Voices in memory you can’t name, rich with unresolved yearning: a song you once leaned toward for an instant on the radio before finding it mawkish, embarrassing, overlush. Maybe the song knew something you didn’t yet, something you weren’t necessarily ready to learn from the radio. So, for you at least, the song is lost. By chance it goes unheard for 15 years, until the day when your own heartbreak unexpectedly finds its due date. This happens the moment the song takes you by surprise, trickling from some car radio, to retie the frayed laces of your years. Beguiled, you permit yourself to hear. But the disc jockey flubs the call list, never names the singer. Or maybe it happens in a movie theater, over a montage that relies on the old song. Afterward you scan the credits, but a dozen licensing permissions go by in a blur, hopeless.

So you forget the song again. Or recall just the hook, a dumb central phrase which sours in memory. How could it ever have seemed bittersweet as your own lost youth? Of course, what’s missing in your recollection is the cushion of vocal harmony the lead voice floated in on, and the wash of strings, the fuzzy mumble of bass guitar, the groove, all so dated, so perfect. What’s missing as well is the story, the context, the space the song lived in. Not to mention any chance for you to make it your own, a chance to spend, say, $34.99 on a two-CD set. That’s okay. No one’s harmed if you never follow the trail. In an uncertain world it’s a reasonable certainty this forgotten song needs you even less than you need it.

Right?

Behind the uppermost pantheon of male soul vocalists—Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye, and Al Green (you add your names to those four, I’ll add mine)—lies another pantheon, a shadow pantheon, of those singers who fell just short. They gather, more or less, in two categories. The first are those denied by the vagaries of luck or temperament—Howard Tate and James Carr, say, maybe O. V. Wright. The singers who record for a few different labels, cut a classic side or two, then bag out, drift away. In the “great man” theory of soul, these are the also-rans. The second category is the singer disguised within the fame and achievement of a group. Ben E. King of the Drifters, David Ruffin of the Temptations, Levi Stubbs of the Four Tops, Philippe Wynne of the Spinners: all known by their peers as among the finest vocalists ever to step to the mike. The world knows them only by ear.

Barrett Rude Jr. is one of the most elusive and singular figures in pop-music history. Though none with ears needs telling—if you’re reading the booklet, play the damn CDs already!—I’ll say it anyway: he’s also one of the greatest soul singers who ever lived, not merely one of the best who never got his due. Born in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1938, Rude was the only child of a troubled marriage, his father an itinerant Pentecostalist preacher (and eventual convict), his mother dying in her late twenties (“of a broken heart” Rude told Cash Box magazine in 1972). His musical experience is frequently exaggerated: he sang in his father’s church, yes—but Rude’s father had his pastorship stripped from him before the future singer was 11 years old, and a year later was in prison. Raised by his aunt, Rude dropped out of high school and migrated from Raleigh to Memphis, where he worked as a janitor, a school-bus driver, then, briefly, as a night-owl disc jockey, specializing in blues and jazz, at a Memphis radio station. There he met Janey Kwarsh, the daughter of the station’s white owner, who’d been working as a secretary in her father’s offices. Rude and Kwarsh quickly married and had a child—unless it was the other way around.

In 1967, at age 29, Rude recorded a pair of singles at Willie Mitchell’s Hi Records studio. No one recalls how he came to the studio’s attention—Rude always denied his father-in-law had arranged the opportunity. In 1967 Hi was still treading water with instrumentals and novelty cuts, while producer Mitchell, with singer O.V. Wright, had begun exploring the deep-bottomed groove he’d soon exploit so masterfully with Al Green. Maybe Rude could have stepped into Al Green’s shoes in advance, and altered pop history—the evidence is here in four cuts, including the horn-driven proto-funk of “Set a Place at Your Table,” which briefly touched the R&B charts in February of 1967, and the slowed-down, eerily sexy Hank Williams cover “I Saw the Light.” But it wasn’t to be. Gaining a reputation as a brooding eccentric, Rude was dismissed as intractable by the even-tempered Mitchell before his career had even begun.

So Rude was seemingly on his way to the first kind of story—the handful of cult singles—until the day in February 1968, in a Philadelphia rehearsal studio, when a session guitarist named Marv Brown, who’d played at Hi Records a year before, suggested his name to a road-worn, journeyman vocal group known then as the Four Distinctions. The group had signed a management deal and were rehearsing under the hand of a young producer named Andre Deehorn. Deehorn had a sheaf of songs he imagined could be hits for a harmony-and-lead group. What he had in the Distinctions was harmony without the lead.

Brown thought he knew the singer they were looking for, a fellow who’d bottomed out in Memphis and was driving a bus in Raleigh, North Carolina—where, with his young wife and child, Rude had retreated to live with his aunt. No matter that there might be a dozen unemployed singers in Philadelphia; they took Brown’s recommendation and made a call. Rude bought a Greyhound ticket and came in for an audition. Unknown at thirty, Rude might have seemed a dark horse for pop immortality. Indeed, demons were never far at bay in a career vexed by rages, whims, and disappearances from studio and stage dates. Safe guess that among his woes an unhappy interracial marriage was a formidable cross to bear in ’60s America. His recording career spans just a decade; Rude was silenced by drug abuse and domestic tragedy at the end of the ’70s.

Nevertheless, from the moment he walked into the Philadelphia studio, Barrett Rude Jr. was destined to be a singer of the second type: the secret, soaring voice contained within a famous harmony group. Rude had in the Distinctions found the context within which he could tell the story he had to tell, a place to do the one thing a human being can hope to do—matter for a while. If he regarded it as something like a prison, we can only respectfully disagree, and be grateful that his was an art built on dramas of confinement and escape.

But who were these four men that I’m selling to you here as a context and a containment for Barrett Rude Jr.? The Distinctions began as friends, working-class black teenagers in the era of Johnny Ace and Jackie Robinson, growing up in the industrial suburb of Inkster, Michigan (also home to the Marvelettes). James Macy, Dennis Longham, Rudolph Bicycle, and Alfred Maddox were a quartet before they were a singing group, forming the all-black infield of the Dearborn-Inkster Chryslers, an early integrated high-school baseball team which won a controversial state championship in 1958. That after they switched from ball to doo-wop it was the shortstop, Jimmy Macy, who sang bass and the first baseman, Rudy Bicycle, who handled the tenor leads, stands only as further evidence pop truth is stranger than fiction. Baritones Fred Maddox and Denny Longham ranged between Macy’s lows and Bicycle’s highs. The Chrystones, as they were first known, were a resolutely secular group, and it was only a year later that Longham pointed out to the others the misleading resonance of their name, and suggested an alternative: The Four Distinctions. Under that name the teenage group would go on to play school dances, state fairs, and, yes, baseball games.

In May 1961 the Four Distinctions paid a fifty-dollar entrance fee for the privilege of winning a sing-off sponsored by Jerry Baltwood’s notorious Tallhat label. Their prize was a pair of sessions. Who penned the four numbers cut in Tallhat’s storefront studio that June? It’s likely the Distinctions walked in with the songs, but Baltwood took the songwriter credit. Included here are “Hello” and “Baby on the Moon,” the first a lovely doo-wop plaint, the latter a Five Royales–style vamp. Neither charted, on this world or the moon.

In 1965 Tallhat’s stable was bought out by Motown, but at the bigger company the group met with only frustration. Fourth or fifth in line for songs behind the Four Tops, the Temptations, and a host of other aspirants, the Distinctions found themselves singing backup and running errands, answering telephones, and fetching star acts from the airport. Denny Longham learned to cut and process hair; he was said by Martha Reeves to give “the best conk in town.” They did, however, come as near to glory as “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,” the same Norman Whitfield production the Temptations would soon ride to the Top 10. Rudy Bicycle’s lighter-than-air falsetto version was suppressed in favor of the senior group, but not before a B side was prepared. “Rolling Downhill” might have seemed to described the group’s plight in Berry Gordy’s organization; in fact it’s a lost gem of a Holland-Dozier-Holland ballad. It would be three more years before career rescue, and before Andre Deehorn added “Subtle” to their moniker. But the Motown tracks are all the proof needed that the Distinctions before Rude were subtle, and polished, with a habit of making the hard plays look easy.

From Gerald Early’s One Nation Under a Groove: Motown and American Culture : “The three major early groups of the company—the Supremes, the Temptations, and the Miracles—were put together and rehearsed at their high schools. They were not church groups . . . and in various autobiographies there is little talk about the influence of the black church in their music . . .” This is a useful correction, but stops a little short. The sound which defines soul is epitomized by the configuration the Subtle Distinctions fell into once Barrett Rude Jr. signed on: a Detroit- or “Northern”-style high-school harmony group fronted by a rougher, churchified, “Southern”-style lead. This collision of grit and elegance, of raw R&B lust and repentance with polished, crossover-seeking pop is also the crossroads where sufferation and exile briefly joins hands with new-glimpsed possibilities of middle-class striving and conformity.

Take for example the Drifters 1959 “There Goes My Baby,” seen by some as the definitive moment when R&B turned to the possibility of another music called soul. Lead singer Ben E. King’s strangled, despairing vocal is pinned between a vaguely Latin beat and mock-classical strings. The results at the time not only horrified the record label, which nearly refused to release it, but puzzled the song’s producer, Jerry Leiber, who said, “I’d be listening to the radio sometimes and hear it and I was convinced it sounded like two stations playing one thing.” This drama was reenacted in James Brown’s strings-and-shrieks ballads like “Bewildered” and “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” as well as in the treacly arrangements which dogged the recording careers of moaner-shouters like Jackie Wilson and Solomon Burke.

What’s remarkable isn’t that ’50s song structures were inadequate to those unfettered soul voices just then locating their force. What’s remarkable is how ’60s soul produced at black-run companies like Motown, Vee-Jay, and Stax created an entire language based on the confinement of such voices in inadequate or mock-inadequate vessels. This drama took its purest form in the vocal interplay developed in groups like the Soul Stirrers and the Five Royales, as well as in a thousand doo-wop stairwells—voices rattling in a cage of echoes, or shaking off a straitjacket of rhyme, or outrunning billows of harmony that threatened to engulf it.

That’s where the Distinctions come in. The Philadelphia production style within which they cut their great records revived the smoothest of doo-wop harmonizing styles to suit a new sophistication of recording technique. Producers like Thom Bell and the team of Gamble and Huff raised this game of confinement to the next level, so testifyin’ singers like the Bluenotes’ Teddy Pendergrass and the O’Jays Eddie Levert had to find every possible way not only to shout, grunt, and plead their way out of the traps devised but to chortle and whisper in falsetto as well.

In this game no one set traps like Deehorn and the Distinctions, and no one slipped them like Rude. Hear it first in the spring 1968 demo recordings which secured the Distinctions’ deal with Philly Grove: a sketch of their first chart hit, “Step Up and Love Me.” With Deehorn’s production scheme still incomplete, the nearly a cappella voices weave a nest for Rude’s whispery intro, then push it out into soaring flight. From the same sessions comes the previously unreleased debut of Rude’s songcraft, “So-Called Friends.”

