeadBase '91 cataloged every song that the band had played on tour, clocking each different version. "Picasso Moon" had lasted for six minutes and 17 seconds in Orlando, but it had gone on for seven minutes and three seconds in Sacramento ....

Nostalgia is built into the Deadhead system. A new convert has always missed the golden age and can only sample its essence by listening to a veteran's tales and tapes .... Some Deadheads-a minority-include hallucinogens in the formula, even though the band discourages drug use at concerts.

Garcia savored his 1960s incarnation as Captain Trips, but he would never suggest that anybody imitate him ....

According to a story in USA Today, undercover agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration have lately been infiltrating Deadhead throngs and busting people who are selling LSD, and as many as 2,000 Deadheads-most of them young, white, and male-are currently serving severe prison terms, of up to 40 years. Here lies the unwanted responsibility. It's as ifby virtue of having been around when the LSD genie escaped from its bottle Garcia and the Dead were somehow expected to coax it back in.

Away from the spotlight, Garcia leads a simple life. Ifhe has any taste for possessions, he keeps it hidden. He has been a creature of the road for so long that he has never had much of a home. After the recent breakup of his second marriage, his house in San Rafael went on the market-it made the newspapers when a real-estate agent fell into the swimming pooland he now rents a furnished condo in Marin. It's an unfancy

place, but he likes it for the view of San Francisco Bay, and also because his four daughters live nearby, and he hopes to stay in closer touch with them than he used to. The eldest, Heather, is 29 and plays first violin in the Redwood Symphony Orchestra, and the youngest, Keelin-her name is Irish-is just five. "They've been very generous to me," he told me, with true appreciation.

"I've been mostly an absentee parent, after all."

Garcia has had to grow up in public, and he can be genuinely troubled by what he regards as his personal failings. The guilt comes from his upbringing as a Roman Catholic, he thinks. He talks readily about his early religious training, and how the Church, with its mysticism and its hierarchical structure, influenced his view of the world. There is a story he tells about how he fudged his first Communion. He had no sins to confess, so he made some up and lied to a priest. Then the lie became a sin, and existence took on complications: He wasn't in a state of grace anymore. Catholicism planted a dissonance in him, he believes, by rubbing against his grain. "Maybe it's good to have something big that's beyond you," he says philosophically. "All that magic and mojo power. Sin becomes ever so much more juicy!" t can take Garcia all day to get out of his apartment.

Always the last to bed, he is slow to get going in the morning and can spend hours puttering. He may start by listening to some music, anything from Haydn string quartets to the Butthole Surfers. He has always been an avid reader, and currently champions the books of Terence McKenna, an amateur anthropologist and a psychedelic explorer. He may decide to fiddle with his Macintosh and generate some computer art, or open a sketch pad and begin to draw.

It's surprising what a good draftsman Garcia is. The best of his drawings are witty, spare, and whimsical. They're very different from his guitar playing-not so rigorous or so practiced. As a guitarist, he labors to make his playing look so easy.

He never gets caught being showy or calling attention to his technical mastery. What you hear sometimes in a trademark Garcia solo is a plangent kind of longing, a striving after an unattainable perfection ....

The last time I saw Garcia, the Dead were reluctantly. in rehearsal-they hate to rehearse-for a summer tour. Garcia's mood was still jolly. He was sticking to his fitness program and was eager for more oxygen, not less. He and Robert Hunter had written a couple of new songs that were as good, he said, as anything else they had composed in a long time. (In DeadBase '91 the fans had strongly agreed that "the Dead should write more new material.") The future was opening up before him, and he had the optimistic manner of somebody who has started dreaming again in middle age....

0

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About the Author: Bill Barich is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and the author of Hard to Be Good, Hat Creek and The McCloud, and Laughing in the Hills.

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