also by lewis shiner
novels
Dark Tangos (2011)
Black & White (2008)
Say Goodbye (1999)
Glimpses (1993)
Slam (1990)
Deserted Cities of the Heart (1988)
Frontera (1984)
collections
Heroes and Villains (2017)
Collected Stories (2009)
Love in Vain (2001)
The Edges of Things (1991)
Nine Hard Questions about the Nature of the Universe (1990)
First published in the UK in 2019 by Head of Zeus Ltd
Copyright © Lewis Shiner, 2019
The moral right of Lewis Shiner to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
9 7 5 3 1 2 4 6 8
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (HB): 9781789541137
ISBN (XTPB): 9781789541144
ISBN (E): 9781789541120
Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon cr0 4yy
Head of Zeus Ltd
First Floor East
5–8 Hardwick Street
London EC1R 4RG
www.headofzeus.com
For Jean-Paul with love, always, from Raul
And, always, for Orlita
Also by Lewis Shiner
Welcome Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Part One
1965
1966
1967
1968
1969
Part Two
1971
1973
1974
1977
1980
1984
1990
1993
1999
2000
2001
2010
2016
Later
Author’s Note
About the authorAbout the Author
An Invitation from the Publisher
Three-thirty, Cole’s first day at the new high school. He hit the courts in his tennis whites, carrying his Jack Kramer racket in its wooden press. The St. Mark’s courts were like nothing he’d seen outside of tv. Bright green composite surface, clean white lines, cloth nets on steel hawsers instead of the chain link he was used to.
He was one of two dozen boys. After ten minutes of basic calisthenics, they milled around, waiting. The coach was named Fleming, young and skinny and earnest. Freshman English teacher, somebody said.
“Cole?” Fleming said, reading from a clipboard, and Cole raised his hand. Fleming glanced at him and said, “You and Montoya take Court Six. Let’s see what you’ve got.”
Montoya was small and wiry, light-skinned despite the Mexican name. Short black hair parted on the left. Good-looking and confident—hell on women, Cole figured.
“Alex,” Montoya said, offering his hand.
“Jeff,” Cole said. “But everybody calls me Cole.”
“What year are you?”
“Junior.”
“Me too. Transfer?”
“Yeah, I was in Midland. You know where Court Six is?” He slacked off the wing nuts and slipped the racket out of the brace, then swung it in large circles to loosen up his shoulder.
“The back forty.” Alex pointed with the head of his racket to a second row of concrete slabs behind the elegant composite courts. He grabbed two balls from the bucket at Fleming’s feet. “Your dad in oil?”
“Kind of,” Cole said. “He’s an accountant.”
“Much money in that?”
“Not really. I’m here on scholarship. And against my will.” Alex cocked his head and Cole said, “No girls.”
“It’s a drawback,” Alex said.
The date was September 7, the day after Labor Day, and the colors of the distant courts rippled in the Dallas heat. Cole had already felt that first, cooling break of sweat under his arms and on his upper lip. Alex took the far side of the net, dropped a ball, and casually swatted it before it hit the ground.
In two minutes Cole had his number. He was exactly the kind of player that made Cole crazy, a scrambler who could get to anything and whose wild shots always nicked the line. Cole had made up for a lack of natural ability with hours of practice, focusing on technique, drilling against a backboard until the daylight was gone. He was a power player, with a hard topspin backhand that he liked to follow in to the net. Unfortunately, he wasn’t powerful enough.
They took a few practice serves, then Cole said, “M or W?”
“M for Montoya.”
Cole spun his racket and the Wilson logo on the handle landed upside-down. He hit both balls to Alex.
It went as badly as Cole expected. Alex’s serves were nothing special, but every time Cole went to the net, Alex hit a deep lob that sent him scurrying to the baseline. Between that and the drop shots and bizarre spins, Alex easily won his serve.
Cole himself had a nasty American twist that Alex couldn’t handle. If Cole got the first serve in. When he fell back on his second serve, Alex got up to the same tricks. Cole held his first two serves, trailing 3–2 when Fleming showed up.
“Montoya, get out of no-man’s land. And quit hitting when you’re out of position. Cole, if you’re going to take the net, put it away. And you’re hitting late on your ground strokes and killing your power.”
Cole dug in and pounded two serves in a row, and Alex sent both of them into the fence. “Nice serve,” Fleming said. “Let me see you mix it up a little.” As soon as Cole complied, Alex was all over it and took the game.
Fleming moved on. Cole couldn’t get the service break back and lost the set 6–4.
As they walked toward the net, Alex flipped his racket around and held it like a guitar, pointing the handle up and contorting his face as he pretended to tear off a hot lick.
Interesting, Cole thought.
They shook hands across the net and walked to the sidelines. “I guess you don’t know much of anybody here, right?” Alex said.
Cole shrugged, still annoyed with himself for losing.
“Why don’t you come to my house for dinner Friday night?” Alex said. “My father is always after me to bring people home, and the food is pretty decent. I can bring you over after school.”
Over the years and many dislocations, Cole had developed the habit of making friends quickly. “Okay,” he said. “Thanks.”
*
Cole followed Alex out to the St. Mark’s parking lot after tennis on Friday. Their books were stacked on their notebooks under their left arms, their rackets in their right hands. They were in their fall uniforms, khaki pants with Ban-Lon polo shirts in a particularly fungal shade of taupe. Cole was a little nervous about being branded queer, though Alex seemed straight enough. And popular, based on the number of people who sat with him at lunch, a club that Cole had joined.
