Praise for Glimpses
“Shiner couldn’t have written this book without a deeply felt sense of the fragility of art, of how many great works have passed into the ages never to enlighten, inform, or entertain new generations. Though the masterworks he conjures up in such exquisite detail are lost to us, we now have a bit of compensation for their absence: a masterpiece of the imagination called Glimpses.”
—Richard Foss, Los Angeles Reader
“Glimpses is dead-on about the high and tight nineties even as it reaches out for the sweet hereafter of the sixties. It longs for something better, and finds it, I guess, as much as anything is ever found anymore. It’s a mean, sweet, wry, and disturbing book, in equal portions.”
—Frederick Barthelme, author of Moon Deluxe
“Few would dare to daub rock music with a metaphysical brush, but Shiner’s risk is his great success.”
—Gilbert Taylor, Booklist
“Powerfully resonant…a searching critique of the shortcomings in a generation’s vision…a literary voice worth listening to.”
—John Herndon, Austin American-Statesman
“Glimpses has the raw power of a documentary, a nitty-gritty, minute-by-minute evocation of a highly personal journey. Glimpses captures the sixties perfectly—I was there, and it was the way Shiner writes it.”
—Dr. Timothy Leary
“Shiner writes with intense feeling about the music Ray loves and the turmoil he endures. The novel sparkles with painfully perfect evocations of the yearning, anomie and need that wrack Ray, yielding a story of uncommon sensitivity, insight and redemptive power.”
—Publisher’s Weekly
“Two decades ago it seemed as though the only true artists in the world were rock musicians. Lewis Shiner has found a way to write about the power of that music and the love it inspired without cloying the mysteries of time, death, sex, and blood relation.”
—Geoff Ryman, author of Was
“As you’d expect from versatile fantasist Shiner, Ray’s attempts to keep the faith by resurrecting Jimi and laying his own father to rest are powerfully affecting. Much more than yuppie reunions like The Big Chill, this captures a generation’s sweet, desperate yearning for the sixties—though it ends up being as authentically wooly as the period.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Lewis Shiner writes with enough heart for three chests. Glimpses is his best work and has the haunting quality of the beginning guitar riff in Hendrix’s ‘The Wind Cries Mary.’ Strong stuff.”
—Jonathan Carroll, author of Land of Laughs
“You don’t have to be a musician to love Glimpses, but musicians will appreciate how free it is of the strained, embarrassing attempts to describe the musical process that torpedo so many non-musicians when they try to write about music. Much less gimmicky than it sounds, Glimpses is ingenious, well-crafted, and deeply moving.”
—Joe Gore, Guitar Player
“Lewis Shiner’s best novel so far, a book at once sad and humorous, sweet and tough-minded, richly and rigorously researched and amazingly well imagined. Its central exploration is into the influence various ghosts have upon people, how the past—both in cultural and personal terms—haunts us all…a first-rate work of historiographic fiction for people who genuinely—and sometimes too innocently—love rock ’n’ roll.”
—Lance Olsen, Review of Contemporary Fiction
“While Shiner has written a suitably surreal and riveting ode to the sixties and its sounds, he’s done it without forgetting the present.”
—Ellen Krout-Hasegawa, LA Weekly
“I hesitate to call a book ‘important,’ but this may well be that…deeply satisfying.”
—J. Stephen Bolhafner, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“Though he’s dealing with a somewhat strained metaphor—the unfinished business of a generation—Shiner is enough of a storyteller that you’re never put off by the underlying sentimentality. Even more impressive, he makes you believe the albums his (admittedly autobiographical) protagonist conjures up are the masterpieces they’re supposed to be. Quite a performance.”
—Stereo Review
“One of the best rock and roll novels of all time and easily the best fantasy of 1993.”
—Don D’Ammassa, Science Fiction Chronicle
“At his best, Shiner is able to convey a rare multidimensional perspective on his flawed heroes…More importantly, he is able to convey these overmythologized cultural icons as complex fictional characters whose struggle to create can still inspire and sustain.”
—Philip Leggiere, American Book Review
“A compelling fantasy novel that’s also a work of lucid and imaginative rock criticism…a big-hearted, affecting book.”
—Dave Rimmer, Mojo
“The semi-fantastic reality of the music lover/rock and roll fan is captured here as never before. Glimpses is an engrossing, enriching reading experience.”
—Paul Williams, Crawdaddy
“Glimpses opens the way into several haunted rooms at the very heart of the myth of the sixties, persuasively illuminating those dark and terribly human moments when art and fate shiver and blur, and the spiritual compass of a generation swings on a thin chill film of drugs and desperation.”
