This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical figures are mentioned, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of this work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
A Black and Blue Book
Copyright © 2012 by Matthew Benjamin
Cover Design Copyright © 2012 Kate Jones
All Rights Reserved
Published in the United States of America by A Black and Blue Book Publishing Group,
Los Angeles
ISBN 978-0-615-48926-1
ISBN: 9780988270305
Printed in the United States of America
Contact http://ablackandbluebookpublishinggroup.com for electronic and other pertinent information regarding this publication.
This first novel is dedicated to Sasha and Bert—two sides of the same coin
This independent work of fiction was in many ways a great learning experience. Looking back, I don’t know how I ever reached the finish line. But I do know that I could not have done so without the following people: Megan Speer, Trudy Conchita-Joseph, Kate McCarthy, Micole Loeffler, Susan Han, Bill McCann, Patricia Locacciato, Alex Constantine, and the Orange County University of Chicago Alumni Book Club—eight or nine brave souls who had the willingness to read my first draft in between Shakespeare and Dante. I, of course, am responsible for all its flaws.
“Home is a place where, when you got to go there, they got to take you in.”
—Robert Frost, The Death of the Hired Man
My name is Nic Reilly. I’m thirty years old, going on thirty-one, and I’m writing this from an undisclosed location in the Mexican Sierras as I ponder my next move. I did not always live in hiding south of the border, and my transition was rather sudden and unexpected. Until about a year ago, I led a challenging but relatively stable life as the owner of an eclectic music shop in Detroit, struggling to survive in an industry that was experiencing seismic change with the onslaught of the digital-file-sharing revolution. Yet despite the daily uncertainty, my routine was ordinary, my intentions pure, and my conscience clear. Every morning I’d wake up in my rented house, make myself coffee, and drive over to my shop on Woodward near Grand where I spent most of the day selling and buying, bullshitting with clients and friends, and discussing strategies with my beautiful store manager, Karolina Torgustive. I was also sleeping with Karo whenever she allowed it. That was pretty much the core of it.
I mention this modus operandi not to put anyone to sleep, but to highlight the transformation that has occurred since. My metamorphosis was and is, by any measure, by any standard, quite remarkable. On one level, I changed from a caring and peace-loving musicologist—a man who adored Johann Sebastian Bach, Miles Davis and Marvin Gaye, to name a few—to an unflinching, coldblooded, murderous saboteur; a person who would secretly journey seventeen hundred miles across a continent loaded with seditious materials to methodically and savagely execute his own brother. Yes, brother. Or, more precisely, half-brother. That was just one atrocity. There were others.
So what happened? How did I become so skewed? What caused the big 180? Well, these things are never simple, but for the sake of expediency I’ll just say it began where it begins for all of us—with parents. And when I say parents, I’m referring to my mother and my biological father, not the man whom I always considered to be my father. That man’s name was Barney Reilly, but more on him later. First, let us deal with the perpetrators, the scourges of my misfortune, the spermatocytal vagabonds, if you will: good old Marge and bio-Dad.
Marge is my mother. She is a good woman who has always been there for me throughout my life. I could not ask for a better guardian or teacher and I am not the least bit bashful to say to the world at large that I love her dearly and always will. I also believe that she is unique given her geographical heritage and cultural upbringing. Marge was born in the year 1951 of Irish and Polish decent and grew to an adult in the city of Detroit during the 1960s and 70s. Her teenage years coincided with the final stages of that city’s great white flight to the suburbs and the dismal transmogrification of the once first-rate Detroit-based American automobile industry. No one, I believe, who lived at that time, under those circumstances, came out of that social and economic cement mixer unscathed. Yet, for me, two decades later, growing up in northwest Detroit, some of the things I remember most are the principles that Marge instilled in me and which categorically defied what I was presented with in the world outside my home. The first of these principles she promoted is tolerance, a priceless asset if you are to survive and prosper in any setting. The second is giving people the benefit of the doubt, even if it takes great imagination and causes consternation to do so. The third is forgiveness, which does not need explanation but is probably the most difficult to truly embrace on a daily basis, especially in a city torn apart by racial enmity and bitterness.
Now, as you will soon find out, I did not always adhere to Marge’s borrowed teachings. In fact, I would say I made an absolute mockery of them when I was presented with certain inflammatory situations that begged me to apply these principles to my life and to whatever immediate decisions I was to make. Perhaps a more visible comparison would be that of a young son of a once chronic alcoholic who survives his ordeal and continuously warns and preaches about the evils of alcohol abuse to the son and then on the son’s twenty-first birthday the son goes out on a ten year bender and drops dead of alcohol poisoning. Hence, my spectacular failures as an adult are entirely of my own making and have little or anything to do with my upbringing. I proved this to myself when I singled out Marge as the person I feared most when in the passions of my heretic obsession to destroy another human being for my own profit and then again afterwards when I was dodging my tenacious persecutors. Her eventual discovery (along with tens of millions of others) of my actions was probably more punishment than any criminal justice system could ever impose on me. So Marge, directly or indirectly, on a tangible level, is not responsible for any of this recent madness; in fact, it is quite possible that she has become one of its biggest victims.