Montoya’s car turned out to be a red ’65 Corvair Monza. Sleek, compact, sporty, engine in the rear. Cole stopped to admire it. “This got the one-ten horses?”
“One-forty,” Alex said. “Not that I get much chance to open it up. You know cars?”
“I used to help out in the motor pool.”
The red tuck and roll upholstery was hot enough to pop the sweat on Cole’s freshly showered back. He followed Alex’s lead and threw his books and racket in the back seat.
Alex had a cushion to put himself higher behind the wheel. He cranked the engine and the radio came on with it, blasting rock and roll. Big, skating-rink-type organ and tinny piano and a tired-sounding singer. “Check it out!” Alex said. “You heard this yet?”
Cole shook his head.
“It’s the new Dylan single. Dig it.”
Cole had heard of Dylan but not heard him. Midland was solidly country-western, and his father ordered him to get up and change the channel whenever music groups came on tv. Most of the rock bands that Cole had heard sounded crude. He liked movie themes and John Coltrane, the Kingston Trio and Bobby Darin. His parents had an ancient monaural phonograph and Cole didn’t have any records of his own.
The song was over by the time Alex exited the parking lot and made a left onto Preston. He turned the volume down and said, “You like Dylan?”
“I don’t know,” Cole said. “How come you’ve got your license already? Are you even sixteen yet?”
“Sixteen next month. It’s a hardship license.” He looked at Cole and grinned. “My parents felt like it was a hardship to drive me around.” Cole’s parents felt the same way, but in his case it meant he didn’t get out much.
“How long you been in Dallas?” Alex asked.
“Since June. Worked all summer in my father’s office. Making coffee, running errands, shit like that.”
“It’s cool that you got to move around.”
“Mostly from one armpit to another. Before Midland I was in Egypt for a year. That was where I learned to work on cars. We got out just before Nasser nationalized the oil. Midland for two years before that, Mexico for a year before that, New Jersey before that.”
“Which armpit of Mexico?”
Cole flushed. “No offense, but we were in Villahermosa, which was in fact not very hermosa.”
“Why should I be offended?”
He wants me to point out that he’s Mexican, Cole thought. He shut up rather than give him the satisfaction. It was starting to look like a long evening.
“Relax, Cole, I’m just giving you shit. My father’s from Guanajuato, which is in fact pretty hermosa, and I agree that Villahermosa is pretty much an armpit. I myself have lived my entire life in Dallas, and I’m not convinced that you haven’t landed in an armpit yet again.”
*
Alex was nervous despite himself as he parked behind the house. You could see there was something about “this Cole character,” as his mother already called him. Alex felt like his own attempts at coolness were transparently lame, whereas Cole was the real deal, standing outside looking in, not with hunger but with indifference.
They got out of the car and he watched Cole take it all in, the pristine driveway, the perfectly rectangular hedges, his sister’s red T-bird convertible, the privacy fence and the pool beyond it, the two-story brick house, less than ten years old. “Nice,” Cole said. “What does your father do to get this kind of bread?”
“Import-export, real estate, he’s got a piece of the Cuauhtémoc brewery in Monterrey, I don’t even know anymore where it all comes from. Once you get past a certain point, being rich is a full-time job all by itself.”
“You don’t approve?”
“It’s not that simple. I love my father. I just don’t want to be him.”
The garage door was up and they walked between his father’s Eldorado and his mother’s Impala, through the laundry room, and into the kitchen. Alex’s mother was washing lettuce in the sink while Frederica sliced potatoes on the counter. His mother’s hair was in a loose ponytail and she was wearing Capri pants and a tight sweater like somebody half her age. She’d barely turned 20 when she had Alex, and she was fanatical about watching Jack LaLanne and working out to fitness records. She dried her hands on her apron as she kissed Alex and said, «Hola, m’ijo.»
“Mom?”
“Sorry, sorry. Hi, Alex. And this is Cole?”
“Hi,” Cole said. He took her hand European style, like he was going to kiss it. “You must be Alex’s sister?”
“Points for charm,” she said. “You can stay.”
“Dad home?” Alex asked.
“Not yet.” Alex wondered if her false cheer was obvious to Cole. “Susan’s here for the weekend.” She looked at Cole. “Susan really is his sister. She’s a freshman at ut.”
“Alex told me.”
She nodded to Frederica. “And this is Frederica.”
“I’m Cole. Anything I can do to help?”
Frederica shook her head like Cole was crazy, and Alex’s mother said, “Is he always like this?”
“I barely know the guy,” Alex said.
“Like what?” Cole said.
“You guys run along,” his mother said. “I’ll call you when dinner’s ready.”
Alex led the way upstairs. He’d remembered to make the bed that morning, at least. He sat on the bed and Cole pulled the wooden chair out from the desk and sat backwards on it. Cole eyed the guitars and amplifier, the stereo and the stack of records leaning against the wall.
“What kind of music do you like?” Alex asked. You could see from Cole’s shrug that he was embarrassed. “C’mon, man, what’s the big deal? You into opera or some shit like that?”
“No, it’s… I don’t know much about rock and roll.”
“Yeah, I figured. Like, ‘rock and roll’ is oldies, okay, like the Platters and shit. Just plain ‘rock’ is what’s happening now.”