The new group was installed at Sigma Sound studios to record a full album. Rude, who’d been sleeping on Marv Brown’s couch, bought a house and sent for his wife and child, who’d been waiting in North Carolina. On the debut, the strings-drenched Have You Heard The Distinctions?, Deehorn’s warm, appealing love songs and his lush, aching productions dominate proceedings—here was the group worthy of his surefire hits. His arrangement of “Step Up and Love Me,” complete with flügelhorn and glockenspiel, established the group’s chart viability, smashing through to #1 on the R&B charts while attaining #8 pop. Rude was given a co-credit on the wrenching “Heart and Five Fingers,” though it’s hard to imagine his cajoling, sobbing outro was ever actually written down. When tour promoters at last began ringing the phone, the group was ready; they’d only been practicing their footwork for a decade.

Apprenticeship was past. Atlantic Records purchased the smaller label’s contract and returned the team to Sigma to cut their first masterpiece, The Deceptively Simple Sounds of the Subtle Distinctions. The classic “(No Way to Help You) Ease Your Mind” inaugurated a brief songwriting partnership between Deehorn, Rude, and Brown. With “Happy Talk” and “Raining on a Sunny Day” also reaching the charts, if you owned a radio, Rude’s aching falsetto and the Distinctions’ rich, percolating harmonies dominated the summer of ’70. The album was a banquet of elegant contemporary moods, the group at the summit of their early form, best described by Dave Marsh in his Heart of Rock and Soul : “Pure déjà vu, seeming to call up nostalgia for a doo-wop soul that had never actually existed.” Though it may seem inevitable that the tone would darken, at the time it was easy to wish for summer to last forever—or for a hundred albums as lovely as Deceptively Simple Sounds. Instead we have just one.

Taking a cue from Curtis Mayfield in “Move on Up” and Marvin Gaye in “What’s Going On,” the Subtle Distinctions recorded their socially conscious In Your Neighborhood in the fall of 1971. With a cover photo of the group in a vacant lot warming their hands over a oil-drum fire the album was rushed into stores before Christmas by an A&R office fearful the appetite for conscience might peter out. No fear— Superfly was right around the corner—but the look didn’t fit the group, and Neighborhood was no Christmas record. Rude delivered corruscating vocals on his own “Sucker Punches” (which reached #18 R&B while failing to dent the pop charts), “Jane on Tuesday,” and “ Bricks in the Yard,”but the album bombed. In the dubious tradition of 100-Proof (Aged in Soul)’s “I’d Rather Fight Than Switch,” Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing” and other Madison Avenue–inspired tunes, Deehorn’s “Silly Girl (Love Is for Kids)” nudged to #11 R&B, #16 pop, providing some tonal—and chart—relief.

Redemption was sweet indeed: Nobody and His Brother was less a retreat than a recasting of the darkness of Neighborhood in deeper, more personal terms, made possible by Rude’s assertion of songwriting leadership. “Bothered Blue” was an immediate #1, topping both charts in October 1972, and if it’s the only song you were certain you knew when you purchased this set, you’re forgiven. Listen again. The song is better, more heartrending and true with each passing year, one of the most grown-up testaments of ambivalence and ennui ever to be made the backdrop for a Volkswagen commercial. Album tracks like “The Lisa Story,” “If You Held the Key,” and “So Stupid Minded” form a war for the band’s allegiance with co-writer Deehorn—Rude’s voice and lyrics raging against the tame formats Deehorn throws in his path, while Maddox, Longham, Macy, and Bicycle try to play peacemakers, to give harmonic soothing to the voice burning in the foreground. When Rude flies they offer a landing pad, when he stumbles they pull him to his feet, when at last he needs to sleep they tuck him in. Only “Bothered Blue” charted, but that was all it took for the album to find its place, and become their number-one seller.

Rude quit the group with the song still on the charts. The Distinctions’ last album, Love You More!, is a retroactive shambles, Deehorn’s weaving together of rehearsal tapes Rude left in his wake. The catchy, understated “Painting of a Fool” was a brief R&B hit in June 1973, but the album fooled no one. The Distinctions were dropped from Atlantic, and quickly parted ways with Deehorn, who had some disco fish to fry. The group slipped quickly and easily into an afterlife on the dinner-club oldies circuit, seemingly as reluctant to completely retire the name as they were to sully it by recording without Rude up front. Few retire as gracefully.

As for the departure of the irreplaceable, erratic, and beloved Rude, no one was surprised. His studio battles with Deehorn were a legend, and for good reason. Black pop was headed in another direction, “Bothered Blue” nonwithstanding. Deehorn would produce many hits in the next years, but the place of a Barrett Rude Jr. was far from certain. For every soul-shouter like Johnny Taylor, who, with “Disco Lady,” found career revival, were dozens who’d come to the end of the road. But if the slick rhythm of the up-tempo Philly numbers anticipated (and helped create) disco, that only adds a poignance to what became—in the sound of the Spinners, Manhattans, Bluenotes, Delphonics, Stylistics, and Subtle Distinctions—classic soul’s last burst.

It’s hard to describe what changed in Stevie Wonder’s records once he began playing all the instruments, except that it doesn’t feel like soul—more like the most humane pop-funk ever recorded. By bringing the music into full accord, Wonder outgrew the parodoxes. Similarly, Al Green’s late-’70s gospel is fine stuff, but once he abandoned Willie Mitchell and the house band at Hi, the music no longer teetered between worlds. The counterexample is Marvin Gaye, who, when he began arranging his own material, waded even deeper into the unresolvable mire. Gaye is soul’s paradigmatic figure, carrying his confinements anywhere, embedded in voice itself.

Could Barrett Rude Jr. have carried on with something like Gaye’s force through the ’70s? Maybe. He tried. He failed. Rude was never a confident songwriter—all but two of his Distinctions songs carry Deehorn’s or Brown’s name as collaborator. Record buyers and radio programmers knew his voice but not his name: he might sing “Bothered Blue” on stage until he was bothered gray, but he couldn’t record it again. At 34, he was starting over. On His Own (1972) shouldn’t have been a bad start: with Marv Brown in tow as arranger, Rude recorded a dreamy suite of love songs as intimate as notebook jottings. Unbilled, the Distinctions sang backup on two numbers, “This Eagle’s Flown” and the sole hit, “As I Quietly Walk,” which lodged comfortably at #12 on the R&B charts but couldn’t rescue the album from public indifference.

Our hearts tend to turn away when ballplayers sign with new teams, when child actors grow older, when groups break up and go solo. Still, in Rude’s view the Distinctions represented a kind of infancy, and the solo career his long-delayed adulthood. The non-reception of On His Own was bitter. Increasingly isolated from the advice of friends, Rude divorced Junie Kwarsh and moved to New York. His last album, Take It, Baby, treats the split with agonized specificity—the million-dollar contract he’d negotiated on leaving the Distinctions had been turned over in a settlement. Eschewing Atlantic’s resources, and leaving behind even Marv Brown, Rude recorded at the New Jersey studios of Sylvia Robinson, later the godmother of the Sugarhill Gang. The result is a tour de force of unleashed resentment, and nearly unlistenable by the standards the Distinctions’ audience had come to expect. “Lover of Women” and “Careless” briefly visited the R&B charts. “A Boy Is Crying” alludes to a custody battle, but from the sound might be a battle between Rude’s two or three selves, among which there are only losers.

Rude’s last, stray single, “Who’s Callin’ Me?”, recorded and released in 1975, is a confession of paranoiac retreat. It takes the form of a string of guesses at the identity of a caller; a ringing telephone is audible through the seething funk. “A bill collector? ” Rude wonders. “Can’t be my brother, my brother never calls.” After considering “A wrong number/Some unwed mother/my last producer/a slick seducer/a mob enforcer” and others, just barely heard on the fadeout is a last, anguished possibility: “Is it my mean old father, callin’ me? ” In light of later events the coincidence is jarring.

Rude’s last visit to the recording studio was in 1978 as a guest vocalist on Doofus Funkstrong’s “(Did You Press Your) Bump Suit” (single edit), a twenty-minute funk workout boiled down for release as a single. It touched the charts, but didn’t stick. Rude’s vocal aeronautics never sounded better and—unmoored from sense by goonish lyrics—never meant less. An even odder epilogue is provided by two examples of privately recorded four-track demos, circa 1977–79. “Smile Around Your Cigarette” and “It’s Raining Teeth” are each haunting and disjointed compositions, and each beautifully if lazily sung, suggesting the influence of Sly Stone. Rude was smashed on cocaine at the time.

I promised a story, and stories have endings. Andre Deehorn produced a variety of acts in Philadelphia and later in Los Angeles, scoring on the dance charts with Sophistifunction and Fool’s Gold, among others. He now works as a personal manager in Los Angeles. Rudy Bicycle and Alfred Maddox remain lifelong friends, each living with their families in Dearborn, Michigan, and working in the industry which has supported them all their lives, Bicycle booking musical acts at casinos in nearby Windsor, Ontario, and Maddox as a publicist for the Motown museum. Denny Longham never lost his interest in hair; after the Distinctions disbanded in 1977 he opened King’s Hair Throne, a clip shop in South Philly, and was a neighborhood fixture until his death from pneumonia in 1985. He was 44. In 1977 James Macy followed Andre Deehorn to Los Angeles, and struggled for years to find a hit on a variety of distaff labels. He and two companions were killed by shotgun blasts by unknown assailants while sitting in a car at a traffic light in Culver City on September 25, 1988. He was 47. Marv Brown never again found a musical partnership as satisfying as that which began at the Hi Studio in 1967. He worked with the house band at Sigma for a year, then vanished, and later took his own life by hanging in a Patterson, New Jersey, flophouse in 1994. He was 56.

After winning custody of his son, Barrett Rude Jr. moved to Brooklyn, and there sank gradually into a cocaine-fueled desolation. Rude’s father joined the household after his release from prison in 1977; his relationship with Rude was uneasy at best. The atmosphere was volatile, a bad blend of Rude’s hedonism and his father’s quirky brand of Pentecostalism, with its moral fervor, its love-hate fascination with music and sensuality, its arcane Sabbathdays. (It’s odd to consider that Marvin Gaye, Philippe Wynne, and Barrett Rude Jr. were all, by choice or upbringing, weird black jews.) On August 16, 1981, during a family dispute, Barrett Rude Senior aimed a pistol at his son and grandson. Whether he intended to use it can’t be known. Another gun appeared, and grandson shot grandfather to death. Rude’s son, who’d turned eighteen two months earlier, was convicted as an adult, of involuntary manslaughter. Though Rude was uninjured, the gunshot ended what remained of his public life. His silence since that time is complete. For what it’s worth, the man is still alive.