I purposefully preface with the above attributes and brief character study of my mother and her innocence because I also painfully (and cynically because I can’t help myself as much as I try) need to point out that Marge has her faults, or had them, and what I have to reveal is not pretty, yet it is essential to my story and must be told. My mother also has an adventurous personality. Adventure, of course, can be a very good thing and usually is but there are those times when a little less adventure may be the wiser course. This is typically acknowledged in retrospect. In Marge’s case, one of those times happened somewhere between the ages of 21 and 23 when she decided to become a rock and roll groupie. Yes, my principled mother was a Detroit groupie. Now, to me, the word groupie doesn’t sound all that horrible, but let’s face it the specific job description details are rather crude. In her defense, though, this was in the early 1970s and not the best decade in American history in terms of morale and hygiene. Or, as my best friend Jonathon—who now teaches at Harvard—used to say: “There was no Martin Luther King, Jr. or Malcolm X in the Seventies, but there were Cheech and Chong and the Symbionese Liberation Army—the diaper rash unit of militant revolution.” And apparently the well-documented drug experimentation of the previous decade, the 1960s, was no longer an experiment, but more like a way of life. So I have to allow Marge a little leeway here. She was a product of her time and that should not be forgotten. Although, having since become a musicologist, it is enough to make me hemorrhage to imagine my good mother bending over for some of the most untalented, ephemeral, two-chord pinheads ever to step foot on a chartered bus. Because along with the shooting stars of that period—such as David Bowie, Stevie Wonder (Motown had already moved out of Detroit to Los Angeles by this time), John McLaughlin and the jazz-fusion surge, Lou Reed, Duane Allman, to mention a few—there were some seriously defunct stray hacks calling themselves musicians roaming about the countryside with hollow sounding secondhand guitars and getting their tubes cleaned on a regular basis. This, remarkably, is the backstory to my genesis; this is the pasture in which my prize Arabian horses grazed, because it is a documented fact that my mother was impregnated by one of these so-called musical talents while practicing her chosen vocation.
I learned most of this information, mind you, not from Marge but from Stu Manowitz, a bushy-haired, slightly overweight, poorly dressed Detroit Tiger baseball-fanatic lawyer, who was and is my mother’s oldest and best friend. Stu and Marge grew up a few blocks from one another in East Detroit, went to grade school and high school together, and, although this was never openly discussed, were romantically involved for a brief period in their teens. From what I pieced together she dumped him, but that did not affect their close and ongoing friendship which has lasted to this very day.
As told to me by Stu, who sequestered the information from Marge, my holy creation went as follows: I was conceived on the roof of the Riverbed Hotel on Fourth Street in downtown Detroit after a rock show at the Cobo during a mid-August heat wave. Evidently, the window air conditioner in the band’s shared hotel room went on the fritz that night, which prompted Marge and her evening date to break away from the sweltering orgy and climb the fire escape to the roof for some fresh air. Once there, they proceeded to fornicate like wild boars in the wilderness, their course, guttural moans blending into the deep rumble of the internal-combustion city traffic below. (I told you I was cynical and it may not have happened exactly like that.) Regardless, and despite the imagery, I have tried to look at the bright side and have concluded that this hire-wire conception induced some major change, and not all bad, either. First and foremost, it forced Marge to temper her passions, forever ending that rather dubious phase of her mostly honorable life. Second, and perhaps more important, a little less than nine months later she became a loving and devoted mother—even if it is I who was born.
*
As I understand it, and I am by no means an authority, Marge’s decision to go through with the pregnancy could be considered unusual. This was right around the time of Roe v. Wade, and most groupies in her circumstances, I assume, would have chosen an alternate path. My belief, however biased, is that Marge wanted out of that lifestyle and I was her exit. That’s the storybook version, anyway. Whatever the true reasons (I never asked), it still took Marge a good six or seven weeks to fully comprehend the fact that she was pregnant—a mini-eternity in her walk of life—and thus was forced to do a little adding and subtracting in order to correctly pinpoint the other individual involved. Once that complex process was over, and having made her decision, she then attempted to notify the father and request that he participate on a financial level in the birth and upbringing of this baby. She expected no more and in my thinking a very reasonable request. After all, it takes two. Unfortunately that proved to be more difficult than anticipated because of my bio-Dad’s musical obscurity at the time coupled with his gypsy lifestyle. Eventually she caught a break through her pipeline and tracked him down to a little club in West Berlin where he and his band members were performing as a third act. Not surprisingly, bio-Dad was quite surprised by the news, especially since he, according to Stu (according to Marge), barely remembered the incident. And who knows, maybe he was legitimately skeptical and did not believe he was responsible. She was, after all, a backstage groupie and he most certainly was not her only recent partner. The net result was that he was not interested in the offer and confirmed it by slamming down the phone and never taking her calls again.