Cole nodded like he was taking mental notes. “You play guitar?”
“At it,” Alex said. “I’d have to work a lot harder to be any good. Lately I’ve been playing bass because it’s easier. If I was in a group, that’s what I’d play. Did you like ‘Positively Fourth Street’? That Dylan song in the car?”
“I think so. Maybe.”
Alex thought it over and said, “Here’s the deal. You help me clean up my tennis game, and I’ll help you with your appalling ignorance about music. Okay?”
Cole nodded again.
Alex took out Highway 61 Revisited. “Lesson One,” he said.
*
Fifty-some minutes later and Cole’s head was spinning.
The instruments on the record were clangy and some of them out of tune. Instead of ruining everything, it only made the music sound more urgent. Then there was Dylan’s voice, like something he used to know and had forgotten. The voice of somebody too clever for his own good, hurt and lonely and rejecting before he was rejected. Like looking in a mirror and seeing somebody far more mysterious than he’d ever seen there before.
Alex surprised him by not asking what he thought, which Cole did not want to put into words at that moment. It must have been all over his face, because Alex said, “Okay. Now we’re getting somewhere.”
They went downstairs. Half of Cole was still out on Highway 61, or in the rain in Juarez, or maybe on Desolation Row. The other half dimly registered an oak-paneled dining room, a chandelier, an oval table 12 feet long laid out with linen tablecloth, candles, real silver. A two-foot-tall wooden crucifix next to a framed picture of the Virgin. At one end sat Alex’s father, five-ten and massively built, with short, curly hair and a neatly trimmed mustache. The only other person at the table was a younger, blonder version of Alex, maybe a fifth grader, sitting in front of a glass of milk.
Alex’s father stood up and held out his hand. “Al Montoya. Good to meet you.” Only the slightest hint of an accent, more in the rhythm than the pronunciation.
“Jeff Cole.” He was ready for a firm handshake and he got it.
Alex hugged his father and his father kissed him on the cheek. Cole, startled, looked away.
“And this is Jimmy,” Montoya said.
The kid shook hands too and said, “Hi.”
Alex’s mother came in, holding a bowl of something in a red quilted mitt. From the look of it, Cole thought it might be potatoes au gratin, something he’d read about but never eaten. Then again, he’d never known anyone with a black maid before, or cars for everybody in the family old enough to drive.
“You’re here, Cole,” she said, pointing to a chair one away from Montoya. “Go ahead and sit down.”
He didn’t, of course. Being poor didn’t mean you couldn’t have manners, his mother had told him a million times. She read Emily Post and Amy Vanderbilt and never got to use them.
“You want a beer?” Alex asked.
“Um, sure.” He didn’t let himself look at Montoya to see if they were pulling his leg.
“Bohemia all right?” Alex said.
“Whatever you’re having.”
Montoya said, “If you’re not familiar with it, it’s got a richer flavor than the US beer you’re probably used to.”
Cole nodded as if he were used to anything other than an occasional pilfered sip of his father’s Schlitz.
“Let me know what you think,” Montoya said.
“I’ll do that,” Cole said.
Alex’s mother set the potatoes next to the rest of the food on the table. Huge wooden bowl of salad. Fresh green beans instead of canned, cut diagonally and sautéed with mushrooms. Loaves of French bread torn to pieces and poking out of a checkered napkin in a basket. Glass butter dish and silver butter knife, steaming bowl of wild rice, pitchers of water and lemonade. She sat at her husband’s right hand and said, «Susana! Ven, estamos listos.»
Alex, who’d come back with two brown bottles of beer, glared at her. Montoya cleared his throat. Cole shifted uncomfortably, and then Susan walked out of the kitchen.
She was darker than Alex, with lustrous black hair that flipped inward at her shoulders, like a fashion model’s. Petite, graceful, completely out of Cole’s league. Except for the wounded look in her eyes. It matched the pain in Dylan’s voice, and Cole wanted to believe that no one saw it but him.
She carried a Pyrex serving dish full of rare steak, sliced into strips and garnished with parsley. She set it on the table and held out her hand. “You must be Cole.”
“I suppose I must,” he said, “but I can try to change.”
She offered him the charity of her smile. The only unclaimed chair was next to his, so he pulled it out for her. She thanked him and then Cole, the last man standing, finally took his own seat.
No matter how hungry you are, his mother had taught him, be patient. Watch the hostess and follow her lead. What she did was hold her hands out, palm up, and the others around the table joined hands and bowed their heads.
“Jimmy?” Montoya said. “Will you do the honors?”
“Bless this food to our use and us to thy service,” the kid said. “Make us ever mindful of the needs of others.”
Cole, a devout atheist since age 12, didn’t join the chorus of amens. He let his attention linger on the feel of Susan’s hand in his. Small, soft, warming to his touch. He was careful to release it at the first sign of her letting go.
He took small portions as the serving dishes came around, said, “Everything smells wonderful,” and braced himself to tell his life story over again. Instead Montoya asked him what he thought of the Gemini V flight. “I can’t imagine,” Montoya said, “what it must be like to be stuck inside a big tin can for a week. I would go crazy.”
At Cole’s house they ate on tv trays in front of the big black and white console set, and Cole’s father complained if anyone tried to talk over the news. If Cole’s father was home, the tv was on, so they never had any conversation at all. Which was okay with Cole, as his father found something to object to in most anything Cole said.