That’s the story. But what matters is a story in song. The music in this collection tells a tale—of beauty, inspiration, and pain—in voices out of the ghetto and the suburb, the church and the schoolyard, voices of celebration and mourning, sometimes voices of pensiveness and heartache so profound they feel unsustainable in the medium of pop. The voices may propel you to warble along, or to dance, they may inspire you to seduction or insurrection or introspection or merely to watching a little less television. The voices of Barrett Rude Jr. and the Subtle Distinctions lead nowhere, though, if not back to your own neighborhood. To the street where you live. To things you left behind.

And that’s what you need, what you needed all along. Like the song says: sometimes we all must get bothered blue.

 

Disc 1: 1–2: The Four Distinctions, singles on Tallhat 1961, “Hello,” “Baby on the Moon.” 3–4: The Four Distinctions, canceled Tamla single , 1965, “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” b/w “Rolling Downhill.” 5–8: BRJ singles on Hi , 1967: “Set a Place at Your Table” (R&B #49), “Love in Time,” “Rule of Three,” “I Saw the Light,” 9–10 Unreleased demos , 1968: “Step Up and Love Me,” “So-Called Friends.” 11–14: From Have You Heard the Distinctions?, Philly Groove, 1969: “Step Up and Love Me” (R&B #1, pop #8), “Eye of the Beholder,” “Heart and Five Fingers,” “Lonely and Alone.” 15–19: From The Deceptively Simple Sounds of the Subtle Distinctions, Atco, 1970: “(No Way to Help You) Ease Your Mind” (R&B #1, pop #2), “Far More the Man,” “Raining on a Sunny Day” (R&B #7, pop #88), “Happy Talk” (R&B #20, pop #34), “Just in Case (You Turn Around).” Disc 2: 1–4: From The Distinctions in Your Neighborhood, Atco, 1971: “Sucker Punches” (R&B #18, pop, did not chart), “Silly Girl (Love Is for Kids)” (R&B #11, pop #16), “Jane on Tuesday,” “Bricks in the Yard.” 5–9: From Nobody and His Brother, Atco 1972: “Bothered Blue” (R&B #1, pop #1), “Finding It Out,” “So Stupid Minded,” “If You Held the Key,” “The Lisa Story,” 10: From The Subtle Distinctions Love You More!, Atco, 1973: “Painting of a Fool” (R&B #18). 11–13: from On His Own (BRJ solo) , Atco, 1972: “As I Quietly Walk” (R&B #12, pop # 48), “It Matters More,” “This Eagle’s Flown.” 14–16: From Take It, Baby (BRJ solo), Atco, 1973: “Careless” (R&B #24), “Lover of Women,” “A Boy Is Crying.” 17–18: BRJ solo single , Fantasy 1975: “Who’s Callin’ Me?” (R&B #63) b/w “ Crib Jam.” 19: Casablanca, 1978: BRJ guest appearance on Doofus Funkstrong’s “(Did You Press Your) Bump Suit” (R&B #84, pop #100). 20–21: Unreleased BRJ demos : “Smile Around Your Cigarette,” “It’s Raining Teeth.”

chapter  1

In the attic room I called my office sat a daybed that was usually spread with paper, the press packets which accompanied promotional copies of CDs and the torn bubble wrap and padded mailers the CDs arrived in. This morning, though, the bedspread, bathed in sideways seven A.M. September light, Indian summer light, was clear of packaging husks, clear of publicity. Instead the daybed held two things: a CD wallet, with plastic sleeves to hold twenty-four discs, and Abigale Ponders, in threadbare Meat Puppets T-shirt (mine) and Calvin Klein men’s underwear (not mine, she bought her own), her limbs bent in sleepily elegant disarray. Only one of the two would be joining me on the nine-thirty flight to Los Angeles. Discman and headphones were already packed, along with a single change of clothes, in a small overnight satchel waiting at the door downstairs.

It wasn’t usual to see Abby in my attic office. In truth, I was peevish to have her there. I’d been hoping to slip from the house while she was still asleep in the room below. Instead she’d trotted upstairs after me. There, in slanted light, her white shorts glowing against her skin and the maroon bedspread, she made a picture—one suitable, if you discounted the Meat Puppets emblem on the thin-stretched white shirt, for the jacket art on an old Blue Note jazz LP. She resembled a brown puppet herself, akimbo, head propped angled, mouth parted, lids druggy. I would have had to be a scowling Miles Davis to feel worthy of stepping into the frame. Or, at least, Chet Baker. Abby’s whole being was a reproach to me. I loved having a black girlfriend, and I loved Abby, but I was no trumpet player.

Shopping at my wall of CDs, I opened a jewel case and dropped Ron Sexsmith’s Whereabouts onto the spread beside the wallet.

She yawned. “Why are you staying overnight, anyway?” Abby counted on groggy insouciance to break the stalemate of the night before. We’d been in a silent war, worse than ever. This was worth a try—I rooted for her, even if I couldn’t cooperate.

“I told you I’ve got a friend to see.”

“Are you going on a date ?”

I mumbled the lie out. “An old friend, Abby.” Bill Withers’s Still Bill was my next choice. I flipped the disc to the bedspread without looking away from the shelves.

“Right, old friend, dinner, I forgot. Oops.” The CD clattered to the floor. “I kicked it.” She laughed for an instant.

I caught the disc still spinning, and slid it into the wallet, near her toes.

“I’m trying to make you talk to me.”

“I’ll miss my plane.”

“They leave on the hour, I’ve heard.”

“Right, and I’m expected at Dreamworks at one. Don’t fuck this up.”

“Don’t worry, Dylan, I won’t fuck anyone. Is that what you said?”

“Abby.” I tried scowling.

“Not even you. So don’t be jealous of yourself, because you’re not getting any.”

“Go back to bed,” I suggested.

She yawned and stretched. Hands on her bare thighs, elbows dipping toward her middle as if seeking to meet. “If we were fucking anymore, Dylan, maybe that would help.”

“Help who?”

“The nature of fucking is it involves both people.”

I tossed Brian Eno’s Another Green World onto the bed and envisioned a row to myself at sixty thousand feet.

She ran thumbs under elastic. “I made myself come last night after you were asleep.”

“Telling someone else about masturbation involves two people, Abby, but that doesn’t make it fucking.” This sort of stuff passed easily between myself and Abby. The tang of déjà vu to the banter made it a simple task to carry on browsing my record collection.

“Do you want to know who I was thinking about when I came? It’s gross.”

“Could you see the whites of his eyes?”

“What?”

“Never mind. I’m interrupting.”

“I’ll tell you if you tell me the name of your secret date in L.A.”

“We’re swapping a real person for an imaginary one? That’s supposed to be a good deal?”

“Oh, he’s real.”

I didn’t answer, but made another couple of quick CD selections—Swamp Dogg, Edith Frost.

“I was half dreaming, really. Guy d’Seur was putting his froggy little hands all over me. Isn’t that stupid, Dylan? I’ve never thought of him that way, not for a minute. When he took out his dick it was enormous.”

“I’m not surprised.”

I wasn’t. Not at d’Seur’s appearance in Abby’s fantasy or at the size she’d granted his apparatus. Guy d’Seur was more than Abigale Ponders’s thesis advisor, he was a Berkeley celebrity. Forget being a rock critic—forget even being a rock musician. The professors of the various graduate departments were the stars that wowed this burg. To walk into a Berkeley café and find seated before a latté and scone one of the Rhetoric or English faculties’ roster of black-clad theorists—Avital Rampart, Stavros Petz, Kookie Grossman, and Guy d’Seur formed the current pantheon—was to have your stomach leap up into your throat. In Berkeley these were the people who hushed a room. Their unreadable tomes filled front tables at bookstores.

Abigale Ponders was the sole child of a pair of black dentists from Palo Alto, honorable strivers through the middle classes who’d only wanted to see her attain a graduate degree and then been completely bewildered at the result. Abby’s thesis, “The Figuration of the Black Chanteuse in Parisian Representations of Afro-American Culture, from Josephine Baker to Grace Jones,” had led her, two years earlier, to come calling on the one working journalist in Berkeley who’d interviewed Nina Simone. I’d made my humbling pilgrimage to Simone on behalf of Musician Magazine in 1989, and Abby had proved she could research a bibliographic index with the best of them. That day, I’d charmed Abby out of interview mode by playing rare Simone records, until it was late enough to suggest a bottle of wine.

We’d moved her into my little Berkeley house three months later.

“Now you owe me one,” she said. “Who are you seeing in L.A.? What’s worth a hotel room you can’t afford?”

“The hotel room is in Anaheim, and it isn’t costing me anything,” I said. “I guess that’s a clue.” I’d resigned myself to giving up the secret.

“You’re being paid for sex ? With a Disney character ?”

“Try harder, Abby. Who in life, when you visit them, insists on paying for everything?”

She fell silent, just slightly shamed.

I took my advantage. “You’re dreaming about d’Seur because you owe his froggy little hands a chapter draft, you know.”

“Fuck off.”

“Okay, but why not use this as a chance to get back to work?”

“I’ve been working.”

“Okay. Sorry I said anything.”

She sat up and crossed her legs. “Why is your father going to Anaheim, Dylan?”

“He’s got business there.”

“What kind of business?”

“Abraham is the guest of honor—the artist guest of honor—at ForbiddenCon.”

“What’s ForbiddenCon?”

“I guess I’m about to find out.”

A pause. “Something to do with his film?” She spoke this softly, as she ought to have. Abraham Ebdus’s unfinished life’s work was no laughing matter.

I shook my head. “It’s some science-fiction thing. He’s winning an award.”

“I thought he didn’t care about that stuff.”

“I guess Francesca convinced him.” My father’s new girlfriend, Francesca Cassini, had a gift for getting him out of the house.

“Why didn’t you tell me he was coming?”

“He isn’t coming. I’m meeting him there.” Our tone was rote and flat, a comedown from Abby’s sexual provocations. Those now drifted off as easily as fumes from a solitary cigarette.

I took Esther Phillips’s Black-Eyed Blues from its jewel case and slid it into the wallet. The light outside was altered. An airport shuttle van would come in half an hour.

Abby tugged at one of the short dreadlocks at her forehead, twisting it gently between her knuckles. I recalled a baby goat scratching tender, nubby horns against a gate, something I’d witnessed in Vermont a hundred or a thousand years ago. When she felt my gaze Abby looked down, stared at her own bare knees. Her mouth worked slightly but formed nothing. I thought I could smell that she had made herself a little excited hectoring me.

“You seem a bit down,” I said.

“What?”

“A little depressed again, lately.”

She looked up sharply. “Don’t use that word.”

“I meant it sympathetically.”

“You have no right.”

With that she suddenly took herself out of the room, peeling the Meat Puppets shirt off over her head as she descended the stairs and moved out of sight. I only got a flash of back. A minute later I heard the shower. Abby had a seminar today, the second of the new semester. She ought to have spent the summer months writing a segment of her dissertation—as I likely should have been drafting my screenplay. Instead we’d fought and fucked and, increasingly, lapsed into separate glowering silences in our two rooms. Now, just as Abby was going in to face her mentors more or less empty-handed, I’d be winging down to Los Angeles to talk out a hot notion for which I’d not scribbled even the first hot scrap of note.