To Marge’s credit, she never gave up. She was quite certain about the identity of the father and she most assuredly needed his support and was reminded of it each day as she watched her body grow large. Finally, some seven months following her decision, and about three weeks after I was born (prematurely), bio-Dad had quietly returned to the United States and was discovered hibernating in an unheated log cabin in Northern California with his poet girlfriend and promptly subpoenaed. This sting could not have been accomplished without the assistance of Stu, who had recently passed the bar and was hired by a Detroit law firm in the Bricktown area downtown. With Marge urging him on, Stu utilized the firm’s private detective services and cornered bio-Dad into taking a court-mandated blood test.
In those pre-DNA days, blood tests did not definitively prove the identity of the father, but they could establish a “probability of paternity” if the computation of the three blood types (mother, father, child—the As and Os and Bs, and negatives and positives, etc.) did not disprove the alliance, and if other circumstantial facts such as timing and mutual consent were in order. And that is exactly what happened. Bio-Dad was found to be my probable parent and ordered by the judge to pay child support. Or, another way of looking at it, there was no more mystery or doubt by anyone about who my co-creator was.
I’m sad to report, however, that after bio-Dad made his obligatory court appearance—the second and last time bio-Dad and Marge would ever set eyes on each other—he began his elusive touring again, and did not follow through with his commitment. Once this deadbeat pattern was firmly established, the burden to keep track of him became a liability and Marge finally had to accept her lot. She was on her own. She would receive no help from gypsy bio-Dad in the upbringing of her newly born child. To compensate, hair styling became her chosen profession, and she began cutting hair part-time at a discount until she earned her beautician license. She also turned her living room into a playpen and provided undocumented child care services for her many single mom friends. And from what I learned there were other small-time entrepreneurial gigs for smalltime cash, such as doing people’s laundry, sewing and similar tasks. But as many of us know, this type of good, honest labor can be insufficient to cover the mounting expenses of modern daily life. As a single mom with limited resources, Marge struggled with uninsured doctor bills, baby formula, rent, living expenditures, and the fear and uncertainty that goes along with that struggle. This resulted, for Marge, in a terrible episode of the shingles and a deteriorating mental condition in the latter portion of my first year of life—a downward spiral heightened by an incident that, given its timing, might have seemed unduly cruel but miraculously turned out to be a huge blessing in disguise. (Doesn’t it often seem to work that way? Just when you think you can’t take another step, a miracle happens? Or is it just me?) The unexpected providential sequence went as follows:
The utility company turned off our electricity for lack of payment, and Marge had to scramble to borrow money to get the power restored—a nerve wracking experience for anyone with a small child in the house. The very evening of the day the electricity got turned back on, somehow my feisty nine-month-old frame climbed out of my crib and got tangled in the web of electrical wiring that converged under the kitchen table. Back then, in the Stone age, sparse kitchen outlets doubled as electrical grids for clumsy predigital machines such as the waffle iron, the fat toaster, and the noisy refrigerator. In my growing entanglement, which quickly worsened, like a cat in a snake pit, sparks flew, appliances went crashing, and I proceeded to almost decapitate myself, burn to a crisp, and blow up the apartment building for good measure. After Marge frantically untangled me, saving my life, the lights flickered a few last times before the entire building turned an ominous dark. This was, so to speak, the last straw. Marge completely broke down. Weeping uncontrollably in the blackness and the clutter, utterly desperate and forsaken, she found the strength to call Stu, her best friend. Stu in turn called an electrician buddy, and lo and behold, the darkness began to turn to light. A beautiful, bright and shining light it was—and his name was Barney Reilly.
It was about thirty minutes after I almost torched Marge’s little garden apartment building that Barney arrived. He was inhaling a Kool menthol cigarette and carrying a hand-painted psychedelic toolbox that he designed himself. He swiftly took out his flashlight, perused the humble surroundings, the blown fuse box, the athletic kid in the now-fortified crib, the good-looking, shapely single mom who was still in tears, and that was pretty much that. He knew he was home. Everything else was just a matter of time and logistics. He was going to live with these two for the rest of his life and take care of them, which is exactly what he did.