—William Gibson, author of Neuromancer
Winner of the World Fantasy Award
Winner of the Violet Crown Award for Fiction (Austin Writer’s League)
First published in the United States in 1993 by Subterranean Press
This edition first published in the United Kingdom 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 CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (E) 9781789541250
Cover Design: Ben Prior
Author Photo: © Orla Swift
Head of Zeus Ltd
First Floor East
5–8 Hardwick Street
London EC1R 4RG
To the memory of those no longer with us:
Mary Alberts
Paul Bradshaw
Timothy Leary
Elissa Turner
Welcome Page
Praise for Glimpses
Copyright Page
Dedication
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Nine
Author’s Note
By Lewis Shiner
About the Author
An Invitation from the Publisher
Chapter One
GET BACK
Once upon a time there was going to be a Beatles album called Get Back. They tried to record it in January of 1969, first at Twickenham Film Studios, then in the basement of Apple Corps at 3 Savile Row. Their own overpriced 24-track dream studio wasn’t finished and they had to bring in a mobile unit. So there they were, under bright lights, using rented gear, with cameras filming every move they made.
Paul had this idea he could turn things around. He wanted to get back to the kind of material the band did in ’61 and ’62, at the Kaiserkeller in Hamburg and the Cavern Club in Liverpool. It must have seemed like another century to them, looking back. They tried to warm up with Chuck Berry standards and “One After 909,” something of John’s from when he was 17. But it was winter and snowy and cold. The sound stage echoed and the basement was cramped. It just wasn’t happening.
That summer they would try again, and this time it would work, and they would come away with Abbey Road. The tapes from the other sessions would end up with Phil Spector, who would overproduce the living Jesus out of them to make them sound alive and finally they would come out as Let It Be.
The new title pretty much says it all. Between winter and summer everything changed. Paul married Linda, John married Yoko, and Allen Klein took over Apple. By then it was too late to get back, ever again.
*
My father died not quite two weeks ago. I can say the words but they don’t seem to mean anything or even matter much. My mind goes blank. So I think about other things. I put Let It Be on the stereo and wonder what it would sound like if things had been different.
Music is easy. It isn’t even that important what the words say. The real meaning is in the guitars and drums, the way a record sounds. It’s a feeling that’s bigger than words could ever be. A guy named Paul Williams said that, or something close to it, and I believe it’s true.
I’ve been in Dallas with my mother, straightening out the VA insurance, helping her write a form letter to send out instead of a Christmas card, answering the phone, getting Dad’s name off the bank account, a million little things that can bleed you dry. Now I’m home again in Austin trying to make sense of it.
It’s November of 1988. The old man died right before Thanksgiving, a hell of a thing. He was scuba diving in Cozumel, which he was too old for, with my mother along for the ride. He used to teach anthropology at SMU but since he retired all he wanted to do was dive. My wife and I flew up to Dallas to meet my mother’s plane as she came back alone, looking about a hundred years old. She had him burned down there in Mexico, brought a handful of ashes with her in a ziplock bag. Elizabeth came home that weekend and I stayed up there ten days, all I could stand. Then I drove back here in his white GMC pickup truck, my inheritance. The inside still smells like him, sweat and polyester and old Fritos.
Anyway, it’s 1988 and it was just last year that they finally released all the Beatles’ albums on CD, making a big deal out of how it was the 20th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper. It was like everybody had forgotten about the sixties until we had this nationwide fit of nostalgia. Suddenly every station on the radio has gone to some kind of oldies format, and they’re playing the same stuff over and over again that you haven’t heard in 20 years, and now you’re sick to death of “Spirit in the Sky” and “In the Year 2525” all over again. Tie-dyed T-shirts are back and bands that should never have been together in the first place have reunion tours and everybody shakes their heads over how dumb and idealistic they used to be.
I run a stereo repair business out of the house. Most of the upstairs is my shop. The north wall is my workbench, covered with tools, an oscilloscope and a digital multimeter, a couple of my clients’ boxes with their insides spread out. The wall above it is cork and there are a million pieces of junk pinned to it: circuit diagrams, pictures of me and Elizabeth and the cat, phone messages, business cards from my parts people, a big black-and-white poster of Jimi Hendrix that I’ve had since college. The west wall is windows, partly covered by the corn plants, palms, and dieffenbachia that Elizabeth has fixed me up with, all rugged stuff that even I haven’t been able to kill. The south side is shelves, over and under a counter top. That’s where I keep the boxes I’m not currently working on, as well as my own system. Harmon Kardon amp, Nakamichi Dragon cassette deck, four Boston Acoustics A70 speakers, linear tracking turntable, CD player, graphic equalizer, monster cables all around. There’s something almost spiritual about it, all that matte black, with graphs and numbers glowing cool yellow and white and green, like a quiet voice telling you everything is going the way it should. It’s just hardware, metal and silicon and plastic, but at the same time it has the power to turn empty air into music. That never ceases to amaze me.
I only have Let It Be on vinyl. The second side was playing, halfway in, and “The Long and Winding Road” came on, full of crackles and pops. I was running on automatic, my hair tied back, house shoes on, resoldering a couple of cold joints. The song is just Paul on the piano, a McCartney solo track really, with a huge orchestra and chorus that Phil Spector dubbed on afterwards. A decent tune, though, even John admitted that.
I don’t remember the first time I heard it, but I remember the one that stuck. It takes me back to Nashville, early June of 1970. I remember it was a Sunday. I heard this announcement on the radio that my band, the Duotones, was supposed to play that afternoon in Centennial Park. It was news to me. I showed up and sure enough, there they were, sounding a little hollow and tinny inside the big concrete band shell, and there in the middle was their new drummer. Scott, the lead player, came out in the audience during the break and said, “We were going to tell you. That promoter we hooked up with, he had his own drummer.”