“It might be worth it for the sights,” Cole said. “The thing that would drive me crazy is having so little control. It’s all done by computers and the ground crew.” Cole had all 55 Topps Astronaut Cards from two years before.
Montoya nodded. “That would get to me, too.”
At the first lull, Cole looked at Susan, who hadn’t spoken since her “amen.” “How do you like ut? It’s really big, right?”
“Thirty thousand,” Susan said. “Some of my lecture classes have two or three hundred people in them. The hard part is getting the prerequisite classes for your major. Sometimes they don’t have enough sections and you can get stuck in a holding pattern for years.”
She was acting, Cole thought, as if he were a human in his own right and not just her little brother’s friend. “Do you know what you’re going to major in?”
Jimmy, barely audible, said, “Football players.”
Susan blushed and her mother said, “Jimmy! Apologize to your sister.”
“Sorry, Susan.” He drew the words out in a singsong.
Cole’s own face felt hot. Of course she was dating football players, and probably majoring in Home Ec. What had he expected, Russian Lit?
“No,” Susan said. “I don’t know yet.”
The pain in her eyes was connected to this, and he couldn’t possibly ask her about it at the dinner table. Or anywhere else, he reminded himself.
*
Alex played it cool, keeping one eye on Cole as they ate. You could see he knew how to handle people. Say something to make them feel good about themselves, the oldest gimmick in the book, and that shit always worked, even on his father, who prided himself on not getting bluffed at the poker table. The trick was in the delivery, pretending he was kidding while at the same time coming off like he really meant it. It was a kind of non-sexual flirting, and he must have figured it out early on. You would need to make friends fast, moving around like that.
Cole finished his beer and smoothly got Alex’s father talking about the brewery. “You want another?” Alex asked.
“Uh, sure,” Cole said.
“I’ll get it,” Susan said, pushing back her chair and ignoring both Cole’s token protest and their father’s raised eyebrow. “Anybody else?”
Alex raised his own nearly empty bottle, pleased at the way he and Susan and Cole had taken advantage of the situation. Yes, Alex thought. I think he’ll do.
Alex and his father and Cole stayed at the table until after nine. Cole didn’t give up his attempts to help with the dishes until Alex’s mother promised him, “Next time.” Cole had eaten three helpings of everything and completely won her over.
“Cole lived in Villahermosa for a year, Pop,” Alex said.
“Really? How old were you?”
“I turned ten there.”
“Do you speak any Spanish?”
“I can get by. Between that and Spanish classes at school.”
You could see that Cole wanted to ask why they didn’t speak it at home, why the dirty looks when his mother used it. Even so, he’d read the mood well enough to answer in English.
Eventually Alex said, “It’s late. I’d better take him home.”
“You’ve had two beers,” his father said. “You’re not driving. Susan can take him.”
Alex stood up abruptly. “Let’s go, then.”
Cole thanked everyone extravagantly, including Frederica, and then he and Alex went outside to wait on Susan. “She’s got to brush her teeth,” Alex said, “and fix her hair and freshen her makeup. In case Prince Charming pulls up next to her at the light.”
“She seems nice.”
Alex shrugged. “Don’t forget your books.”
Cole got his stuff out of the Monza and after an awkward minute said, “Are you pissed off about something?”
“I hate it when my father treats me like a kid.”
“We’re fifteen years old,” Cole said. “We are kids.”
“When he was my age, he was working twelve hours a day and bringing home most of the family’s money. And he didn’t take shit from anyone, including his old man.”
A floodlight snapped on above them and Susan made her entrance. “Shall we?” she said. She’d carefully tied a scarf over her hair and her lips shone. Cole moved quickly to open the driver door of her T-Bird, then glanced at Alex and said, “Shotgun.”
Alex got in and stretched both arms across the back of the seats. Cole gave directions while Susan backed out. They cut over to Marsh and cruised north, three lanes each way, traffic sparse, the late summer wind pinning Alex’s shirt to his chest. The nearness of fall made him lonely and impatient.
“The Dylan concert is the twenty-fifth,” Susan said. “I’m getting tickets Monday morning before I go back. You want any?”
“Cole?” Alex said. “You interested?”
“I have to ask my parents… but yeah. Definitely.” He looked at Susan. “Do you need money tonight?”
“Alex knows where to find you,” she said.
“That’s right,” Cole said. “Whenever you need me.”
*
The girls in Mr. Casey’s Civics class had pronounced him “a hunk.” All but Madelyn. She found it alarming that he was so clearly aware of his good looks and that he took so much pleasure in the way the girls responded to him. His dark hair was unkempt and slightly too long; his tattersall shirts and knit ties were daringly casual; his smile radiated inappropriate warmth.
“Miss Brooks?” he said. “Will you tell the class the subject you chose for your essay?”
Madelyn had been dreading this moment. They’d spent the first few weeks of class discussing a major paper due mid-semester, and on Monday they’d had to turn in preliminary topic paragraphs. Now Mr. Casey was calling on the students he thought had provided good examples, with the idea that this would somehow inspire those who hadn’t. Rather than, in fact, make them sullen, jealous, and resentful.
Madelyn’s strategy for surviving high school centered on the avoidance of negative attention. On a tactical level this meant not doing anything to emphasize her quiet good looks, not binding herself to any of the social cliques that she easily moved among, and above all not making a display of her erudition.
“It’s, um, about the crisis in Greece.”