The first sixteen years or so of my life I never thought for one second that Barney was not my biological father. True, we didn’t look too much alike, but a lot of families didn’t look alike. Similarly, we didn’t look too unalike, either—enough, anyway, to draw attention to our separate genetic identities. So it never crossed my mind. I mean, why should it have? Barney was a part of my earliest memories and photographs and no one soul told me otherwise. It’s only when I look back now, long after the fact, that I can spot clues that would make me question any of it. Not that it would have made a difference had I known as a child because Barney was a terrific father and I was blessed to have him in my life. My only complaints are petty and on par with what every kid has to deal with when coexisting with much larger beings on a daily basis. In Barney’s case, he smoked too much, both cigarettes and the evil weed. He also talked aloud to himself quite often—running conversations in public places—as he debated, say, the pros and cons of purchasing a particular product. And perhaps his greatest flaw, as I saw it, he abused his live, bootleg Grateful Dead and Creedence Clearwater Revival tapes by playing them to death. But that was about as bad as it got. In terms of the things that really matter: he was not a drunk or a pervert, he rarely lost his temper, he was a creative and entertaining teacher, and, above all, he stood as a good example of what a man should be like.
Given my recent history, it doesn’t make me feel any better to confess that I had two relatively well balanced adult figures in my life and I still turned into a front page mess. I’ve known many others who had nightmare experiences growing up with abusive parents or none at all and they turned into model citizens. Nonetheless, Barney had one particular interest that needs to be highlighted because of its relevancy to my subsequent bio-journey: his great enthusiasm for fireworks. In truth, it was more of an obsession than an interest and he was a complete nutcase about anything that exploded above his six-foot frame and was continuously blowing things up. I absolutely loved it, but not so with our neighbors who would regularly call the police because Barney was regularly lighting up the neighborhood skies in the middle of the night, sometimes in midwinter. We lived in a house off McNichols next to a small park, and the infield of the baseball diamond was his launching pad. Back then, Barney knew all the cops and bribed them with free electrical service and devices. But even bribed cops from a remarkably corrupt metropolis like Detroit—a city known for its random gunfire, violence and arson—could not look the other way when the heavens were flashing and thundering all around them. After numerous warnings and pleadings, Barney was formally instructed by the police chief himself to cease with the flying gunpowder or he would be arrested for violating city ordinances.
Like any good addict, Barney found other ways to feed his habit. By far the most enjoyable for me was the periodic desert excursion. Every once in a great while, when the funds were liquid, Barney would pack up me and Marge and fly us all out to Las Vegas, rent a van, and drive about forty miles east of town to an Indian reservation where Barney was allowed to blow up anything he wanted. The Indians had their own patch of the Mojave, their own autonomy, and an unlimited supply of fireworks for sale of which Barney took full advantage. From what I remember, too, everyone—Barney, Marge, and the Indians (I wasn’t allowed)—shared a healthy penchant for the evil weed and indulged accordingly. Those colorful, magical desert night skies in the middle of nowhere are some of my best memories, thanks to Barney. But all good things come to an end, and in this case, the end was Barney’s.
I was sixteen-years-old at the time, and it was the first tragedy I had ever experienced. We were back in the desert, and a faulty fuse caused a missile to ignite prematurely and explode in Barney’s face. Adding to this horrendous spectacle, the explosion sent a stray fireball whistling into the rental van where Barney stored his arsenal, detonating it, and causing the loaded vehicle to buck and dance across the black desert like a wild bull with a giant stick of dynamite stuck up its ass that wouldn’t stop firing. When it finally did stop, some fifty yards later, all that remained was the chassis and axles. Everything else was gone. And I say this not to be disrespectful, but watching that van gallop and burst into mighty nothingness was one of the most remarkable things I’ve ever witnessed, and I am absolutely certain that Barney would have felt the same had he not already been scorched unconscious from the initial explosion and, thus, missed the whole thing.
Barney spent fifteen weeks in a Vegas hospital in a pseudovegetative state, his upper body severely burned and bandaged. He was then flown back to Detroit where Marge and I were allowed to wheel him home and tend to him ourselves.
As you can imagine, this was a challenging adjustment for everyone and took some getting used to. Interestingly, the logistical complications and restrictions attached to Barney’s unsightly bodily deformation were not our biggest concern. Rather it was his mental condition. According to the physicians, the brain damage was restricted to the left cerebral hemisphere, causing paralysis to the right side of his body, and also some really goofy general behavior. It was goofy because he would at times act perfectly normal (bedridden, paralyzed, perfectly normal), but other times he would suddenly drift off into a semi-conscious state where he could not be “reached,” yet would still be awake. His eyes were still open and blinking, and he would crush-out his cigarettes, if that helps any. Sometimes I would go on talking to him for quite some time before realizing his switch had turned off. I never quite figured it out, nor did I ever fathom how conscious he was of his semi-consciousness. It was, for me, complex, and I believe the same held true for the physicians. Eventually, I dealt with it the best I could, as did Marge, although it pained me even more to watch Marge cater to him. She never let on, of course, to either one of us, yet I knew it destroyed her to see Barney in that state, a fragment of the handsome, life-loving man she adored. No more wild nights frolicking in the desert or between the sheets. Those days were gone forever.