I remember being able to see the individual little pebbles in the pinkish concrete under the bench. The bench, I think, was green. There wasn’t a lot for me to say. My bridges were burned. I’d spent the last month flunking out of Vanderbilt, too busy with band practice or protests over the shootings at Kent and Jackson State to go to class. I hadn’t managed to stop the war, and now I didn’t have a band either.
I hung around until they closed my dorm and then I hit the road. I’d already told my parents I wasn’t coming home for the summer so I just drove on through Dallas, headed for Austin, where Alex was. She wasn’t my girlfriend anymore. We’d broken up the fall before. But then we’d broken up a million times and if I was there, staying at her house, maybe she would change her mind.
I only had AM radio in my car and it seemed like they just played two songs that whole trip. One was Joe Cocker’s cover of “The Letter,” with Leon Russell’s piano sharp as an icepick, making me push the gas to the floor and feel the hot wind through the open windows. The other was “The Long and Winding Road.” It had been a pretty long road for me and Alex. I’d known her since sophomore year in high school, since we were all in drama club together. I’d seen her long hair go from red to brown to black, listened to her rave about everything from astrology to Bob Dylan to BMW motorcycles. I’d spent the last half of my senior year and the summer after helplessly in love with her. It was my first real love affair, full of jealousy and tears, the unendurable pain of an unanswered phone, long drives back from her mother’s apartment at two in the morning, dozing off at the wheel. But mostly it was making love, in the car, on the floor of her mother’s den, at friend’s houses, in my bed with my parents watching TV in the next room.
The Beatles didn’t get it together for Get Back and Alex and I didn’t get it together in the summer of 1970. I moved off her couch after a week or so and rented a room up on Castle Hill. Right before I left I got this letter, care of her, from my father. It was always my mother who wrote me, I guess that’s true in most families. This time it was him, on a sheet of yellow legal paper, printed in block capitals. GO AHEAD AND PLAY IN THE TRAFFIC, it said. Then, at the bottom, ONE THING YOU FORGOT: LOVE. I can’t remember him ever using the word before. It looked like a lie. He signed it DAD. I didn’t tear it up, bad as I wanted to. Maybe I just wanted to keep hating him the way I did right that minute.
During those long summer days in Austin I looked for work. Everything turned out to be door-to-door sales. At night I tried to put a band together with a guy who was just learning to play guitar and an organist who’d done nothing but classical. One day the bass player disappeared in his ice cream truck en route to Houston, and that was the last straw. I ended up back in Dallas in spite of myself, getting a degree in electrical engineering from DeVry Institute. That got me my first decent job, printed circuit design for the late lamented Warrex Computer Corporation.
There’s magic, see, and there’s science. Science is what I learned at DeVry and it bought me this nice two story house off 290 in East Austin. Magic says if maybe the Beatles could have hacked it then maybe Alex and me could have hacked it.
If the Beatles had hacked it, “The Long and Winding Road” would have sounded a lot different. Paul always hated what Spector did to it, wanted it to be a simple piano ballad. John might have written a new middle eight for it, something with an edge to cut the syrupy romanticism. George could have played some of the string parts on the guitar, and Ringo could have punched the thing up, given it more of a push.
It could have happened. Say Paul had realized the movie was a stupid idea. Say they’d given up on recording at Apple and gone back to Abbey Road where they belonged, let George Martin actually produce instead of sitting around listening to them bicker. I’d seen enough pictures of the studio. I could see it in my head.
Here’s George Martin, tall, craggy-looking, big forehead, easy smile. Light-brown hair slicked back tight. He’s got on his usual white dress shirt and tie, sitting near the window of the control room that looks down on Studio 2. Studio 2 is the size of a warehouse, thirty-foot ceiling, quilted moving blankets thrown over everything, microphones of every shape and size, from the slim German condensers to the old-fashioned oblong ribbon types, miles of cable, music stands like small metal trees.
Here’s John, his beard just starting to come in, hair down to here, Yoko growing out of his armpit. Paul’s beard is already there, George Harrison and Ringo have mustaches. Paul is in a long-sleeved shirt and sleeveless sweater, John and Yoko are in matching black turtlenecks, George has a bandanna tied cowboy style around his neck. The tape is on a quarter-inch reel, not the inch wide-stuff they use now. It’s been less than twenty years, after all, since the studio stopped recording directly onto wax discs. Everything about the mixers and faders is oversized, big ceramic handles, big needles on the VU meters, everything painted battleship gray. The air smells of hair oil and cigarette smoke. Everyone bums Everest cigarettes off of Geoff Emerick, who is wearing a white lab coat like all the other EMI engineers.
They’re listening to the playback. Here’s Ringo’s deadened toms, five quick chords on George’s Rosewood Telecaster…
And there it was. Coming out of the speakers in my workshop. For half a minute it didn’t even seem weird. I put down my soldering gun and listened, feeling all the emotion that had been buried under the strings rise to the surface.