“I don’t think,” Mr. Casey said, “most of us know about this crisis. Can you explain it? And stand up, please, Miss Brooks, so we can all hear you.”
She reluctantly got to her feet. Keep it simple, she reminded herself. “Well, it’s a monarchy there, and the new king just took over, and he’s very young and kind of pushy. He forced the prime minister to resign, but the prime minister is really popular, so none of the king’s replacements have been able to win a vote of confidence.”
“And this is important because…?”
Madelyn felt herself get caught up, against her will. “Because the power struggle is over who controls the army. Like in most countries, the Greek army is deeply conservative, and they don’t like the wave of liberalism that’s been happening over the last few years. If the civilian government can’t hold power, the army could take over and impose a right-wing dictatorship.”
She must have let some emotion into her voice because she heard, from the back of the room, Ed Wallingford say, “Big woo.” Ed, the kicker and the smallest boy on the football team, was given to deflating what he saw as pretension.
Mr. Casey said, “Your title is ‘The July Apostasy in Greece.’ Can you explain that?”
His wrongheaded attempt to hold her up for admiration, she knew, would only end in ridicule. “That’s what they call it over there.” She looked at Mr. Casey and saw that he wanted more. “The prime ministers that the king appointed were members of the first guy, Papandreou’s, party. So Papandreou’s people called them apostates. Traitors, basically.”
“Where did you get all this?”
“We listen to the bbc sometimes.” In fact she and her father ritually tuned in the bbc Overseas Service—since March called the bbc World Service—nearly every weeknight.
“And Greece? Why Greece?”
That, Madelyn thought, was none of Mr. Casey’s beeswax. “Greece is the cradle of democracy. If they became a military dictatorship, the symbolism would be pretty ominous.”
“Excellent, Miss Brooks. I very much look forward to reading your paper.”
“Me, too,” muttered Ed Wallingford, prompting antiphonal sniggering on the back row.
When the bell finally released her from her agony, Madelyn got out of the classroom as fast as she could, unable to bear any more of Mr. Casey’s veneration or Ed Wallingford’s hostility.
It could have been worse, she supposed. Mr. Casey could have kept at her until he got to the truth of her fascination with Greece.
As much as her father doted on her, Madelyn’s mother was the one who read her to sleep when she was little. They must have started with the usual Little Golden Books and then moved on to A. A. Milne; what Madelyn remembered was the night her mother set The House at Pooh Corner aside and said, “Would you like to try something different?” Madelyn was three, and this would be her earliest memory.
“Yes,” she said, not having a real opinion of her own, responding purely to her mother’s excitement. Her mother went away and came back with a thick book wrapped in an orange paper cover. She turned a few pages and began to read.
“‘Tell me, O muse,’” she began, and then she said something about heroes and sacks and Ilion.
Her mother looked up. “Ilion, of course, that would be Troy.”
Madelyn had laughed then, because she had no idea who Troy was either, or what a muse was, or what it was that was getting put in a sack.
Over the years, she returned repeatedly to that S. O. Andrew translation of The Odyssey, sometimes reading no more than a few lines. She’d absorbed enough about romantic love, long before the upheavals of puberty, to grasp the concept. The perfect lover was always available, always consoling, able to sweep you away from mundane reality, to obsess you, to steal your heart.
How could the Mr. Caseys of this world, let alone the Ed Wallingfords, ever compare to books?
*
Dave had come to Greenwich Village for the first time on a stifling Friday night in August of 1961, six-foot-minus-a-little, scrawny, 25 and already losing his hair. He’d never set foot there, despite growing up in Yonkers and two years at New York City Community College and four years working in midtown after graduation. From childhood, his parents had warned him about the Bolsheviks and gypsies and dope fiends of the Village, to the point where, even as an adult who knew better, he feared that if he went and got into trouble, God forbid, he would never hear the end of it.
On that particular night, he’d fled his airless Brooklyn apartment after another horrible scene with Rachel, her shouting, him retreating until he’d found himself in the hall, smelling overcooked cabbage and exhaust fumes from the air shaft, sick to death of his life so far.
For no conscious reason, he’d gotten on a train headed into Manhattan. A self-destructive impulse, planted by Rachel’s venom and brought to fruition by the sight of the Bleecker Street station, had sent him off the train and up the stairs and out onto Lafayette.
As he walked up Bleecker past nyu and into the Village proper, he could see the history in every brick, some of which had no doubt been hurled at policemen. From the bohemian painters of the twenties and thirties to the radical theaters and playwrights of the forties, from the beats of the fifties to the current jazzmen and folkies, the Village had witnessed a continuous outpouring of dissent that was as alien to Dave as fakirs walking on hot coals.
Back when his name was Fischel Cohen, he had grown up with Zionist folk songs, and when the Weavers put “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena” on the flip of “Goodnight, Irene,” he was permitted to buy a copy. The guitars and the unrestrained power of the voices touched something in him as frightening as it was compelling. Years later, still in college, he heard the same thing in the Kingston Trio’s “Tom Dooley.” So he knew the names—The Village Vanguard, Gerde’s Folk City, The Cock and Bull—even though he’d always believed himself too old, too married, too square to ever act on that knowledge.