This was equally true for the revenue that Barney generated. Until the accident, Barney was responsible for all our living expenses and insurance premiums. The Blue Cross he paid into all those years covered the hospital visits and the proliferating pharmaceuticals, but it ended there. Marge had to drain their savings accounts to pay the mortgage and the other regular bills, as well as to fund the new semi-invalid incidentals, including a conversion of the downstairs den into Barney’s bedroom and bathroom since he could not navigate the second floor. Unfortunately, again, the real victim of this new financial stress was not me or Marge, but Barney—his awareness of it. His unusual mental condition did not shield him from the harsh reality that he was unfairly stuck in time and could no longer provide for his family. Even worse, that he had become a burden. And no matter how much we lied to him, he knew better. In my opinion, this awareness of helplessness is what eventually did him in. That’s what killed him.
To compensate, Marge returned to the salon and I was fortunate to find a part-time job at a very hip record store called Sledge’s Eclectic Emporium on Woodward. The owner was, and still is, a tall, angular, bespectacled black man named Sledge Parker, who possessed an uncanny ability for dates. To pay the bills Sledge promoted the Detroit Motown sound and rock and roll, but his real love was jazz, and he had practically everything ever recorded in stock. I learned much from Sledge and eventually took over the shop, but I’m jumping. The point is this job helped to compensate for Barney’s immobilization—a suffering that came to an end about three weeks prior to his fortieth birthday and nine months following the desert incident.
The cause of death was not brain seizure, stroke, blood clot or something brain-related as one might suspect, but lung cancer, of all things. Conveniently, we were planning a big birthday party for him, and the invitations were quickly revised to give notice of his death. To this day, I’m convinced that Barney chose the time and cause of his farewell (an instinct that was corroborated years later by a backwoods preacher). Both reflected his wry sense of humor, and his concerns for me and Marge. Over one hundred people attended his funeral, including neighbors, customers, many members of the Detroit Police Department, and a group of Hopi Indians who flew in from Nevada to perform a drum recital in his memory. As the drums beat and the chanting grew louder, I kept thinking about how much I loved Barney and yet how relieved I was to see him move on. He was not a happy camper in his new role as paraplegic, brain-damaged, burn victim, and I knew in my heart that it was time for him to leave this physical world and see what was next.
*
As Barney’s son I learned many things. One of them was the inner workings of electricity—a magical and powerful force that few people understand. I don’t really understand it either, not the way I understand baseball or even certain laws of physics, but I get the general idea: electricity never takes the long route. It always chooses the shortest path. It seeks its freedom in the most direct manner, and it will light, heat, fuse, fry, or sizzle anything that is too weak to resist it. This principle became important to me not only as a practical necessity, but also as a metaphysical law: be direct, know your limitations, and if someone gets in your way, push through them.
What follows is the heart-to-heart that Barney and I shared right before he died. I like to refer to this as Barney’s “deathbed revelation.” Because of this conversation, I later found myself forced to apply the electricity principle to its absolute fullest. This memorable and somber exchange took place in midwinter, and I distinctly remember it was snowing a unique, brownish Detroit slush. It could not have been more depressing if we were being pissed on by Satan himself. But at least it blanketed the shit-stained, month-old sidewalk ice that I had just slipped on coming into the house. He called me into the den and asked me to sit down. “I got something to tell you,” he said. I replied with the usual, “What is it, Dad?” And that’s when it started:
“I’m not your dad,” he blurted out.
Not sure of his mental condition at the moment, I remained calm and asked him to repeat himself, thinking he could very well be in some other universe.
“I’m not your dad,” he repeated firmly without any signs of ambivalence.
“You’re kidding?”
“Take a good look at me, son. Do I look like I’m kidding?”
I looked at his toasted, mangled body. He was not kidding and appeared to be in a lucid sate.
“Can you be a little more specific, then?” I asked politely, still thinking there might be a screw loose somewhere.
“I wasn’t the guy who got your mom pregnant.”
“What?”
“I said,” he said, “I am not the man who impregnated your mom. There was someone before me.”
“Who was before you?” I asked weakly.
“A musician.”
“A musician?”
“His name is Ben Tyler.”
This took a second. A long second. “Ben Tyler? You mean the Ben Tyler?”
“Yeah, the Iron Horse guy.”
“You’re kidding?”
“I thought we covered that, son. I’m not kidding.”
This was incredible, surreal information if it was true. Ben Tyler was a well-known rock star who reached stardom in the 1970’s with a band called Iron Horse. This was followed by a solo career with even more fame and success.
“This is a little hard for me to take, Dad. Ben Tyler is my biological father? Is that what you are telling me?”
“Yes. I know this must be weird to hear this. That’s why I wanted to be the one to do it—tell you.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before?” I asked in disbelief.
“Well,” he said, as if expecting this, “at first you were too young. Just a baby. And then as time went on we figured it was best to just leave things the way they were.”
“Why?” I asked with a little bit more authority.
“Let’s just say,” he said slowly, “when I met your mom it was over between Ben and her and Ben wasn’t doing too well as a musician. He didn’t have any money at that time.”