Then it hit me, really hit me, what I was listening to. As soon as it did the music slowed and went back to the way it always has been.
*
I was lightheaded and there was a sound like tape hiss in my ears. I cut the stereo off and sat on the old brown leather couch by the windows, thinking, what the hell just happened? The cat, who is this big black-and-gray tabby named Dude, jumped up in my lap like he always does when I sit on his couch. I started to pet him and then the fatigue washed up over me. I let myself doze off for a few minutes and when I woke up my head was going like a bass drum.
It was three o’clock. Elizabeth would be home any minute. I went down to the kitchen and ate a couple of cookies to get my blood sugar back up. I felt weird, tapped out, like I’d just come down with something. I wondered if maybe I had. Maybe I’d hallucinated the whole thing.
I heard Elizabeth’s car in the driveway.
I never know what kind of mood she’ll be in. Sometimes it’s been kids yelling at her all day and she just wants silence or the TV. I put the cookies away and rinsed out my milk glass. The door opened with a kind of squeak and pop. I heard her toss her purse on the table by the door, walk into the living room and collapse on the couch. “Any mail?” she said.
I came out of the kitchen, drying my hands on a dishtowel. I could only see her blonde hair where it hung over the back of the couch, all those different shades, gold and light brown and honey and yellow and white. “Not yet.”
I thought, if she asks how my day went, I’ll say something. She picked up the remote control and turned the TV on to CNN. Somebody was talking about President-Elect Bush and the anti-drug hysteria the whole campaign had caused.
“What a day,” she said. “This one kid, Mikey?”
I walked over and sat on the stairs. “You told me about Mikey before.”
“Yeah. Well, today he herded about six of the girls under the slide and charged the boys a quarter apiece to go under there with them. Of course his father’s the stockbroker, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that it breeds true.”
I was too woozy to manage a laugh. “You want a drink?”
“Not right now. I need a new job, is what I need.” She’s talked about quitting since her first year in the school system and I don’t take her seriously anymore. I went back to the kitchen and cracked a Bud, my first of the day. It didn’t do much for the headache right away, but these things take time.
*
That night I had another nightmare about my father. I go to this huge shed to rent scuba gear for him. The floor is like the deck of a ship and rolls under my weight. I don’t see anything but these weird, bell-shaped tanks and I tell the guy I need the big aluminum ones. I’m pleased that I wasn’t taken in by such obviously bogus tanks. He goes to get the right kind and I follow. The floor starts to really roll and then sinks. The suction of the sinking floor pulls me under. My shoes and wet clothes are too heavy. I can’t get to the surface and I start to panic. I know that I know how to swim and this should all be okay, only it isn’t. I start yelling.
I was still yelling when Elizabeth managed to wake me up. She made sure I was okay and then she turned over and went back to sleep. It’s a talent she has. I myself lay there for a long time, trying to clear all the shit and nonsense out of my head. It’s like the Zen business where you’re supposed to not think about a white horse, only it’s impossible, you can’t not think about something. My father used to tell me that story, now it’s my father I can’t get rid of. He’s right there, floating face down in the blue-green water, the regulator hanging out of his mouth and leaking a thin stream of bubbles.
I tried to think about the thing that happened with the Beatles song. That was just as scary. So I finally pictured a wiring diagram for an amplifier and made myself an electron, and I followed my way through the gates and resistors and capacitors like I was walking a garden maze and that finally did the trick.
*
The last time I talked to my father we got in an argument over cameras. You’d think after thirty some-odd years I would have learned to keep it from happening. Not a chance. He could always find some way, if he kept at me long enough, to get me to fight back. It was my mom that called, of course. At the end she made him get on the phone with me, and somehow he ended up trying to tell me that no camera in the world had an F-stop larger than f/4. “I’m looking at my camera right here,” I said. “I have it in my hands. It goes f/4, then f/2.8, then f/1.8.”
“It must be some kind of Russian camera.”
“Dad, it’s a fucking Nikon.”
“Well, it’s the only one like it ever made.”
By that point even I could see that it was time to cut my losses. Like the guy that goes to the doctor and says, “It hurts when I bend over,” and the doctor says, “Don’t bend over.” For the first time in my life I knew, I could see without question, that my old man would never change.
Elizabeth has this friend named Sandra that we see at parties. She’s in AlAnon, for people with alcoholic parents. The whole co-dependent 12-step thing. They tell her you have to quit trying to change them. It’s not your fault. Change yourself to where you can get clear of it.
So that was what I did. I said, “Yeah, Dad, right Dad, goodbye Dad.” That was in August, the last words I ever said to him, and in November he was dead.
It was hard to walk away from an argument with him, to not try to win. Sometimes not doing something is the hardest thing there is. Not thinking about that damned white horse. Not taking that one last drink that you know will make you throw up. Not making a pass at the divorcée with the antique 8-track who would happily pay with something other than cash.
So when I got this letter from my mother in October that told me how disappointed she was that I wouldn’t talk to my father, that I wouldn’t even apologize, I lost my temper. I was so mad it was like shock. I sat for an hour trying to work and couldn’t move my hands. So I wrote her back, told her everything I could remember that he’d done to piss me off or fuck me up. I didn’t hold back on the cheap shots or the whining or the guilt.