At the intersection of Bleecker and MacDougal, the excitement seized him in the pit of his stomach, a feeling indistinguishable from the terror he felt when he walked past a cluster of duck-tailed, Lucky-smoking, motorcycle-jacketed hoods on Flatbush Avenue. This crowd was more benign, dressed the same way as Dave, in white short-sleeved shirts and narrow ties and shiny black Florsheims, yet they had an air of knowledge and purpose that had always eluded him.
He followed a group of them up MacDougal and ended up in a line twenty people long that led down the stairs to the Gaslight Café. Fifteen minutes after that he crowded into a damp, unbearably hot basement where every table was filled and the overflow leaned against every inch of available space along the bare brick wall. The only light came from the occasional fake Tiffany lamp that hung from the ceiling and Dave had to walk with his hands in front of him until his eyes adjusted.
On stage, a guy in an elegant suit and a neatly trimmed brown beard manipulated the microphone to produce startlingly realistic sound effects, creating characters through weird voices and then tossing them aside, dispensing with punchlines in favor of building and abandoning entire surrealist worlds. When he finished, everybody snapped their fingers instead of applauding, and Dave began to suspect he was asleep and dreaming in Brooklyn.
“First time here?”
Dave turned to see a stunning black-haired woman in black-framed glasses, jeans, and a black sweater that was coming off one shoulder. He nodded.
“Apartments upstairs,” the woman said, pointing. She spoke with exaggerated clarity to be heard without raising her voice. “Same airshaft. People complained about the noise.” She ended on a smile.
“Who was that guy?”
“Hugh Romney. On staff here.”
Overwhelmed by shyness, Dave nodded thanks and turned away.
A hugely tall man with a thick moustache and brown hair that fell in his eyes arrived on stage and sat on a stool with his guitar. He joked with the crowd and then began to pick intricate patterns and sing in a raw, powerful voice. Some of what the man played was what Dave had always thought of as folk music, and some was blues, jazz, Dixieland, gospel, and anything else that came into his head.
Between two of the songs he turned and gave the black-haired woman a questioning look.
“Dave Van Ronk.” She seemed amused.
He’d heard of Van Ronk. Everybody in the music business expected him to be huge, and nobody would take a chance on him other than the Village’s own beatnik label, Folkways.
Van Ronk played for half an hour and then announced Brownie McGee and Sonny Terry, a guitar player and a blind harmonica player, both Negro. Dave’s parents had told him that in the Village the schvartzers mixed with the goyim on the streets, in the clubs, even in the bedrooms. It still struck Dave as very odd, not objectionable, merely strange. And speaking of mixing, Van Ronk had obviously paid close attention to McGee’s guitar playing and singing style.
Eventually he wandered out onto the street and let himself be drawn up MacDougal to Washington Square. In April there had been a so-called Beatnik Riot there, after the city had tried to shut down the Sunday afternoon folk singing. Naturally the city won. Dave arrived to find the police enforcing a six-pm curfew on musical instruments. He sat at the central fountain anyway and listened to the kids as they passed around cigarettes and argued, mostly about ideological purity of one kind or another: clawhammer versus Scruggs-style banjo picking, Negro blues versus Childe ballads, hammered dulcimer versus guitar. After that he’d walked the streets until daylight, fueled by espresso and an anxious, irresistible excitement.
That had been the start. After he separated from Rachel, he rented a cheap fourth-floor walkup on Sullivan Street and over the next six months began to make sense of the emotional onslaught. Seeing Fred Neil at the Café Wha?, Bob Dylan at Gerde’s, and Tim Hardin at the Night Owl had shown him why Van Ronk was not going to be famous beyond the Village. The zealots in Washington Square had missed the same thing that Van Ronk had. The problem was not a failure of authenticity, but rather an excess of it. This was not shaping up to be a decade of reverence.
*
Dave had been an engineer at Columbia Records since 1957, since he’d shown up with his two years of college credits and convinced them to give him a try. That first week, an old Jew in accounting had looked at the name on his paperwork and shaken his head. “Fischel Cohen? I don’t think so.”
“What do you mean?”
“You get credit on an album cover, that’s what people should read? We can fix this. Fischel, Fisher. Cohen, Ken. Turn it around, Ken Fisher.”
“Ken? You want me to be a Ken?”
“What else you got for me?”
“Well… my middle name is Dov.”
“Perfect. David Fisher.”
The deed was done before he had time to think, and it seemed a minor thing, until his first paycheck arrived made out to David Fisher. Accounting said it could take months to correct, and it would be simpler to open an account in the new name. Within a month, the pressure of trying to maintain two identities was driving him meshuge and he gave up and went before a judge and made it legal.
It wasn’t like he had any affection for Fischel. He’d been called “Fishbreath” in grade school and “Fishy” in the Army and it was only stubbornness that had kept him from changing it before.
Telling his parents was another thing. A month and a half went by before they let him in their house again, and even then they barely spoke to him.
Rachel had been even worse. Though she had watched the process unfold and nodded along with each step, she managed to hold it against him in the end. Then again, Rachel had held most everything against him.
*
In February of 1962, Dave told Mitch Miller, his boss at Columbia, that he wanted to record some of the new folk music. He had by that point worked his way up from second tier easy listening dates to full orchestra sessions with Tony Bennett and the latest Sing Along with Mitch album, even as the tv show was burning up the ratings. Miller had sneered. “You mean they actually use engineers on that garbage? Why?”