“So you mean like he wasn’t able to help out or anything?”
“Yeah, yeah, that’s exactly what I mean. So I kind of just took over.”
“I see.”
“Yeah,” he mumbled, carefully monitoring my reaction.
“Well, what about later?”
“How much later?”
“After he became rich and famous.”
“Well, actually, son, that wasn’t too much later. I think it took him about another year or so to hit it big with that trashy album of his. The Elevator one.”
“And?”
“And then I think, well, he was kind of busy, you know, being a rock star and all.”
I was waiting to hear more but he stopped talking. And for a moment I thought he checked out, but he hadn’t. He was just thinking about how best to proceed:
“You know, Nic,” he said as he lit up and inhaled deeply, finding the strength, “I love you more than anything in the world and I tried my damnedest to be a good father to you.”
“I know you did, Dad. You’re a great father. The best!”
“Thanks. But there’s something more I want you to understand. It’s important.”
“What?”
“I adopted you when you were almost a-year-old. That’s why we all have the same last name.”
I thought about it a moment. This was the first time I considered the technical aspect of Barney being my father given this new information. Yes, this was true, we had the same last name.
“And when I did that,” he continued, “adopted you—Ben was no longer responsible for you. Legally and forever.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. That’s the law.”
It took a few more seconds before it clicked: Ben Tyler was a wealthy man and I was not entitled because of the adoption.
“Oh, I see,” I said slowly as the reality filtered through my blood stream like a giant thimble of whiskey.
“Trust me, son,” he said, knowing I understood, “no one in a million years thought Ben would get lucky. And, well…”
“What?”
“—there was the temptation—for me anyway—to tell you about him so maybe you could develop a relationship with him but your mom was against it.”
“Why?”
“She was afraid he wouldn’t respond.”
“Why?”
“After he suddenly got rich, Stu contacted him for past child support and he paid up, or his lawyers did, but he still made no effort to see you, and the door was wide open. I made sure of that. I wanted you to have every advantage. But he never did. I think some of it had to do with him getting married right afterwards. I imagine a lot was going on for Ben back then. I’ll give him that. Although, that’s no excuse.”
Working at the record shop, at the time, I remembered reading in the music gossip columns that Ben Tyler married twice and had five kids from the two marriages. The first wife was a poet, and the second a performance artist.
“It was a tough decision not to tell you,” he continued, “but we were trying to do the best thing for you. I swear.”
“You did the right thing, Dad.”
“I hope so. I thought about it every time one of his songs came on the radio, and they were always coming on. That’s why I listened to those old Dead tapes all the time.”
Finally his Dead and CCR fixation made sense.
“Thanks for telling me, Dad.”
“Thanks for understanding, son. You sure you’re okay?”
“Yeah, I’m okay.”
Although, to be absolutely truthful, I wasn’t okay at all. If anything I was stupefied. Later, after Barney checked out, I remember taking a long walk despite the winter hazard. This was more than a lot of information to synthesize. Barney was correct. It was indeed most strange to think, to accept, that after all those years someone other than Barney was my blood, my co-creator, and that Ben Tyler, a household name, was that person. At some point, I thought, I would have to talk to Stu. Not just then, but when the time was right. It’s always a good idea to talk to a competent lawyer before venturing into the unknown.
About three weeks after Barney’s funeral, the time had come to find out more about my estranged bio-Dad. So I jumped on a Grand River Avenue bus and rode downtown to talk to Stu. As noted, Stu was a baseball fanatic, and back then he shamelessly cluttered his office with corny Detroit Tigers memorabilia, particularly from the year 1968. That autumn the Tigers captured the World Series led by their star pitcher, Denny McClain—the last player in the majors to win thirty games in one season. Tragically for Stu, he later had a falling out with the city and the Tiger organization when the Tigers abandoned old Tiger Stadium in 2000 and moved into the new Comerica Park. That half-mile or so cross town transition, according to Stu, was a form of “esthetic and cultural urban genocide” with which Stu could never reconcile. A harsh assessment, perhaps, but if anyone had a basis to complain about municipal injustice, it was Stu. He was one of the very few in his economic class who did not join the white flight to the suburbs in the 1960s, and as of this writing he continues to make his home in Corktown, a progressive little Detroit neighborhood, no more than a few blocks away from what’s left of his beloved Tiger Stadium.