My sometimes-editor at The L.A. Weekly had arranged the pitch meeting, my first. Over the last two years I’d slowly ground myself into $30,000 of credit card debt as a freelancer, my recent livelihood consisting mainly of the work I’d been doing for a Marin-based reissue label, Remnant Records. My dealings with Remnant’s owner, a graying beatnik entrepreneur named Rhodes Blemner, vexed me. So today’s pitch was a bid for freedom.

I must have lapsed into some kind of fugue, because the next thing I knew Abby was dressed and back at the top of my stairs. She wore jeans and a black sleeveless top and knee-high boots which raised her above my height. The boots still needed to be laced through their elaborate upper eyelets. She stood rubbing moisturizer into her palms and elbows and regarding me with steely fury.

“I don’t talk about the hardest parts of my life only to have you throw them back at me,” she said. “If I’ve ever been depressed at least I’ve had the nerve to admit it. I don’t want you to ever use that word with me again, do you understand?”

“Sure you’ve got a nerve. Apparently I touched it. That’s called letting someone know you intimately, Abby.”

“Oh, yeah? What’s it called when you don’t know yourself intimately?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why didn’t you tell me your father was coming, Dylan? How could you let me twist like that?”

I stared.

“You’re depressed, Dylan. That’s your secret from yourself. You don’t let it inside. Your surround yourself with it instead, so you don’t have to admit you’re the source. Take a look.”

“It’s an interesting theory,” I mumbled.

“Fuck you, Dylan, it’s not interesting, it’s not a theory. You’re so busy feeling sorry for me and whoever, Sam Cooke, you conveniently ignore yourself.”

“What exactly do you want, Abby?”

“To be let inside, Dylan. You hide from me, in plain sight.”

“I suppose that’s another way of describing one person sparing another their violent shifts of mood.”

“Is that what we’re talking about here? Moods ?”

“One minute you’re jerking off on the carpet, now this outburst. I can’t take it, Abby.”

“You think you’ve spared me your moods ? What do you think it’s like for me, living under your cockpit of misery, here?” She gestured at the wall I’d been contemplating, covered with fourteen hundred compact discs: two units each holding seven hundred apiece. “This is a wall of moods, a wall of depression, Mr. Objective Correlative.” She slapped the shelves. They rattled.

“Wow, you’ve really drawn up an indictment.” I was fumbling for breathing room, nothing more.

“That’s what you call it when I won’t play depressed for you? You switch to your little Kafka fantasies? I don’t have the power of indictment, Dylan. I’m just the official mascot for all the shit you won’t allow yourself to feel. A featured exhibit in the Ebdus collection of sad black folks.”

“That’s unfair.”

“Let’s see, Curtis Mayfield, “We People Who Are Darker Than Blue”—sounds like depression to me.” She chucked the CD to the floor. “Gladys Knight, misery, depression. Johnny Adams, depression. Van Morrison, total fucking depression. Lucinda Williams, give her Prozac. Marvin Gaye, dead. Johnny Ace, dead, tragic.” As she dismissed the titles she jerked them from the shelf, the jewel cases splitting as they clattered down. “Little Willie John, dead. Little Esther and Little Jimmy Scott, sad—all the Littles are sad. What’s this, Dump ? You actually listen to something called Dump? Is that real? Syl Johnson, Is It Because I’m Black? Maybe you’re just a loser, Syl. Gillian Welch, please, momma. The Go-Betweens? Five Blind Boys of Alabama, no comment. Al Green, I used to think Al Green was happy music until you explained to me how fucking tragic it all was, how he got burned with a pot of hot grits and then his woman shot herself because she was so very depressed. Brian Wilson, crazy. Tom Verlaine, very depressed. Even you don’t play that record. Ann Peebles, I Can’t Stand the Rain. Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, blecch. “Drowning in the Sea of Love,” is that a good thing or a bad thing? David Ruffin, I know he’s a drug addict. Donny Hathaway—dead?”

“Dead,” I said.

“The Bar-Kays, it sounds happy, but I get a bad feeling, I get a bad vibe from this disc. What’s going on with the Bar-Kays?”

“Uh, they were on Otis Redding’s plane.”

“The Death-Kays! ” She overhanded it to shatter against the far wall and rain onto the pillow.

“Okay, Abby.” I held out my palms, pleading. “Peace. Uncle.” My spinning brain added, Sprite! Mr. Pibb! Clitoris!

She stopped, and we both stared at the crystalline junk around her feet.

“I have some happy music,” I said, dumbly adopting her terms.

“Like what?”

“‘You Sexy Thing’ is probably my favorite single song. There’s a lot of disco-era music I like.”

“Terrible example.”

“Why?”

“A million whining moaning singers, ten million depressed songs, and five or six happy songs—which remind you of being beaten up when you were thirteen years old. You live in the past, Dylan. I’m sick of your secrets. Did your father even ask if I was coming down with you?”

My face was hot and no speech emerged.

“And all this shit. What is this shit, anyway?” Alongside the box sets on the shelf above the CD cases were arrayed a scattering of objects I’d never shown off or named: Aaron X. Doily’s ring, Mingus’s pick, a pair of Rachel’s earrings, and a tiny, handmade, hand-sewn book of black-and-white photographs titled “For D. from E.” Abby’s unlaced boots crackled in the broken plastic cases as she walked. “Whose little shrine is this? Emily? Elizabeth? Come on, Dylan, you put it there so I could see it, you owe me an explanation already.”

“Don’t.”

“Were you once married? I wouldn’t even know.”

I took the ring from the shelf and put it in my pocket. “This is all stuff from when I was a kid.” It was a slight oversimplification: E. was the wife of a friend from college, the gift of the book commemoration of an almost which was really a just-as-well-not.

Mingus’s comic books were in a box in my closet, mingled with mine.

She grabbed the Afro pick. “You were already taking souvenirs from black girls when you were a kid? I don’t think so, Dylan.”

“That’s not a girl’s.”

“Not a girl’s.” She tossed the pick onto the bed. “Is that your way of telling me something I don’t even want to know? Or did you buy this off eBay? Is this Otis Redding’s pick, stolen from the wreckage? Maybe it belonged to one of the Bar-Kays. I guess the truly haunting thing is you’ll never know for sure.”

I lashed out. “I guess I have to listen to this shit because you don’t feel black enough, Abby. Because you grew up riding ponies in the suburbs.”

“No, you have to listen to it because you think this is all about where you grew up and where I grew up. Listen to yourself for a minute, Dylan. What happened to you? Your childhood is some privileged sanctuary you live in all the time, instead of here with me. You think I don’t know that?”

“Nothing happened to me.”

“Right,” she said with heavy sarcasm. “So why are you so obsessed with your childhood?”

“Because—” I truly wanted to answer, not only to appease her. I wanted to know it myself.

“Because?”

“My childhood—” I spoke carefully, finding each word. “My childhood is the only part of my life that wasn’t, uh, overwhelmed by my childhood.”

Overwhelmed—or did I mean ruined ?

“Right,” she said. And we stared at one another for a long moment. “Thank you,” she said.

“Thank you?”

“You just told me where I stand, Dylan.” She spoke sadly, no longer concerned to prove anything. “You know, when I first spent a night in this house, you don’t think I didn’t walk up here and check out your shit? You think I didn’t see that pick on your shelf?”

“It’s just a pick. I like the form.”

She ignored me. “I said to myself, Abby, this man is collecting you for the color of your skin. That was okay, I was willing to be collected. I liked being your nigger, Dylan.”

The word throbbed between us, permitting no reply from me. I could visualize it in cartoonish or graffiti-style font, glowing with garish decorations, lightning, stars, halos. As with the pick, I could appreciate the form. Most such words devaluate, when thrown around every day on the streets by schoolboys of all colors, or whispered by lovers such as myself and Abigale Ponders. Though it had been more than once around the block of our relationship, nigger was that rarity, an anti-entropic agent, self-renewing. The deep ugliness in the word always sat up alert again when it was needed.

“But I never was willing to be collected for my moods, man. You collected my depression, you cultivated it like a cactus, like a sulky cat you wanted around to feel sorry for. I never expected that. I never did.”

Abby was talking to herself. When she noticed, a moment after I did, her expression curdled. “Clean up your room,” she said, and went downstairs.

The airport shuttle’s horn had been sounding for some time now, I realized. My room would have to wait to be cleaned, and the five or six CDs I’d selected would have to be enough. The Syl Johnson record, Is It Because I’m Black, had skated to the top of the small heap of discs and plastic left behind where Abby had been. I fished it up and added it to the wallet.

At the kitchen table Abby stood, one boot up on a chair, cinching the endless laces. She’d already refreshed the Africanoid jewelry in her piercings. It would seem an absurd costume for a student in a classroom, if I hadn’t known how hard her fellow students dressed for the same occasion. The boots were only a little obstacle to the art of dramatic exitry—she’d surely meant to be out the door before me, meant her last words upstairs to be conclusive.

I grabbed the bag at the door. Her face, when she looked up, was raw, shocked, unmade. The van honked again.

“Good luck today,” she said awkwardly.

“Thanks. I’ll call—”

“I’ll be out.”

“Okay. And Abby?”

“Yes?”

“Good luck, too.” I didn’t know if I meant it, or what it was meant to apply to if I did. Was I wishing her good luck in leaving me? But there it was, our absurd coda completed, good luck on all sides. Then I was gone.

chapter  2

It was September 1999, a season of fear—in three months the collapse of the worldwide computer grid was going to bring the century’s long party to a finish. Meanwhile, as the party waned, the hottest new format in radio was a thing called Jammin’ Oldies. Los Angeles’s MEGA 100, recently reformatted (or in radio parlance, “flipped”) to the new trend, was playing in my cab—the song was War’s “Why Can’t We Be Friends?”—as I instructed the driver to take me to the Universal Studios lot and we swung away from the LAX curbside, into palm-lined gray traffic. The trees looked thirsty to me.

San Francisco had a Jammin’ Oldies station too. All cities did, a tidal turning of my generation’s readiness to sentimentalize the chart toppers of its youth. Old divisions had been blurred in favor of the admission that disco hadn’t sucked so bad as all that, even the pretense that we’d adored it all along. The Kool & the Gang and Gap Band dance hits we’d struggled against as teens, trying to deny their pulse in our bodies, were now staples of weddings and lunch hours in all the land; the O’Jays and Manhattans and Barry White ballads we’d loathed were now, with well-mixed martinis or a good zinfandel, foundation elements in any reasonably competent seduction. From the evidence of the radio I might have come of age in a race-blind utopia. That on the other end of the dial hip-hop stations thumped away in dire quarantine, a sort of pre-incarceration, no matter. Not today, anyway, not for one borne in the backseat of a taxicab helmed by one Nicholas M. Brawley, through sun-blanched smog, toward a meeting with a Dreamworks development executive, nope.