Elizabeth came home while I was reading it over and for some reason I handed her my mother’s letter, and then mine. I told her, “I’m not going to send it, of course.”
She read both of them and said, “No, you’re right. You shouldn’t send this.” I felt weirdly let down for half a second, then she said, “You should make it stronger. She said she doesn’t feel welcome in our house. Tell her the truth. Tell her she’s welcome, but he’s not. Tell her he doesn’t know how to behave around decent people. Tell her the way he treats you. Go ahead and tell her.”
“I thought…”
“What?”
“I always thought you blamed me. For the way things are between us. That you wanted me to somehow make up with him.”
“I never said that. I didn’t say anything like that. What I wanted was for you to write a letter like this, but I didn’t want to push.” She was standing there with her arms folded, cold and solid, like an iceberg. I liked having that chill directed at somebody else for a change.
So I wrote the letter. I told my mother how, when he played games with me as a kid, he would tear up the cards if I started to win. How whenever Elizabeth or I cooked for him, he would look at the plate and say, “What is this shit?” like it was supposed to be funny. How when I was in high school and he couldn’t find anything to punish me for, he would ground me for my “attitude.” It ran to four pages. I mailed it before I could change my mind.
I got this apologetic letter back from my mother. Eventually she talked to my father about some of the things I’d said and he told her, “He’ll get over it.”
That was the week before they went to Cozumel.
*
So my father is dead, and Alex is married with two kids somewhere in Austin. But there is this other lost thing, this Beatles song, and maybe I can have that back.
Elizabeth was off to work by 7:30 the next morning. I did the breakfast dishes and went upstairs. I had a couple of easy jobs that I was supposed to get out by lunch—new belts on a turntable, an amp with a short in the power supply. I couldn’t make myself look at them. Instead I got out a new Maxell XLII 60 and put it in the Nakamichi. I powered it up and fast-forwarded the tape all the way through, then rewound it to get the tension right. I cued it up past the leader. Then I sat down on the couch with the remote.
I laid it all out in my head like before. The control booth, the four Beatles, the sound stage outside the window. George Martin with his chin in his hand, Geoff Emerick rewinding the tape. Martin nods to Emerick. I turned on the Nakamichi.
The song played right through to the final “yeah yeah yeah yeah.” After that was the squeak of the piano stool, the click of the intercom, and Martin’s voice from the tape saying, “Come on up, fellows, let’s listen to that one.” Then silence.
My hands and my forehead were sweating. I pried my eyes open. November sunshine, digital readouts on the stereo, the spools of the cassette still turning. I rewound the tape and dropped the remote on the couch next to me.
I was exhausted. I went downstairs and washed my face, poured a fresh cup of coffee. Either there was something on the tape or there wasn’t. Either way I didn’t know what to do about it.
I fought my way through the two repair jobs and called the customers. Then I took a nap for an hour. I was still tired when I woke up, but my nerves wouldn’t let me sleep any longer. I went upstairs and played the tape.
*
I was waiting for Elizabeth when she got home. She stopped in her tracks when she saw me and said, “What’s wrong?”
I said, “I want you to come upstairs and listen to something.”
“Right now?”
“I think so, yeah.”
She dumped her purse and her books and sighed theatrically as she climbed the stairs. She sat on the couch and listened to the tape all the way through. “The Beatles, right?”
“Did you notice anything different about it?”
“I guess. It sounded faster maybe.”
“It’s a totally different version.”
“One of those bootlegs or something?”
“Unh uh. It’s not like that at all.” I got up and went over to the deck and shut it down. “I made it,” I said.
“I don’t understand.”
“I don’t either.” I turned around and faced her, leaning back against the counter top. “I know this sounds completely crazy. I was trying to imagine the song, I mean the Beatles playing it this way, and it started coming out of the speakers. So I, like, did it again, with the recorder on, and I got a tape of it.”
Elizabeth sat there for a long time, looking at me. The sun behind her made it hard to read her expression. She was perched on the very edge of the sofa, like she didn’t mean to stay. A half-smile on her face came and went, like a rheostat dimming and raising the lights. Finally she said, “This is some kind of joke, right?”
“It’s not a joke.”
“I don’t understand. What is it you want me to say?”
“You heard the tape. It is something different.”
“I can’t authenticate a Beatles record for you. I mean, come on. I can tell you that yes, you sound pretty crazy.”
“I can do it again.”
“Ray, listen to yourself. Do you really expect me to believe this is some kind of, I don’t know, psychic phenomenon? I’m worried about you. I know this business with your father has been hard. You’re not sleeping, you’re having all these nightmares. Maybe you ought to get some help.”
“I can do it again. I’ll show you.” I was dead tired, and it was hard to concentrate with her in the room. But I did, and a few seconds of music came out of the speakers.
Elizabeth stood up. “It’s not funny, Ray. If you want to tell me what’s really going on, fine, I’ll be downstairs. I can’t handle this right now. I need a hot shower and a little peace and quiet.”