Dave had always had a grudging respect for Miller, though many considered him a schlockmeister for stunts like pairing Sinatra with a howling dog and letting a 13-year-old sing “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.” Miller had invented the idea of the record producer, along with the idea that a record could be an art form in itself and not just a souvenir of a live performance. He was the absolute monarch of “the Church,” Columbia’s 30th Street Studio, generally considered the best sounding room in the world, 100 feet long, wide, and high, with an echo chamber in the basement that was the envy of the industry.
Miller’s shovel-blade beard, two-armed conducting style, and tight smile were national icons. The public never saw his self-confidence cross the line into arrogance, or heard his contemptuous dismissal of contrary opinions. Dave’s penalty for his disloyalty was exile to Studio A, uptown on 7th Avenue. Miller never spoke to him again, even when they passed in the hall.
Once free of his influence, Dave began to see that Miller had helped turn the musical culture of the 1950s into a sterile wasteland of artifice and made-to-order sentiment, had created the very famine of authenticity that the kids in Washington Square were rebelling against. The contrast between Miller’s world and the future that was barreling toward them became more obvious every day. In February of 1964 on the Ed Sullivan Show, The Beatles served notice of that future to every pop musician in the US.
The following May, Tim Hardin showed up at Columbia to record a set of demos. Dave had fought to get assigned to the session, only to have it explode into chaos before it started. The schedule listed it as a solo recording, and Hardin arrived with an entourage that included musicians, hangers-on, and his own producer, a six-foot-six baritone blond named Erik Jacobsen who was the banjo player in some folk group with a kooky name. John Sebastian was there, the harmonica player that Dave had seen playing with Fred Neil. So was Gary Burton, the jazz vibraphonist, and Sticks Evans, with his left-handed drum set and his dapper three-piece suit and pocket handkerchief. So was a huge, loud woman named Cass, a wild man named Zalman, a kleptomaniac named Pompa, and various other musicians and women of little or no virtue.
It quickly became apparent that Hardin was completely loaded on heroin. Cass, Zalman, Jacobsen, and Sebastian began smoking reefer in the hall. Every time Dave turned around, Pompa was gone and something else was missing: a typewriter, a chair, pictures off the walls. As soon as Hardin got a few bars into a song, he would nod out and the other musicians sat and waited until he drifted back in and picked up, in perfect time, exactly where he’d left off.
God watches over fools, Dave’s mother had always claimed, and somehow they got through the 12-hour session without the intervention of police, firemen, doctors, or Columbia executives, and when he replayed the tapes afterward and heard, amid the endless variations on the “Hi-Heel Sneakers” riff, the beauty and pain in Hardin’s voice on “How Time Flies,” his heart swelled up and he phoned Jacobsen and babbled incoherently until Jacobsen invited him over to his apartment on MacDougal, where he and Sebastian were listening to country and blues and jug band music on reel-to-reel, and where they told him their stories, how they’d been living in adjacent rooms in a transient hotel in the Village unbeknownst to each other until one night Sebastian came knocking at two am asking Jake to turn the music up, and how Jake had heard The Beatles on a jukebox in a White Castle while on the road with the Knob Lick Upper 10,000 and started to hear sounds in his head that he couldn’t make as a musician, but thought he could create as a producer, and how Cass had introduced Sebastian to Zally at her apartment on the night The Beatles had debuted on Sullivan, having already decided that they should be in a band together, and they’d played together for the first time then, Sebastian the technician, Zal the free spirit, dripping influences from Floyd Cramer’s slip-note piano to Louis Armstrong’s air-raid trumpet to Clifton Chenier’s blustering accordion, and now it looked like Zal was part of their conspiracy, the band they were going to form as a sort of American armed response to the British Invasion, and Dave, his judgment perhaps affected by the clouds of pot smoke floating in the room, had said, “Take me with you.”
Columbia understandably passed on the Hardin demos. Dave assumed that was the end of it, but when The Lovin’ Spoonful finally materialized, Jake remembered him. The band cut their first demos at Bell and Allegro, top-notch rooms with state of the art gear, and Dave moonlighted as engineer to be part of it. He found to his surprise that he belonged there, in the thick of the creative whirlwind, putting a pickup on an autoharp or underdubbing to create new hybrid instruments that blended guitars and pianos or guitars and tubular bells. Jake taught him how to splice tape to resurrect brilliant fictional performances from the ashes of failed takes. They created every sound they could imagine and went beyond that to create sounds even they had never imagined before.
*
And then, suddenly, September of 1965 arrived and “Do You Believe in Magic” broke nationwide and here, on this Thursday night in the Village, Dave was walking down Third Street to listen to the Spoonful for possibly the last time ever at the Night Owl, because after extended dates in LA and San Francisco they had outgrown not just the club but the Village itself.
He saw then that he had blinked and missed another cultural warm front that had blown through and changed everything, had swapped out bulging, long-necked acoustic guitar cases for flat Fender rectangles, banished jackets and ties, grown hair over collars and ears, put women into jeans and sandals and jangling jewelry.
We did this, he thought, the Beatles and the Spoonful and the bands in garages everywhere. We electrified the world.
The street around the Night Owl’s famous yellow awning seethed with kids, locals and tourists both, a testament to the success of the record. Dave knew from experience that the volume of the band made them a more pleasant auditory experience on the sidewalk than inside. Jake knew it too, and Dave found him fifty yards from the club, his blond head poking up past the crowd around him. Dave made his way over and Jake threw one arm around him and pulled him into a hug. Jake was dapper, as always, in a double-breasted suit and no tie, while Dave, who had no instinct for clothes, wore a short-sleeved sport shirt and gray slacks.