“You like this song?” I asked Nicholas Brawley’s fortyish gray-coiled neck.

“It’s all right.”

“You know the Subtle Distinctions?”

“Now see that’s some real fine music.”

At the guard-post gates of the Universal lot was proof I was expected, so Brawley’s cab could be waved through, to wend past the curbed Jeeps and the long windowless hangars and the brick huts which appeared to have been thrown up just that morning. Dreamworks’ building resided what felt to be a mile or so inside the compound, behind a tree-sheltered parking lot requiring a special pass for entrance. None had been issued, so Brawley dropped me at the inner gate.

“You have a card?” I asked him. “I’ll need a ride out of here in, I don’t know—maybe an hour?”

He jotted a number on the back of the company’s card. “Call my cell phone.”

As I crossed the shade-spangled lot to the entrance a well-dressed lackey was just crossing it in the other direction, moving for a break in the eucalyptus trees. He carried an Oscar. Palms cupping the statuette’s base and shoulders, he appeared to be looking for someone to bestow it on. I wondered if his whole job was to cross this lot all day with the golden prize, back and forth, reminding any visitor of the local stakes.

Inside, I was directed upstairs, where I gave my name to a pretty girl with a headset. She fetched me a bottled water before abandoning me to a flotilla of couches and magazines. There I plopped my sad little overnight bag, hitched up my pants to cross my legs and tried not to look too demoralized beneath the smirk of framed posters. Time passed, phones rang, carpets sighed, someone whispered around a corner.

“Dylan?”

“Yes?”

I dropped Men’s Journal and a boy in a sharp-creased suit took my hand. “You’re the music guy—right?”

“Right.”

“I’m Mike. Great to see you. Jared’s just ending a call.”

We moved to Mike’s little office, an intermediate space, a staging area, apparently, for encounters with Jared. You had to meet Cats-in-the-Hat-A-through-Z before you got to the One True Cat. At least we were all on a first-name basis.

“Mike?” said an intercom voice.

“Yes.”

“I’m ready for Dylan.”

Mike gave me a thumbs-up endorsement to cross Jared’s threshold, and a wink for luck.

The room had earth tones to spare. No posters here, nothing jarring—it was like a shrink’s office. Sunlight sliced through a couple of potted rubber trees, to ornament the carpet. Jared launched from behind his desk. He was jacketless, blond, thick and soft and relaxed in his body, a gym junkie, I guessed. I’d have kicked his ass at stoopball, though.

A conclave with Jared Orthman was meant to be the next best thing to an audience with Geffenberg himself. A thousand or a million writers hungered for what I had today. I hoped not to blow it, not so much on their behalf as on that of my own shriveled prospects and swollen debt.

“Here, let’s sit here.” He guided me away from the desk, to a pair of facing love seats across the room, the pitch zone. I dropped my bag, which sagged like a Claes Oldenberg sculpture, seeming to stand for an artist’s impotence in corporate surroundings. I wished I’d packed my Discman and change of underwear in something more like a briefcase. We sat, smiled, crossed legs.

Jared frowned. “Did you get water? Did they give you water?” he asked anxiously.

“I left it outside.”

“Do you want something? Water?” He looked ready to provide the vital essence if he had to wring it from stones.

“I’m fine, thanks.”

“So.” He smiled, frowned, widened his hands. We studied one another and tried to remain friendly. Jared and I were probably the same age but otherwise had traveled from opposite ends of the universe to this meeting. My black jeans were like a smudge of ash or daub of vomit in this cream-and-peach world.

“I’m a friend of Randolph’s,” I reminded him. “From the Weekly.”

“Riiight.” He nodded, considering it. “Just . . . who is Randolph?”

“Randolph Treadwell? The Weekly ?”

He nodded. “I think I know who you mean.”

“Well, he, uh, set this up.”

“Okay. Okay. So, uh, what are you doing in my office?”

“Sorry?” The question was so bald. I was astonished as if he’d asked Why do I hold this job, as opposed to, say, anyone else? Can you explain that, please?

“Just a minute,” he said, holding up one finger and springing from the love seat. He leaned over his desk and pushed a button. “Mike?”

“Yes.”

“What’s Dylan doing in my office?”

“He’s the music guy.”

“The music guy.”

“You remember. He’s got a movie.”

“Ahhhh.” Now Jared turned and smiled at me. This was all pleasure. A movie! How perfectly unexpected. “Who’s Randy Treadmill or something?” he said to the intercom.

“He’s that guy you met when you were talking about the thing.” Click, buzz. “On the boat.”

“Ahhhh. Okay. Okay.” He released the intercom. There was a hierarchy of remembering here, I understood. Mike remembered for Jared the sort of things Jared had once remembered for someone else, on his way up through the ranks. Someday Mike would have someone remembering things for him as well, and be free to abandon the skill.

Jared returned to the love seat and again pointed a finger at me, but now it was a happier finger.

“You’ve got a movie,” he said warmly.

“Yes.”

“I’ve been wanting to hear this.” He didn’t know the first thing about it, I saw now. I could have offered him a comedy about a rookie vibraphonist for the Boston Pops, or a thriller about a spy who kills by ultrasonic whistle, any of the many things a music guy would be likely to concern himself with.

“I’m closing my eyes,” said Jared. “It means I’m listening.”

I was left to consider his tanned lids, immaculate desk, twin rubber tree plants. I was the ant who had to move them, apparently.

“Your movie is about—?” This was a just-because-my-eyes-are-closed-doesn’t-mean-there’s-no-hurry situation.

“A true story,” I said.

“Okay.”

“In Tennessee—”

“Tennessee ?” Jared opened his eyes.

“Yes.”

“What happened in Tennessee?”

I started again. “In the fifties, in Tennessee, there was this singing group called the Prisonaires. Because they were in prison. But they had a career anyway. They recorded at Sun Records, where Elvis Presley was discovered. That’s the name of the movie— The Prisonaires.”

“Did you know that both my parents came here from Tennessee?” He made it sound like Crimea, or Mars. “Or is that just some kind of coincidence?”

“I didn’t know.”

“Okay. Okay. Wild. What’s it called?”

“The Prisonaires.”

“Okay, tell me again.”

“Let me set it up,” I’d been advised to “talk in scenes.” “I’d want to start the movie inside the prison. The lead Prisonaire is a guy named Johnny Bragg. He’s the songwriter, the lead singer. He’s been in jail for years, since he was sixteen. On trumped-up charges. So he and another convict are out in the yard, walking, in the rain, literally, and one says to the other. ‘Here we are, walking in the rain, I wonder what the little girls are doing?’ And Johnny Bragg starts singing the line, a mournful little song, ‘Just Walkin’ in the Rain.’ Which became their first hit. Maybe it could be playing over the opening credits.”

“That reminds me of something else.”

“You’re probably thinking of ‘Singing in the Rain.’ ”

“Oh yeah, sure. He wrote that ?”

“Different song.”

“Okay, let me get this: he’s wrongfully imprisoned. What’s the charge?”

“Well, actually it was six convictions for rape. Six ninety-nine-year sentences, with no possibility of parole.”

“Ouch.”

“The cops set him up. He was an arrogant, good-looking kid, and they had it in for him. They pinned a bunch of unsolved rapes on him.”

“Brad Pitt, Matthew McConaughey.”

“I forgot to say black.”

“These are black people ?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.” Jared waved his hands, reluctantly brushing Pitt from the room. “Start again with black people. How does he get out of jail?”

“Well, he doesn’t. I mean, he does later, but not right away. He starts a singing group in jail, prison, the Prisonaires. That’s the gimmick—they’re still in prison. They’re let out for recording sessions and live performances.”

“I don’t get it. In or out?”

“That’s the movie. The Prisonaires were so famous in Tennessee that the governor was under pressure from both sides—to free them, to keep them locked up as an example. A few got pardons, but Bragg was still locked inside. It’s a great story, full of dramatic highs and lows.”

“You’re freaking me out.”

“I am?”

“Because we don’t make movies with dramatic highs and lows.”

“Sorry?”

“Just kidding, man.”

It was becoming possible I’d pitch myself across the gap between our love seats and throttle Jared.

“Look, if I could just describe it without any interruptions I think I could make you see.”

“Dylan, that’s not nice.”

“It’s just—I’m dying to tell you this story.”

“I like you, mister.”

I waited until it was clear he had nothing to add, then said, “Thank you.”

“Five minutes.” He spread his fingers to show me five, then stretched back and closed his eyes again.

“The Prisonaires are one of the great unknown stories in pop-culture history,” I said. The language was dead on my tongue, but I blundered on. “Five black guys in prison in the 1950s, some serving hundred-year sentences, some on briefer stretches, all victims of prejudice and economic injustice in the Jim Crow South. Five jailbirds who form a singing group just for the love of the music. But they’re so good they sing themselves into an audition. The warden issues special passes just so they can visit Sun Studios—this is in 1953, the same point when a weird little kid named Elvis Presley is hanging around Sun, trying to get a session. But the star of the movie is Johnny Bragg, the lead singer, the lead Prisonaire. When Bragg was sixteen he got railroaded—a woman with a grudge, maybe jealous because he was playing the field, called the cops on him. She screamed rape. And the white cops pinned six convictions on him, just to clear their books. Six unsolved cases, wham. Johnny Bragg gets six hundred years in prison.” Nearly everything I had was cribbed out of Colin Escott’s liner notes from the Prisonaires CD, or fantasized out of my own musings on a handful of newspaper clippings I’d unearthed myself. But it was enough. I was beginning to inspire myself, to remember what I’d had in mind in the first place, the screenplay I ought to have been researching and writing for the past year. “On the early-morning bus ride to Sun Studios Bragg looks out his window and sees an empty drive-in movie theater, and he says ‘Wow, look at that crazy cemetery.’ He’s twenty-six—been in prison for ten years.”

“Bad deal,” mused Jared.

“So they record. Cut a single, two sides. Elvis Presley is there. In the studio, hanging around. Just a kid they tolerate around the place. He and Bragg make friends, this is all true, by the way. Great chance for a cameo, like when Val Kilmer plays Elvis in Mystery Train.”

“Never saw it.”

“It’s okay, not great. Anyway, Bragg and the Prisonaires cut a record, two sides, and go back to the joint. End of story, right? Except the song, ‘Just Walkin’ in the Rain,’ is a hit. A big hit, people calling in requests to radio stations. Meanwhile, the Prisonaires are back inside. They don’t have radios, they don’t know, but then they start getting letters in the prison, letters from strangers. They’re becoming stars. And the prison officials start getting involved. You’ve got the warden on the phone to the governor, everybody trying to figure out how to handle this thing, whether to encourage it, how to spin the story.”

Jared nodded and rocked slightly, seeming to approve, perhaps envisioning white actors in supporting roles, Gene Hackman, Martin Landau, Geoffrey Rush.