She went downstairs. I lay down on the couch in a band of warm sunlight and went to sleep.
*
That night I had another dream. My father is kneeling in front of me. He says something, daring me, I think, and I start to hit him in the face. I hit him until my arms get tired and then I realize out of nowhere that I might be hurting him. I start to put my arms around him, to apologize. He takes it the same way he took the beating, deadpan, no emotion, doesn’t say a word.
When I woke up I wondered if Elizabeth was right. Maybe I was playing tricks on myself, maybe I was worse off than I realized. The house was cool and I felt like I was a million miles away from anybody. Elizabeth slept on the far side of the queen-size bed, her back to me, a mound of covers over her and Dude on top of the covers, staring at me with eyes that glowed like LEDs.
Elizabeth is thirty-one to my thirty-seven, six years younger than me. We met when she was waitressing, before she went back to school and got her teaching certificate. Fall of 1978. I’d gone into the Lemmon Avenue Bar and Grill on crutches, ankle sprained from Sunday’s full-contact racquetball game. I used to hang out there a lot because of a sort of house policy where the waitresses would sit across from you and talk to you when they took your order. The food was good too. I didn’t remember seeing Elizabeth before that night: medium height, slightly on the heavy side of average, that multicolored golden hair, a smile that made me wish she’d let me in on the joke. She made me put my sunglasses on before she would show me my prime rib, which she thought was too rare. She brought me a second beer without me asking and forgot to charge me for it. When I pointed it out she looked at me like I was a complete idiot, which I guess I was.
I didn’t ask her out for another two weeks. By then I was eating there almost every night and always asking for her station. When I finally did she said, “I was wondering when you’d get around to it.” It took me years to realize that there was a big difference between expecting it and actually looking forward to it.
The thing I liked best was the way I was around her. I always wore a sport coat when I went over to her place, always brought a bottle of wine or some flowers. We went to plays and museums and French movies with subtitles. It was romantic. I was playing way over my head. She had a roommate who thought I was terrific and said so to Elizabeth all the time. Maybe too much. It made Elizabeth dig her heels in, refuse to be impressed.
Still she must have felt something, even from the first. The first time I asked her name she said “Elizabeth” right off, though I found out later she’d always gone by Beth up till then. It was what her roommate and all her friends still called her. I think both of us had the idea we could pull ourselves by our bootstraps into a Hollywood love affair, with violins in the sex scenes.
Instead it was an uphill fight. She was so young, only 20 when we started dating. She was nervous about sex, and put me off for weeks. We kissed some, and that was awkward too. She finally admitted she’d never been crazy about kissing. I still can’t believe I married a woman who doesn’t like to kiss. When she finally gave in and went to bed with me I was all over her, waking her up in the night for more.
I think about that more than anything. That first couple of months, when you walk around with the smell of sex ground permanently into your hands and crotch and face. It never lasts. Why is that? The times I’ve come close to having an affair, that was what I thought about, how it would be to feel that way again, even if it was only for a while.
I ask myself why we’re still together, and I never get a good answer. She can always make me laugh if she wants to. This August, right before school started, we spent the weekend at my friend Pete’s lake house and it had started off like a second honeymoon. We made love twice the first day, held hands in the restaurant, walked by the lake that night. As I went to sleep I thought, this is the reason. I made a stand to keep my marriage together and now it’s working again. But by Sunday afternoon she had a stack of magazines in front of the TV and I was icing down another six pack.
Now there are entire months again where we don’t make love at all, days where we don’t even talk except the menial household minimum, times when I know she’s ready to kill me and I’m ready to kill her and we sit and suffer in separate rooms so we don’t have to look at each other.
*
Most of my friends are record collectors or dealers. On weekends we hit a few stores, a couple of times a year we’ll go out of town for a big convention.
It’s like men and women have their own languages. There are some of the same words in both of them, but they still come out differently. Some things men don’t really have words for. I know my friends worry about me, and I even know why. They know how it was between my father and me, they know I should be feeling something. Only they don’t have the words to ask and I wouldn’t have the words to answer if they did.
So we talk around it. Like my friend Pete called on some pretext or other and then asked about Beth. I know he has a bit of a thing for her and suddenly I wanted to know why.
“Well, she has a lot of good qualities. She’s smart, she’s funny, she’s attractive…”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“…and underneath that icy exterior I think there’s a genuinely caring and concerned human being who’s simply scared out of her mind.”
“By what?”
“By life, old buddy. By you.”
“Me?”
“Look at you. Not even forty, and you retired to start your own business. And you made it work from day one. You drink all the time, and yet I’ve never seen you drunk. You just handle it. Shit happens, and you handle it. Your father dies, and what happened?”
“I handled it.”
“You handled it. Don’t you think that’s a little scary?”
“I’d think it would be comforting.”
“Then you don’t know women very well.”
“Hey, fuck you.” Women share secrets, men insult each other. It’s how we know we’re friends. There was a moment where I could have said something about the Beatles tape, could have asked him to listen to it and tell me if I was crazy. Only I didn’t have the words.