“This guy,” Jake said to no one in particular, “this guy is going to be huge, once he flies the nest and starts producing on his own.”
Dave felt the opposite of huge, dwarfed by Jake’s physicality and outsize personality.
“You want to go inside?” Jake asked, and Dave shrugged. The crowd made way for them, and Jack the Rat, at the door of the club, gave them a gap-toothed smile and waved them in.
The interior was barely more than a hallway, 20 feet wide and long enough to disappear into darkness at the far end. The stage protruded from the middle of one wall, so small that Joe had to set up his drums on the floor at stage left, the pa speakers pointed outward from the sides of the stage so that the vocals rode high above the instruments. Zal was in full wild-man mode, dancing jerkily back and forth like he had to take a leak, tall and lean in vertically striped stovepipe pants and a top hat. He was to blame for the crippling volume, cranking his guitar until the rest of the band had no choice other than to go along or be swallowed up.
They were in the middle of Chuck Berry’s “Almost Grown.” Sebastian waved to Jake and smiled happily, and Zal nodded and raised his guitar neck in salute. Heads turned, and failed to recognize who the salutes were for. Dave saw Jake’s gaze move over the room, checking out the girls, winnowing out the underage, a more difficult feat every day.
Suddenly Dave felt a hand on his shoulder, pulling him down toward the floor. He turned and saw Tim Hardin, feeling a surge of disappointment followed immediately by guilt. Hardin had turned Jake around at the same time and now he was smiling, arms open wide, his long brown forelock falling to his eyebrows across the wide plane of his forehead, one eye glittering with mischief and tragedy, the other squinting against the smoke from the cigarette parked in the corner of his mouth. He looked fairly straight, Dave thought hopefully.
The volume prohibited even the pretense of conversation. Jake gripped Hardin’s shoulder in greeting and Dave nodded awkwardly. Hardin pointed to his ears and led them to the street.
“I thought you were still in LA,” Jake said.
“What’s the matter, aren’t you glad to see me?” Hardin never expressed fewer than two highly volatile emotions at once. Here his petulance teetered on the edge of laughter.
“Sure, Timmy, always.” Jake was less than convincing, on the verge of losing patience while Dave was willing to cut Hardin more slack on the basis of the incredible music they were in the midst of recording. Jake had come up with the idea of buying Hardin a portable tape recorder and paying him $50 for every demo that had at least two verses and a chorus, $75 if it had a bridge.
The scheme was working. These were brand-new songs that finally did justice to that amazing, heartbroken voice and the virtuoso guitar playing that sounded like Robert Johnson dueting with Django Reinhardt, the lyrics deceptively simple and full of surprising images and naked emotion. Once Verve released the album and Hardin became a household name, bigger than Dylan, bigger than Sinatra, Dave was sure that the recognition would chase away the demons that were riding him so very hard.
“Do you want me to set up some studio time?” Dave asked.
“Tomorrow, definitely.”
“What time tomorrow?” Jake said.
“I don’t know yet. I’ll call you.”
Inside the Night Owl, the band wrapped up “Good Time Music” and Sebastian said, “You folks stay groovy for just a few minutes and we’ll be right back.”
Somewhere in that elegant pearl-gray suit, Dave knew, Jake had a couple of joints, and his attention was already in the tiny dressing room downstairs where he and Sebastian would light them up.
Hardin saw it too. “I’ve got a new song,” he said.
“You got it on tape?” Jake said.
“I can sing it for you right now. ‘Got myself a red balloon, got a blue surprise…’”
“You know the deal, Timmy. No tape, no advance.”
Dave wanted to hear the rest of the song. Such was the power of Hardin’s charisma that Dave wondered if he had fifty dollars on him, which he didn’t.
“Listen,” Jake said, “I’ve got some business to attend to, but if you’re around later, we could do some work tonight.”
“Aw, man, not tonight. I just got back.”
“All right, then. Later.” Jake nodded to both of them and ducked back in the club.
Dave felt abandoned. If Hardin noticed his discomfort, he didn’t show it. “Did I ever tell you,” Hardin said, “about the first time I saw Susan, here in the Village?” This was the actress who worked under the name Susan Yardley. Hardin had met and fallen in love with her in LA, and she had inspired the sudden outpouring of songs. “She was living in this apartment over on Christopher, this must have been sixty-three, and there was a bar there on the ground floor. And I walked in there one day and she was dancing to the jukebox, all by herself. ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ was playing. God, she was beautiful. I just stood and watched her, never said a word to her. The minute I saw her in LA, I recognized her. I knew right then it was fate, man. Destiny.”
“Sinatra, was it?” Dave asked.
“Sure, man, Sinatra, who else?”
“That record just came out last year. August of sixty-four.”
Hardin shook his head in disgust. “Maybe it was Mathis. Maybe it was last year. You’re not hearing what I’m telling you, man. You got no romance in your soul.”
If that’s true, Dave thought, why do I think of Rachel and cry every time I hear “It’ll Never Happen Again”? And then he thought, what a tissue of lies we all make out of our pasts, pointed little narratives that prove something, the hand of God or the lack of God, how smart we were or how blind, how funny, how sad.
“I’ve got to meet somebody,” Hardin said. “Can you loan me five bucks?”