“The authorities decide to go the liberal route, and claim the Prisonaires as a sterling example of rehabilitation. They start letting them out to make radio appearances, do live shows, cut more sides at Sun. There’s a lot of sentiment building up, people calling for pardons. Not least the Prisonaires themselves—they cut a song extolling the governor, called “Frank Clement, He’s a Mighty Man.” Basically just a raw bid for mercy. Not everybody’s happy though. The same heavy dudes that set Bragg up in the first place haven’t forgotten him. They’re biding their time, waiting for the Prisonaires to stumble. When the governor’s up for reelection things start getting interesting. These guys are becoming a political football. You can just picture the racial politics involved.”

“I’m thinking KKK, that’s what I’m thinking.”

“Uh, yeah. Just about. The thing about Tennessee in the fifties, Jared, is that the Klan didn’t always necessarily wear a hood.” I was winging it here. But that was okay. The facts would surely have to be bent to make a movie. This was what I’d come here to do: bend these facts into Hollywood’s ear. “So the governor’s under pressure on both sides, he’s been encouraging these boys, raising their hopes. He begins making plans to release the Prisonaires, talking about them on the radio, milking it for publicity. And his Republican opponent is working the other angle, turning it into a scare story. ‘The good citizens of Tennessee better hope that not all of its convicted killers can sing’—shit like that.”

“Wow. This is good stuff.”

“Let me describe one scene for you. I see this as a real centerpiece. There are photographs of a Prisonaires show from just before the first pardons—remember, these guys have families, they’ve left women behind, and the only time they get out is onstage. They can’t mingle. There’s probably armed guards at the edge of the stage, that sort of thing. These pictures, I should have brought them along, they’ll blow your mind, Jared.” By force of will I was leveraging the Prisonaires’ reality, their sweat and pain and love, into this pallid room, into Jared’s pallid mind. I’d make it stick, here where nothing stuck. I understood now that I was born for pitching. I had only to be let into the room. “It’s like the Beatles at Shea Stadium, Jared. Or Elvis. Women weeping, breaking down. But these aren’t just a bunch of teenage girls. They’re the Prisonaires’ mothers, grand mothers, aunts, girlfriends holding babies. They’re falling apart, tearing up handkerchiefs, crawling on the floor while these guys sing. The music is so beautiful, it’s just tearing people’s hearts out. Maybe you’d even have the girl who set Johnny Bragg up, probably she’d be there too. She’s sorry for what she did, she’s still in love. And she’s in this crowd of women, just falling to pieces.”

“Holy shit.”

“That’s just half of it. When this crying wave hits the audience, the Prisonaires lose it too. They try to go on singing but they can’t. They’re separated from these women, from their mothers, everyone, by the distance of the stage. And they start bawling too. They’re clinging to each other, clinging to microphones and chairs. Trying to reach out, but the guards push them back. It’s like, I don’t know, like Guernica, Jared. It’s a scene you don’t forget.”

“I can really see this.” Jared sounded astonished at his own powers of visualization.

“Of course you can. Okay, so, back up: the governor. He’s getting reports on this stuff. He’s riding a tiger and he’s afraid it’s going to eat him alive. So he springs a couple of the guys. His opponents are roasting him alive, but he springs them anyway. And that’s when a plan emerges. The governor’s got a crafty little aide, a Kissinger type, who suggests they leave Johnny Bragg inside. Bragg’s the one carrying the heavy sentence, and he’s the songwriter, the lead voice—the genius. Split the band away from him and maybe the story can be allowed to die out.”

“No.”

“It’s horrible, but yes. That’s how they play it. They pardon all four of the other Prisonaires, one by one. Everybody’s waiting for Bragg to come out and join them. Looks like a happy ending, but it’s too good to be true. The governor’s enemies on the right have him in a box. So he makes a show of being tough on crime by leaving Bragg inside. The warden cuts off his privileges. The hope is that without the music, this thing is destined to blow over.”

“Jee sus.”

Jesus, yes. Where was I unearthing this crap? I was pitching the Oliver Stone version.

“But Bragg doesn’t quit making music. With all his Prisonaires on the outside, he forms a new prison group, the Marigolds. Years are going by here, you understand. They’re squeezing the life out of this man. In ’56 Johnnie Ray records a cover of ‘Just Walkin’ in the Rain,’ and Bragg gets a check in prison for fourteen hundred dollars—he tells them just to put it in the commissary, he thinks it’s for fourteen dollars. He’s never seen so much money in his life. But he’s got no way to spend it. The Marigolds record a few numbers for Excello Records, but nothing really hits.”

“What’s with Marigolds ?”

“There was a craze for flower groups, the Clovers, the Posies, stuff like that. Just like everybody had to be bugs a few years later—the Crickets, the Beatles.”

“Ah.”

“Bragg doesn’t get parole until ’59, six years after the Prisonaires’ first hit. And then he only lasts a year before they set him up for another fall. He’s charged with robbery and attempted murder—for stealing two dollars and fifty cents. Pathetic. White women come forward again, claiming he tried to attack them. He’s a magnet for these kinds of accusations. It’s classic race panic, and Bragg’s this symbol that pushes everyone’s buttons. The man must have had some kind of presence, some pride when he walked down the street, that these white authorities couldn’t abide. They just had to put him back inside, it was their way of coping.”

“I don’t know if you’ll like this but I’m totally picturing Denzel Washington.”

“Listen: that year Elvis Presley, fresh out of the army, detours his trip home to visit the state prison to hang out with Bragg. Picture it, the same weird little kid who was hanging around the studio admiring the Prisonaires harmonies is now the biggest entertainer on the planet. And he remembers Bragg, it matters to Elvis. The thirty-year-old black con and the King. The visit gets publicity, but only for Elvis. No one remembers Bragg’s case anymore, and the Prisonaires are a distant memory. Elvis offers to pay for a lawyer, but Bragg says it’s okay, he’s cut a deal. There’s nothing on paper, no proof, but Bragg’s promised the warden not to push the case to the Supreme Court in return for a promise he’d be out in nine months.”

I paused, then, to set it up.

“Yeah?”

“They kept him another seven years.”

“You’re killing me, Dylan.”

“It goes on and on. In the sixties he re-forms the Prisonaires again, this time with a white guy in the group—it’s the era of integration now. But the other prisoners don’t like it, he gets attacked in the yard. Later he gets out again and marries a white woman, and the cops arrest him for walking down the street with her—”

“Stop, okay? Stop. Don’t tell me any more.”

Jared had been growing steadily more agitated for some time, and now he sprang from his seat, bugged his eyes, and paced to the desk.

“Is something the matter?”

“Everything’s great, Dylan. It’s just—who else knows about this?”

“You’re the first.” I assumed this was the answer Jared had to hear. Needless to say, the Prisonaires story had only been sitting around for thirty-odd years, waiting to be plucked up. It didn’t belong to me. For all I knew another writer was turning in a polished third draft of his version in the office next door.

I dared ask, “You like it?”

“Are you kidding? It’s pure dynamite. I’m just thinking, okay? I’ve got to think. This is Friday, right?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Okay, practically speaking, that means I’m not going to find anybody until Monday.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“Where are you going from here?”

I suspected ForbiddenCon wasn’t a reply Jared would easily make sense of. It wasn’t that easy for me to make sense of myself. “Back to my hotel.”

“Don’t shit me.”

“I’m not.”

“Because a part of me, wow, a part of me doesn’t want to let you out of my office until I know what we’re doing with this, until I get something from you that I can take into a meeting and a promise you’ll give me a couple of days from the weekend. Forty-eight hours at least. Do you want a tissue, mister?”

“Sure.” I’d tear-streaked my face, evoking Johnny Bragg’s dilemma. I wonder how many of Jared’s pitches wept in this office. Maybe all of us, by the end.

Jared plopped his tissue box on my love seat, then leaned over his desk, onto the intercom.

“Mike?”

“Yes?”

“Mike, I just heard something great. This is what I’m always telling you—you never know how it’s going to happen. Some boat-guy’s friend just walks into my office and it’s this writer Dylan and Dylan has something really great, really really great.”

“That’s incredible,” said Mike.

“No, it’s really incredible.”

“Wow.”

“Mike, I need Dylan’s agent right now.”

“Sure.”

Jared turned from the desk. “I know this is moving fast but I just want to say, Dylan, you and I are going to be putting our kids through college on this.”

“Okay.” I blew my nose.

“If I can’t make this movie I’m going to kill myself.”

“I guess that means you have to make the movie.”

“That’s exactly what it means. Holy shit.” He was amazed at himself, understandably. Large events were occurring, and he was at their center. “I need something on paper.”

“I don’t have much written down,” I bluffed.

“I need to be able to explain. I have to make other people get it. I need something on paper, like what you said. What you said was so amazing. It has to be like that.”

“It wouldn’t take long.”

“You’re saying there’s nothing ?”

“Not yet.”

“This is bad, Dylan. I really, really need this so I can make someone else see.”

The intercom clicked. “Jared?”

“What?”

“I don’t have an agent for Dylan.”

“I thought I told you always to get contact information. You remember me telling you that?”

“It’s my fault,” I stage-whispered, wanting to protect Mike.

Jared released the intercom. “I’m not into games,” he said.

“Neither am I. Just let me call my agent first, okay?” I had no agent, nor the remotest notion where I’d begin looking for one. “He doesn’t actually know a lot about this whole thing.”

“If you think I’m letting you walk out of my office with this movie in your head you’re crazy. I need something from you, Dylan. Don’t screw me, man. This is my movie. I feel this one.”

“It’s great,” I said, holding up my hands, hoping to slow the madness. “We’re both excited. Just tell me what should happen next.”

“Call your agent from here.”

“What?”

He held up both hands. “Sit at my desk. I promise I won’t listen. I’ll go out in the hall.” He paced madly. “Just sit and call him from here.”

“I—”

“I’m giving you my office, man. Go. Sit.”

There was no refusing. I took his chair. He shut himself out in Mike’s antechamber, first pointing at me from behind the half-closed door. “Tell him I’m holding you hostage until I have something I can take into a meeting.”

“Okay.”

When he’d sealed the door I dialed my home number. It rang through to the machine, of course. Abby was at school. I hung up without leaving a message, then retrieved my address book and rang Randolph Treadwell at the Weekly. I got him.

“Help,” I said.

“You had the meeting?”

“I’m in the meeting. He left the room so I could call my agent, only I don’t have an agent. I’m at his desk.”

“Interesting.” Randolph’s voice was neutral.

“Is Jared always so, uh, volatile?”

“I don’t really know him that well. Why?”

“He’s seems to think we’re about to have a baby together. A solid-gold baby.”

“That’s the way these things go,” said Randolph, unimpressed. “It’s sort of like a faucet. If it’s on, it gushes. Now you have to keep it open.”

“Thanks for the advice.”

“You want to come by the office after this? How long are you in town?”

“I have to go see my dad, in Anaheim.”