*
I thought about it the rest of the day. The thing is, if there’s something wrong with me, I’m not sure I want it to get better.
Pete’s right about my handling things. Back in 1979, when I was burned out on Dallas and Elizabeth wanted to go to UT for her teacher’s certificate, I made sure I had a design job in Austin before I quit Warrex. And I kept that job even after I started the repair business, working nights until I was sure I could make a go of it full time.
Elizabeth calls me Captain Sensible. Which is really the name of the bass player from the Damned, not that she cares. She says it in a way that is supposed to make me understand that she kind of admires it and even counts on it, but that it pisses her off too.
It was almost nine. Elizabeth and Dude were watching Dynasty. I went upstairs and thought maybe I was a little tired of being Captain Sensible myself. That I could either erase this Beatles tape and let the whole thing go, or I could keep pushing and see where it led.
I called Southwest Airlines, who said they could put me on a plane to LA the next day, round trip, for $198. Then I called a woman named Peggy who I used to work with at Warrex. She quit the same time as me, moved to New York and went to work for Marvel Comics. I knew she sent comics to Graham Hudson at Carnival Dog Records and he sent her CDs. Hudson is the guy that does their remastering, the brains behind those sixties compilations, Glimpses. I had all three volumes: great lost and overlooked cuts by major bands, by national acts that died on the vine, by local acts that never made it big. “Desiree” by the Left Banke, “William Jr.” by the Novas, “Go Back” by Crabby Appleton, “Think About It” by the Yardbirds.
Peggy said she’d call him for me and get me an appointment. It was only seven o’clock on the west coast. She wanted to know what this was all about and I told her she wouldn’t believe me.
“Did you start another band or something? Didn’t you use to play drums?”
“Not for a long time,” I said.
I sat by the phone for half an hour. I promised myself that if I couldn’t get through to Hudson I would forget the whole thing. Then Peggy called back and said Hudson would see me at three p.m. Friday afternoon, the day after tomorrow.
*
They say bees can’t see the color red. It was that way when I told Elizabeth I was flying to Los Angeles. It seemed to roll right off her, like she didn’t accept it as real. When she asked me why, I told her it was because of the tape. She couldn’t quite see the tape either.
“Can we afford this?” she asked.
“The VISA’s clear. I can charge everything.”
After a second or two she said, “Do I get any say in this?”
“Sure. If you don’t want me to go, I won’t.”
I thought it was what she wanted to hear but I had only pissed her off. I saw it go straight up her spine. She turned back to the TV in a terribly final way. “In that case, by all means, go ahead, go.”
“Look,” I said. “I’m sorry. It’s just something I have to do.”
She held up her left hand, palm toward me, and cocked it in a short wave. I understood it to mean, “Right, fine, conversation over.” The odds were she would say goodbye to me at the airport, and nothing else until then.
I called Pete to cancel Saturday. “Take some advice,” he said. “Try to have fun out there. And if some little beach bunny wants to fuck your brains out, don’t let your conscience stand in your way. Wear a rubber, but don’t hesitate.”
“I don’t think I’m the beach bunny type.”
“All I’m saying is, keep an open mind.”
After that I called my mother. I call every two or three days because I know it means a lot to her. I still dread it every time. I see her rattling around in that big house by herself, either in her robe or one of the jogging suits she’s started wearing in the last few years. Her hair is dyed this sandy color that is nothing like the brown it used to be. She’s medium height, her posture’s still okay, though she has this pot belly that no amount of sit-ups can get rid of. I don’t have anything to say to her, and all she has to tell me are the tiniest details of her life—what was in the salad she had for lunch, the few percentile points she gains in interest when she moves her savings around from bank to bank. This time she replayed her conversation with an American Airlines ticket clerk, word for word, about the refund on my father’s return ticket from Mexico. She corrected herself every time she got a detail out of place. Finally she gave up when she couldn’t remember the last two digits of the amount, whether it was 83 cents or 38, and broke down in tears.
*
I thought about a lot of things that night. One of them was the way Peggy asked about my playing drums. I haven’t touched them in almost 20 years, since I left Austin with my tail between my legs and went to DeVry. I still dream about it, though, those frustration dreams where you can’t ever get where you need to be. I have a gig with, say, the Jefferson Airplane, only the drums never show up. Or I can’t get past the guards to the stage. Or we get set up and there are these endless delays that keep me from getting to play until I wake up.
I never wanted to play drums in the first place. I wanted to be a guitarist. I got a gut-string Silvertone acoustic guitar for Christmas of my sophomore year in high school, and I practiced all the time, with that hormone-fueled obsession that is the only card you really have to play when you’re 15. Then that summer, in this high-school theater company, I ran my left hand into a Skil saw. After they put me back together, I couldn’t unbend my index finger any more. Either I learned to play all over again on a left-handed guitar, or I took up something else. My best friends all played guitar and they needed a drummer, so I volunteered, just to be able to play something, to be part of it.
I don’t remember ever mentioning it to Peggy. It must be more on my mind than I realized.
