Tinker and Blue by Frank Macdonald

everyone and everything on the street looking for another point of entry until a wide grin of self-satisfaction erased the lines of concentration from his forehead.
    â€œCome on, old buddy. We got work to do,” he said, ribbing Tinker from his reverie with an elbow.
    Blue confided nothing to his friend as he led him back along the street, rushing past potters and leather workers, silversmiths and street artists, reaching the end of the hippie population and heading toward the skid row familiarity of their hotel.
    In the room, Blue stood in front of the cracked bureau mirror running his comb in unfamiliar directions through his hair until it hung in the style Karma had once imposed; he had returned it to its customery ducktail upon departure from the Human Rainbow Commune. Picking up his guitar he turned to Tinker.
    â€œCome on, buddy. We’re going to infiltrate the enemy, to quote the other fellow.”

12
    â€œCripes, Tinker, I wish people would stop dropping drugs into my hat,” Blue complained as he shifted aside a couple of purple cigarettes and a small rabbitturd of hashish to count out a dollar and seventy-three cents in very small change. For three days, they had been propped against the brick wall of a building teaching Sgt. Pepper and Bob Dylan a few things about music. Blue, studying the trickle of change into his blue hat, read the tide of its ebb and flow, noting that Tinker’s songs took in revenue at a rate of ten to one to his own singing. He finally settled back like what’s-his-name, Brian Epstein, to chord and plot the course of their partnership which would take them all the way from their meagre beginnings in hippie Heaven to the golden halo of spotlight that fell on the stage of Ryman Hall. Destiny. Sometimes a man can feel it against all the odds.
    Occasionally, Blue left Tinker to sing a cappella while he did a reconnaissance of the competition and concluded that they weren’t doing any better or worse than most, except for a classical violinist who at his sidewalk location introduced Bach to the Beatles, where the two got along famously. The violinist had the unfair advantage of possessing only one arm, managing the bow with an ingenious contraption which he operated with his teeth. Why a guy who would have no trouble getting himself a disability pension would go through all the trouble of learning to play the violin with one arm and thirty-two teeth was a mystery to Blue, and he resented the pisspot full of money the fiddler’s top hat was taking in. Despite the unfairness of that competition, Tinker and Blue averaged enough to eat, buy Blue’s cigarettes, and put a few dollars toward another week of luxury in their home-sweet-home away from home. The profit margin beyond those immediate needs was assigned to their gas-money-home account, current balance: zero.
    Tinker’s repertoire didn’t include a lot of the popular stuff sung in this particular corner of the planet. His renditions of Irish rebel songs, Scottish ballads, Cape Breton classics and select choices from the country and western charts disoriented those who stopped to listen. They said, “Wow!” a lot and walked away befuddled by this crack in their Universe where old wars were celebrated while the people on the street were trying to stop a current one. It broke the symmetry of this make-love-not-war neighbourhood.
    To please his audience, Tinker pulled out of the air around him the melodies and words that appealed to him, practising what he could remember back in their room. “Pretty heavy into this love and peace business there, aren’t you, Tinker?” Blue said in his review of Tinker’s new material while acknowledging that it made them more money than “Molly Bawn.”
    Tinker, as usual, chose the words he sang carefully. He didn’t care if a song was sentimental or rowdy or filled with rage or warm with love so long as he believed the story. Unlike Blue,