“What’s he doing in Anaheim?”

Jared barreled through the door. “I gotta go.” I hung up the phone.

“What’s the ending?” said Jared.

“Sorry?”

“I was trying to do it for Mike, the whole thing, the black guys, the jail, Elvis. And I forgot if you told me the ending.”

“I . . . think we didn’t get to the ending,” I said carefully.

“And?”

“Well, Johnny Bragg was in and out of prison a couple more times, I think. He made music whenever he could. No big hits, though.”

“The Prisonaires?”

“They died, I think.”

“Could we have, like, a big comeback ?”

I shrugged a why not? I couldn’t bring myself to pronounce the words, though. Was there any aspect of Johnny Bragg’s story I hadn’t dishonored by my pitch? What further harm would a little comeback bring? Or a big one?

“What about Elvis? Elvis is really important to this whole thing. That was a really great part, when Elvis visits and you were crying, remember?”

Maybe Elvis could return and bust the warden in the jaw, then personally break Bragg out of prison. Or the two of them, Bragg and Presley, could be shackled together at the ankles and sent to break up rocks. The singing would be amazing, anyway.

“Well, the story doesn’t really have a big ending,” I said. “It just sort of goes on and on. I’m sure we can figure out a good place to end it, though. Maybe Johnny Bragg walking through the gates, a free man. The last time.”

“It has to be good.”

“It can be good.”

“Do they catch the guys who really did it?”

“Did what?”

“You know, killed all those women.”

“There aren’t any dead women. There wasn’t a big legal showdown or anything. Eventually he was just old and they stopped picking on him, I guess.”

“How old?”

I’d wondered when this might come up. “He might even still be alive,” I said. At the time of Colin Escott’s liner note, nine years ago, Johnny Bragg was still alive and giving interviews. His anecdotes were the source for half my pitch. For years I’d been planning a visit to Memphis to try and interview him myself. That visit waited, with so many other speculative projects, for an entity like Dreamworks to bankroll. Anyway, that was my excuse.

“Alive? ”

“It’s possible.”

“Possible? ”

Yes! Alive! Possible! I wanted to scream. “He’d be in his seventies.”

“You don’t know?”

“I’ll find out.”

“This is a serious problem, Dylan.” Jared raked his hand through his hair and frowned, under stress I couldn’t possibly understand. “Can I have my desk back, please?”

“What do you want me to do?” I asked as we swapped places.

Scowling, he settled back, crossed his legs, and with two fingers kneaded the bridge of his nose and then the periphery of his jaw. He appeared to be recovering from a sort of bender, coming down as after an orgasm or a hit of crack. I wondered how often he indulged.

“You just came in here and pitched me someone’s life story, a living person,” he said, not angrily, but with deep regret. “Well, we’d have to option life rights. That can get really sticky.”

“He’d want it told,” I suggested.

“Yeah, yeah, of course. I don’t know about the ending, though, Dylan. I’m not happy about that ending.”

He spoke as though The Prisonaires was already filmed and edited and he’d just screened it and been disappointed. Now we were left with the sorry task of mopping up, cutting our losses. “It’s so vague, he gets out, he goes back, the band never reunites. And I kept expecting something to happen with that woman, the one in the audience, you know? The crying one.”

Inescapably, absurdly, I fell to the same tone. “I guess we could end it sooner. After the first parole.”

“Oh, I doubt that would work.”

“Okay,” I said, helpless.

“Listen, I don’t want to—I don’t want to tell anyone about this thing until we pull it together. It should be perfect. A slam dunk. You and I should both think really hard about the third-act problems and do nothing until we’ve cracked them. If I bring this upstairs I want it to be airtight, you know?”

“That makes sense.”

“Did you talk to your agent?”

“He, uh, feels the same way, actually.”

“Of course he does. He knows how these things work.”

“So—” I was baffled. “What happens next?”

“The question is what you do next. This is all in your hands.”

“Uh, okay.”

“I’m not easily discouraged, you know. I believe in you, mister.”

“Thanks.”

“There’s nothing wrong with taking some time, by the way. This isn’t going anywhere. It’ll happen when it’s meant to happen.”

“Okay.”

“So, do you have a driver? Because I need to have you out of my office now.”

“I can call—”

“Yes, but use Mike’s phone.”

In the middle chamber I handed Nicholas Brawley’s card to Mike and asked him to call.

“Jared was really knocked out,” Mike whispered, eyes wide at what I’d accomplished inside.

“I think he’ll recover,” I said.

I waited with my overnight bag in the shady lot for a long fifteen minutes before Nicholas Brawley’s cab pulled up again at the gate. The man with the Oscar never came back. Brawley’s radio was still tuned to MEGA 100, and the station was broadcasting my old nemesis of a theme song, Wild Cherry’s “Play That Funky Music.” Of course, the thirty-five-year-old rock critic knew what the thirteen-year-old scrap of prey on the sidewalks outside Intermediate School 293 never did: Wild Cherry was a bunch of white guys. The tune which had been enlisted as an indictment of my teenage existence was in fact a Midwestern rock band’s rueful self-parody. I’d wondered many times since then whether knowing would have helped. Probably not. Anyway, it struck me now in a different light, as being yet another bit of personal meaning which had been taken from me, stripped off like clothes I’d only borrowed or stolen. I had maybe the least persuasive case for self-pity of any human soul on the planet. Or anyway, the most hilarious.

chapter  3

Abraham and Francesca stood together in the lobby of the Anaheim Marriott, still as sculpture. All around them the lobby boiled with arrivals, misshapen travelers clad in black and purple, peering nervously side to side as though concerned with the impression they made as they wheeled suitcases in agitated confusion to the check-in desk. Others lurched or darted through the vast open space of the lobby, gathering briefly in groups of four or five to hug and talk, to crinkle brochures with circled program items, or present one another with buttons or ribbons to affix to suspenders or knapsack straps. Some wolfed sandwiches, licking gummy fingers unselfconsciously. Many wore plastic-frame eyeglasses or floppy hats or molded jewelry, others T-shirts with proud enigmas emblazoned: MORE THAN HUMAN , DONATE YOUR BODY TO SCIENCE FICTION , I USED TO BE A MILLIONAIRE THEN MY MOTHER THREW OUT MY COMIC BOOK COLLECTION . Photocopied signs, taped inelegantly to corridors and glass doors, offered suite numbers for hotel parties, advertised special events, and directed attendees to the registration table or the art show or the first aid station. Certain laminated name badges were labeled PRO or VOLUNTEER . Voices rose and were lost in a babble of others—monotonous harangues, kooky laughter, anxious questions, hysterical reunions. ForbiddenCon 7 was under way in all its glory. I only had to figure out what it was, or else not bother. I didn’t sense it needed me to know.

Francesca saw me first. “There you are!” she cried out. Abraham nodded and they surged toward me as I came through the revolving door. I hurried forward, trying to save them the trouble. “You’re late!” said Francesca. “We’re practically going to miss Abe’s panel.”

I’d promised to meet them in the lobby at three—it was almost four. Nicholas Brawley had laughed and shaken his head when I gave him the destination. “You should have rented a car,” he said, and by the time we’d crossed the ocean of suburb between Hollywood and Anaheim I saw his point. The fare was $114.00. Now, however, stepping into the lobby of the convention hotel, I considered the even greater conceptual distance I’d covered, moving from Jared Orthman’s office to ForbiddenCon. Brawley’s fare was a bargain.

“Dylan,” said my father. We embraced, and I felt him sigh against my body. Then I turned and dipped to Francesca, just in time to be enveloped in her swarming attack, not soon enough to plan where on my exposed surface the lipstick would be delivered. It landed north-northwest of my mouth, a misaligned mustache in beet purple. I swabbed it with my thumb and said, “Sorry I’m late.”

Francesca’s badge was unadorned, while Abraham’s bore a special purple ribbon, reading GUEST OF HONOR .

“They need Abraham in the greenroom,” she said gravely.

“Lead the way,” I said.

“That’s all you have?” said Abraham, looking at my bag. He seemed disappointed. “You’re staying the night?”

“Of course.”

“You’re registered already,” said Francesca. “Zelmo took care of everything.” She scrabbled in her purse as we moved through the lobby. “Here’s for your room. It works like a credit card—you swipe. The key’s for the minibar.”

“I’ll be hitting it hard,” I joked, taking the keys.

“Oh, you won’t have time,” said Francesca. “Zelmo Swift, the committee chair, is taking us to dinner.” She goggled her eyes at the honor.

“He knows you’re coming,” added Abraham. “I asked and was told it’s fine.”

“You’re being foolish, darling,” said Francesca. “You’re the guest of honor, why wouldn’t your family be invited?”

“It’s an extra body at dinner. I asked.” He turned to me. “We’ll talk there if Zelmo lets us get in a word. Now I have to do this thing. I hope you won’t mind sitting.”

“Mind?” said Francesca, taking my arm. “He’ll be proud!”

My father had lived alone for fourteen years after I left Dean Street for college in Vermont. Little changed in those years—he’d gone on painting paperback-book art to cover his mortgage and shopping, and gone on pouring every spare hour on the clock and spare ounce of energy in his frame into his epic, endless, unseen film. In 1989, at last granting the absurdity of having three floors to himself, he’d converted the brownstone to two duplexes, adding a small kitchen to the second floor and renting out the parlor level, with the basement, to a young family. What remained untouched was the upstairs studio, the monk’s quarters where he daubed out days in black paint on celluloid. The neighborhood, in fits and starts, gentrified around him, Isabel Vendle’s curse or blessing realized in lag time. For Abraham it was primarily a matter of raised property taxes. He’d never asked what the rental market would bear—the duplex was always leased at a bargain.

There were never women, that I heard of. If Abraham knew how to seek for that part of his life, after Rachel, he didn’t know how to mention it. Then he’d come to the attention of Francesca Cassini, a fifty-eight-year-old receptionist working in the offices of Ballantine Books. This man slumping into the offices with his latest jacket art tucked into a pebbly black pressed-board portfolio tied together with black laces, this man slumping from the elevator dressed humbly, in his Art Students League proletarian garb, fingertips slightly stained with paint, his demeanor mordant, as ever—this man had caught the eye of the fresh widow from Bay Ridge. A woman who, despite her immigrant’s name, had lived all her life among the postwar generation of New York Jews, Francesca spoke in their manner and recognized them as one recognizes oneself. She’d lost a Jewish husband six months earlier, a career accountant, a man bent, I imagined, over a lifelong column of figures likely as dear to him as the world’s longest abstract film in progress was to my father. Abraham, jacket-art celebrity, butt of corridor jokes for his Bartelbyesque mien, didn’t stand a chance. If ever a man cried for Francesca’s salvaging, here he was. She’d announced herself. She’d attached herself. One winter I visited Brooklyn and there she was, moved into the Dean Street house. I couldn’t complain. Francesca organized my father, and she seemed, in a peculiar way, to make him happy. She made him visible to himself, by her contrast.