*
I’d never been to LA before. The plane flies over the middle of Palm Springs and right away you start to see the swimming pools, spots of blue in the endless tan of the desert. Then you cross the San Bernardino Mountains into LA itself and the air turns darker and the horizon disappears in brownish-yellow haze.
I rented a Pontiac Sunbird at the airport. It was the first time I ever had to rent a car and I felt like an idiot having to have everything spelled out for me while guys in suits shifted their weight impatiently behind me. It didn’t have a tape deck so I got my little hand-held cassette player and some tapes out of my suitcase. By the time I got onto the street it was almost dark. I was afraid of the expressways so I took Lincoln Boulevard all the way north to Santa Monica, looking for a cheap motel.
Things in LA are smaller and older than I thought they’d be, lots of low Spanish buildings from the forties and fifties, nothing much over two stories unless you get downtown. I kept the windows open for a while, but without the sun the air got cool and I rolled them back up. I saw people on roller skates and skateboards everywhere, lots of convertibles, kids in leather and spiked hairdos. There were a few token Christmas decorations that couldn’t quite compete with the neon pinks and greens and yellows that everybody wore. There was music everywhere, mostly rap, played at unbelievable volume. It was like being in high school with my parents out of town, and me with the car all weekend. Everything was new and exciting and at the same time I felt more grown up and on my own than I had in years.
I turned right on Colorado Avenue and drove past Carnival Dog records, to make sure I could find it the next day. It’s a two-story box, next to the Department of Motor Vehicles. Afterwards I headed north again, toward San Vicente Boulevard.
My parents lived here from the summer of 1946 to the fall of 1949, in half of a four-bedroom house on 16th Street. It’s still there, tan stucco, red tile roof, palm trees and porticoes, only a few blocks from the beach. My father’s aunt owned it and rented out the other half. My father had come here in the summers before the war, before he married, and he used to talk about those years as the best of his life, dancing on the pier every night, playing tennis every day. There were tennis courts down the street and he said that for the rest of his life just the sound of tennis, that distant clop of a well-hit ball, filled him with unbearable longing. The pier was different then, he said, all elegance and romance. When he talked I saw this long California sunset out over the water, heard a big band play “Moonlight Serenade,” heavy on the clarinets. The air was clean and smelled of orange blossoms and the railings were lined with beautiful women in dresses that came just past their knees, their long hair piled high with silver combs.
I drove back to the pier and parked above it on Ocean Avenue. The wind was cold and I zipped up my jacket and stuck my hands in my pockets. Fourth Street goes straight out onto the pier, arching out over the Pacific Coast Highway below. A big curved sign says, SANTA MONICA YACHT HARBOR • SPORT FISHING • BOATING • CAFES. At the closest end of the pier is the carousel, enclosed in a reconstructed Victorian-looking building. To the left some steps lead down into the sand and a small playground.
I went into the carousel building and watched the crowds lined up to ride. There are three concentric rows of horses, all brightly painted, with lots of silver and gold. Along the walls are antique-type vending machines, including a fortune teller called “Estrella’s Prophecies.” I bought my fortune, which turned out to be a small black-and-white card with some old-fashioned clip art on it.
“Yes my friend your greatest fault is that you talk too much. Learn to keep a secret.” Did she mean the “Long and Winding Road” tape? “However your other golden qualities make up for your talkativeness. Your anxiety to help others, and your consideration of other people’s wishes has earned you many friends.
“A friend will urge you to take a trip. Don’t do it. Your best interest lies in remaining at home. I’m depending on your good sense to lead you on the right path.” For another coin, she promised to tell more. Thanks, Estrella.
Outside, all I could see of the water was the white of the waves as they broke. I pushed through the crowds and got out onto the pier proper, which is a long line of T-shirt shops and fast food franchises: the Crown and Anchor, Seaview Seafood. People line up on both sides of the pier fishing, mostly oriental and Chicano. Signs say, NO COMER LOS WHITE CROAKERS. At the far end there are bumper cars, showered with blue sparks from the grid of wires overhead.
Whatever my father loved here is long gone. He’d told me that. I bought myself a Venice Beach T-shirt and a pretzel and a beer and watched the waves roll in.
*
In the morning I cruised through Hollywood and saw the sign on the hill and Graumann’s Chinese. A few blocks in any direction from the Walk of Fame and things get very gray and businesslike. The sun was up there somewhere behind a smog heavy enough to wash out the city’s color. I looked up at the Griffith Park Observatory from ground level, saw UCLA, and ate a hamburger in Westwood. By three o’clock I was in the waiting room at Carnival Dog Records.
The place is done up in African kitsch. There’s a thatched straw roof over the receptionist’s desk, hard wooden chairs painted purple with yellow polka dots, zebra stripes on the walls and on the steel-and-concrete staircase that goes up to the second floor. There were a few copies of the latest LA Weekly stacked by the front door. There are these dog heads—framed prints and paintings, plaster casts, wooden carvings—all over the place.
The receptionist had short dark hair and lots of eyeliner. She wore a T-shirt with neon colors and a black vinyl miniskirt. She had a buzzer that unlocked the doors on either side of her desk. While I sat there she buzzed a long stream of people through: a tall, skinny guy in a Twilight Zone