When I approached him that one day after school seeking news about Ben Tyler, he patiently heard me out and agreed that I had the right to know the facts. He assumed that I would seek them out regardless, as kids do, and it would be better, for accuracy’s sake, if most of the inflammatory information came from him. His one major concern was Marge. Well aware of her reticence (guilt) regarding the touchy subject matter, he did not want me going back and discussing my new found information. I assured him of my discretion, and soon after he entrusted me with everything he knew. And he knew quite a bit which I will now convey. I must warn you, though, some of this information may seem extraordinary in terms of character, but as you’ll soon find out that’s precisely the point. So bear with me:
At the time of my high school discovery, which is our time reference here, both of Ben’s parents (my blood grandparents) were deceased, but Ben had two siblings, both older and both still breathing. Of the two, however, Gertrude Tyler, the eldest, was to die tragically four years later. Gertrude started out a missionary nun in Bolivia in the early 1960s and was later expelled from her diocese for gross sexual misconduct, an obsession that I quickly found out runs in the family. She stayed in the general area nonetheless, joining radical lay missionary sisterhoods, a few of which she reportedly started herself. Her goals in life were to provide for the needy and the oppressed, to oppose ruthless governmental oligarchies and their punitive methods, and to satisfy her strong carnal desires.
Her death, according to two Chilean newspaper reports, was caused by her “slipping off” an edgy cliff high up in the Chilean Atacama Desert while attempting to organize local labor forces that were building sites for the new powerful telescopes that were beginning to pop up along the Andes for the Southern Hemispheric view. This accident was witnessed by more than two dozen people, including many scientists and engineers who were supervising the installation of a forty-meter telescope on this particularly mountainous sight. Because of the credentials of these individuals, there was never an official investigation beyond recording initial eyewitness statements, even though her body was never found. Yet everyone, friends and foes alike, was fairly certain that Gertrude was dead because she was never heard from again, and that alone was sufficient evidence. So Gertrude never figured into my story, but her personality should be noted, for it was this type of extremism that I would soon become accustomed to from all the Tylers.
Gertrude’s other younger brother, Hank Tyler, is an entirely different story in that he plays prominently in my adventure and is still very much alive to this day. Much more will be devoted to him as events unfold. Suffice to say that at this time, not too long after Barney’s death, Hank partnered with Ben in a record label called Prostitute Records based in Los Angeles. Because of Ben’s copious industry connections and his brother’s aggressive marketing campaign, it was not long before Prostitute Records stores began spreading like acne throughout the country and then Europe and elsewhere, although at this point in time they were just getting underway.
Ben’s first marriage was to the poet Molly Sivad. Her claim to fame was a published collection of dark poems entitled To Die Or Not To Die, which explores the horrors of adolescent angst and indecisiveness. For a poetry book it was considered a rogue success and sold over 400,000 copies between 1972-75. Their first child, Megan Tyler, was born in North Hollywood five months after Ben and Molly were married in a graveyard ceremony (Molly’s choice), and six months after I was born in Detroit. Thus, Megan was Ben’s oldest legitimate child and six months my junior. Eleven months later, she was followed by her brother, Stan Tyler, Ben’s oldest legitimate boy, and it was in between these two births, Megan’s and Stan’s, when Ben struck gold as a rock star with the sloppy and mediocre album, Elevator to Hell—which Barney made reference to in his death bed revelation. The story of how this occurred is rock and roll legend and worth repeating:
Ben and his struggling Iron Horse band members were especially hung over one afternoon (they always awoke, when they woke, in the afternoon) and were forced to buy two new amps because the bassist had thrown up on stage the previous night. Apparently, the puke was so fetid that no one would go near the two saturated amps, including the stage hands, which allowed the chunky, reeking liquid to filter and drip into the circuitry and ossify the boards. This forced Ben, the band leader, to drag his tired ass out of bed the following afternoon and go to Sears, the cheapest place he knew, with money he didn’t have, to buy equipment for a gig that night. For spite, he woke the band and forced them to go along.
After they walked across town to save a few pennies, they entered the store and onto the small elevator. Just as the elevator door closed, someone farted. This provoked a heated argument among the members, but Ben had reached his limit. Trapped, suffocating, gassed, hung over, and broke, he allowed his temper to get the best of him and began repeatedly hitting his bass player over the head with his guitar, screaming “this is hell, this is hell…” Before he knew it, he had himself a nice little melody. Just to make sure, Ben whacked the bass player a few more times, and, yeah, he was sure, as were the others. Once the elevator door opened, they ran like hell down the stairs and over to the studio to record it before they forgot, adding lyrics and a chorus. Six weeks later, Elevator to Hell became an instant mega-hit, and Iron Horse went on to make three consecutive platinum albums before Ben went solo and continued the platinum streak.
It was following the beginning of this magnificent stardom that Ben married his second wife, the performance artist Isabella Vasquelez. His interest in her began when he attended one of her shows in a closed wing of the San Diego airport terminal that had been converted into an underground theater. That particular night, Isabella was dressed only in a white diaper and sat perched on a flimsy wooden highchair and stuffed large, shapely vegetables down her swollen throat which generated course, primal noises as the juices and pieces of skin and flesh from the dark herbaceous objects squirmed down her face, down her neck, across her breasts and into her soaked diaper. For Ben, this particular performance art was impressive on a number of levels and after the show he walked backstage and ran off with Isabella, as rock stars will do.
Ten weeks later, Isabella was pregnant. And there was a very good possibility that Ben would have attempted his typical legal sidestepping if not for Isabella’s father, Marco Vasquelez, an extremely proud Mexican rancher and business man who bred race horses, grew and exported marijuana from his home state of Michoacán, Mexico, and operated a labor contract business that catered to California landowners and agribusiness managers who were in need of cheap, seasonal manpower to harvest big-money crops. Once Marco discovered that Isabella, his only child, was with child, he did nothing less than threaten to kill Ben if he did not do the responsible thing and divorce his poet wife and marry Isabella. Ben wisely did as he was told, divorced Molly (which cost him a fortune), and married the rancher’s daughter. To Isabella’s credit, though, Ben did not need much persuasion. She was, by most accounts, a strikingly beautiful and unique woman and you might even say that Ben fell in love for the first time in his life when he met her.
Isabella gave birth to three more of Ben’s children in slightly over five years: Joseph, Jessica, and Josh. For some reason the letter J must have meant something to them. Ben now had two (three if you count me) sets of children, with both families residing in the Los Angeles area: Molly, Megan and Stan lived in Topanga Canyon; Isabella, Joseph, Jessica, Josh and Ben in the Hollywood Hills—although from what I understand, after Josh was born, Ben spent most of his time outside of California traveling the world.
*
Finding out about all this Tyler history was fascinating, slightly disturbing, and emotionally confusing because I realized rather quickly that I was alone with it. Marge, through Barney and Stu, was aware of my general knowledge, but her motherly pride would not allow her to open up with me, despite my many subtle references. I was not interested in the sordid details (I kept my promise to Stu), but I believed the circumstances of my birth should no longer be swept under the rug like it had for seventeen years. But it was to no avail. Marge would always find excuses to avoid the subject, and I eventually had no choice but to accept her position. As time went on I was hoping this would change.
I was equally disappointed with my friends. In sharing my new bio-story, I was seeking camaraderie and support and all I got was doubt, resistance and cross-examination. I then quickly realized that I might be compromising Marge and possibly the memory of Barney by answering their many nosy questions. So I stopped almost before I started and decided to keep my strange biology below the radar. This was Stu’s advice as well because nothing had really changed (with the exception of Barney dying). Everything else, legally anyway, stayed the same. Of course, had I not been adopted, it would have been a much different story. According to the state of California I had “birth rights.” Unfortunately those rights dissolved with a notarized, City Hall paperwork exchange some sixteen years prior.
One of the few people I did choose to talk to about bio-Dad was Sledge Parker, my employer and the owner and visionary of Eclectic Emporium. Sledge was a successful businessman and musicologist, and, at an earlier point, ran a profitable counterfeiting operation until one of his operatives got sloppy and made a swap for real cash with a planted federal agent. Fortunately for Sledge, he was not convicted of printing phony bank notes, just passing them on, so his stint was limited to a first-offense, plea-bargained, five-year federal prison rap tied to a lengthy parole. It was in prison where he was tagged with the nickname Sledgehammer, or Sledge for short. Usually a peaceful man, the incident that brought on the change was a violent one and tells us much of what Sledge was dealing with in his life at that particular period in American history.
One average prison day in 1966, a white supremacist cold-cocked Sledge from behind in the prison chow line for no apparent reason, other than, you know, Sledge was black, and the other guy was superior, or however that works. Sledge went down hard but was able to endure the blow and tripped up his attacker using his spidery arms. Once the bigot dropped, Sledge sprung up like a cartoon superhero and proceeded to pound the guy mercilessly using his two stick-like arms, which appeared to be smelted together into an iron rod. This imagery was enhanced by large, sharp-knuckled hands, and the combination of arms and hands swinging windmilllike, over and over, gave the impression to those who witnessed this punishment that Sledge was wielding a sledgehammer and literally pounding his opponent into the ground like a railroad spike. Luckily for both Sledge and the supremacist, three prison guards halted the carnage just in time, preventing a bloody death. Since there was no swollen corpse to deal with—just a bunch of broken bones and pierced organs—the warden coolly declared that Sledge had acted in self-defense and sent his attacker packing to a maximum-security joint in Florida to serve out the rest of his term.
When Sledge was released from prison in August 1969, he returned to Detroit and started up Eclectic Emporium on Woodward. Because he was out of circulation, he missed the 1967 riots and part of the city going up in flames, but he did witness the tail end of the great white flight out of the city and the hardening of the color lines. I understand these were not easy times for urban dwellers, and despite the abundant challenges, Sledge maintained a healthy profit from a multiracial clientele, many of whom would come back from the swelling suburbs and other parts of the state to purchase from his store. For Sledge, it was all about the music, and music was still what drew people together. His shop became an instant classic and was a quiet, insider Detroit landmark by the time I started working there years later.