The greenroom had been set up in a small conference room off the lobby, guarded from the ordinary public by a volunteer at the door. In breathless tones Francesca explained we were a guest of honor’s entourage, and we were allowed into the sanctum. It held two urns containing coffee and water for tea, and a sectioned plastic dish full of cubed cheddar and Triscuits. A pair of volunteers sat behind a tray of blank badges and their plastic holders. From them Francesca demanded a pass “for Abraham Ebdus’s son,” then clipped the result to my shirt pocket.

It wasn’t clear what we were waiting for. My father stood, stalled in consternation, in the center of the room, while Francesca dithered around the edges.

“Mr. Ebdus?” ventured a volunteer.

“Yes?”

“The other program participants went upstairs. For your panel. I think it’s beginning now.”

“Without him?” said Francesca.

“The Nebraska Room, I think. Nebraska West.”

We hurried out. “I told you we could go direct,” said Abraham to Francesca as we went up the wide central stair to the mezzanine.

“Zelmo said meet at the greenroom.”

Abraham just shook his head.

Everyone moved awkwardly in this space, drifting as though rudderless, then abruptly accelerating, in explosions of tiny steps. Crossing paths they’d glare, mutter, wait for apologies. Through this fitful human sea we made our way to Nebraska Ballroom West. A sign taped to the door announced the program as “The Career of Abraham Ebdus,” as though this were self-explanatory. I supposed it was, or would be by the time the panel accomplished its work.

We entered at the back of the room. At the front, four figures already occupied the elevated dais, behind table microphones and sweating pitchers of ice water. The dais was covered in maroon bunting which matched the acoustic padding of the ballroom’s walls and the thin upholstery of the stackable chairs that were arranged in rows, wall to wall. A crowd of perhaps fifty or sixty sat, attentive and respectful, scratching, coughing, crossing and uncrossing legs, wrinkling papers.

“Good of Abraham to honor us with his presence,” said one of the panelists into his microphone, with heavy sarcasm. It drew a burst of relieved laughter from the audience, then a scattering of applause.

“Up,” egged Francesca, and my father obeyed. She and I took seats at the aisle, Francesca clutching my arm in her excitement.

The moderator, who’d wisecracked at our entry into the room, was a balding, sixtyish man, distinguishable at this distance from Abraham himself primarily by a garish blue ascot. He introduced himself as Sidney Blumlein, formerly art director for Ballantine, and if not exactly Abraham Ebdus’s discoverer then at least his main employer and patron during what he called the crucial first decade of my father’s work. “I’ve also been his apologist for longer than he’d want me to remind you,” Blumlein continued. “I’m not ashamed to say I protected his art from editorial meddling a dozen times, two dozen. And I talked Abe out of refusing his first Hugo.” Another warm chuckle from the crowd. “But truly, it was always an honor.”

The others introduced themselves: first Buddy Green, who blinked through thick glasses and couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen, editor of an on-line zine called Ebdus Collector, dedicated to the purchase of the rare original painted boards of my father’s designs. I’d blundered across Green’s Web site a few times, Googling the name Ebdus to search my own archived journalism. Next was R. Fred Vundane, a tiny, withered man in a Vandyke beard and mad-scientist glasses, author of twenty-eight novels, including Neural Circus, the very first for which my father had painted a jacket. Then Paul Pflug, another paperback painter, a fiftyish biker-type, fat in leather pants, with a blond ponytail and eyes concealed by dark wraparounds. Pflug seated himself at the far edge of the dais, leaving an empty chair and unfilled water glass between himself and Vundane.

The tributes and anecdotes weren’t so terribly interesting that I couldn’t mostly study my father and his reactions. I didn’t recall ever seeing him this way, onstage, at a distance, held in a collective gaze. The result was a kind of nakedness I realized now he’d always avoided. Green spoke gushingly in a high whine, claiming Ebdus as the successor in a line of science-fiction illustrators from Virgil Finlay through Richard Powers—names which meant less than nothing to me—and it was evident Abraham took pleasure in it, however masochistically. Vundane spoke with aggrieved vanity—perhaps he yearned for a panel on “The Works of Vundane”—about Ebdus’s deep and uncommon insight into the surrealist nature of his, Vundane’s, writing. And when Pflug’s turn came he reminisced, gruffly, about meeting my father at the beginning of his career, and claimed Abraham’s seriousness, his regard for standards, as an example which had altered the course of his, Pflug’s, career.

Abraham didn’t speak, just nodded as the others alternated on the microphones. But his distaste for whatever it was Vundane and Pflug had accomplished—or failed to—was painfully obvious. For that matter, it was unmistakable that nobody on the dais liked Pflug. I wondered how he’d come to be invited.

“I’ve told this story many times,” said Buddy Green. “I was trying to trace the provenance of the original art for the Belmont Specials—his first seventeen paintings. They weren’t in the hands of any of the major collectors. They weren’t in the hands of any of the minor collectors. Unfortunately, they weren’t in my hands. I kept writing to the Belmont people and they said they didn’t know what I was talking about. I thought they were stonewalling. So, being a little slow on the uptake, it finally occurred to me to ask Abraham. And he explained, like it was no big deal, that he destroyed them. He couldn’t imagine anyone cared.”

Abraham’s eyes scoured the crowd, looking for me, I permitted myself to imagine. I wondered how it felt to hear those called his first seventeen paintings.

“It’s true,” said Sidney Blumlein, with great avuncular gusto. “When I hired him away from Belmont, Abe was systematically destroying the work.”

This drew oohs and aahs, a kind of titillated awe from the crowd.

“This man is the only one your father respects,” whispered Francesca. “None of the others. Not even Zelmo.”

“Zelmo?”

“The chair. I mean, of the whole convention. You’ll meet him at dinner. He’s a very important lawyer.”

“Ah.”

Now the microphone was retaken by Blumlein, whom Francesca had claimed as Abraham’s only friend on the panel. Being moderator, Blumlein took it upon himself to prize open the jaws of the clam—to find a way to force Abraham Ebdus to acknowledge and address his admirers.

“For more than two decades Abe has graced our field, and I do mean graced. All well and good. But at this time of celebration there’s no reason to pussyfoot around the question—he’s done so at a remove. His background isn’t science fiction, and in that he’s an exception from the vast majority of professionals at this gathering, at any gathering in our field. We’re fans, our interests begin in the pulp-magazine tradition, however we might like to hope we’ve elevated it.”

Pflug sneered. Vundane took a pitcher and topped off his untouched glass.

The audience was stilled, silenced from its murmurs of approval and recognition, perhaps less certain now that everything they were hearing fell safely in the vein of an Elk Lodge testimonial dinner.

“Abraham Ebdus, let’s not kid ourselves, had no interest in elevating it. He was looking to make a buck to support his art—what he regarded as his real art. As perhaps some of you, perhaps many of you may know, Abe is a filmmaker, an experimental filmmaker, of terrific seriousness and devotion. This is how he spends his days, when he’s not painting jackets for books. It has nothing to do with science fiction. What’s miraculous—what we’re all here to celebrate—is that being a real artist, one of depth and profundity, Abe brought to the books a visionary intensity that did elevate. That contained beauty and strangeness. Because he couldn’t help himself.”

I saw how well Sidney Blumlein knew my father. He was urging Abraham into the weird light of this roomful of celebrants, baiting him with the possibility of an audience worth addressing. I didn’t know whether I wanted him to succeed.

“This is what, Abe? Only your fifth or sixth time at a convention?”

My father hunched, seeming to wish he could reply with his shoulders. Finally he leaned into the microphone and said, “I haven’t counted.”

“I first dragged you to a LunaCon, in New York, in the early eighties. You weren’t happy.”

“No, it wasn’t to my taste,” said Abraham reluctantly.

The crowd tittered.

“And wouldn’t it be fair to say, Abe, you rarely if ever read the books under your jackets?”

Now a collective gasp.

“Oh, I’ve never done,” said Abraham. “I say it without apology. Mr. Vundane, your book, what was the title?”

“Neural Circus,” supplied R. Fred Vundane, his jaw so clenched it mashed the vowels.

“Yes, Neural Circus. I was always stopped by that title. It seemed, I’m sorry, vaguely distasteful to me. You speak of surrealists—I suppose you mean the poets. It feels a very poor shade of symbolist imagery, actually. Rimbaud, maybe? No, I was asked to envision other worlds, and I did. Any congruence with the work is happenstance.”

I’d read R. Fred’s book. I recalled a troupe of genetically altered acrobats residing in a hollowed asteroid.

Blumlein rode in to the rescue now, perhaps pitying Vundane, who’d shrunk even smaller in his chair. “This is just an example, I think, of the wider context, the erudition, that Abe brings to what he touches. In our field he’s a comet streaking past, whom we’ve managed to lure into our orbit. A fellow traveler, like a Stanley Kubrick or a Stanislaw Lem. He disdains our vocabulary even as he reinvents it to suit his own impulses.”

“I have to interrupt, Sidney, to say you’re overstating the value of what I do.” Here was a subject to rouse Abraham’s passion. “You throw names, Kubrick, Lem. And Mr. Green, god bless him, throws Virgil Finlay, whom I’ve never had the good fortune to encounter. Let me throw a few names. Ernst, Tanquy, Matta, Kandinsky. Once in a while, the early Pollock or Rothko. If I’ve accomplished one thing, it’s been to give a rough education in contemporary painting, or what was contemporary painting in 1950. The intersection of late surrealism and early abstract expressionism. Period. It’s derivative, every last brushstroke. All quoted. Nothing to do with outer space, nothing remotely. Honestly, if you people hadn’t put such a seal on yourselves, if you’d visit a museum even once, you’d know you’re celebrating a second-rate thief.”

“You stopped at pop art?” asked Blumlein.

“Please. You have Mr. Pflug for that. That’s all there was when I began doing jackets—pop art.”

Blumlein and Ebdus had begun to seem a kind of vaudeville act, scripted at the expense of the fall guys who’d made the mistake of joining them onstage. The audience ate it up.

“Yet here you are, Abe, among us. LunaCon wasn’t to your liking, but you’ve spent a career among us, sharing your gift. You’re the guest of honor.”

“Look, that’s fair. You want an explanation. It isn’t pretty. If I were a stronger person I wouldn’t be here. I’m tempted by flattery, so I come. My work on film is hardly known. It’s unknown. You people have been very kind, too kind. I’ve grown fond, despite myself. My companion enjoys travel. There isn’t one explanation, there are several.”

“Do you feel a part of the field, warts and all?”

Abraham shrugged. “It’s a bohemian demimonde, like any other. There are similar convocations in the world of so-called experimental film, but I’ve always declined to go. Some attend imagining they can further themselves. But the work, the true work, is of course carried on elsewhere. Perhaps for me the stakes there are too high, so I accept your invitations instead. I don’t ponder these things. An event like this is an accident, not necessarily a happy one. I frankly marvel at the oddness of a room gathered in honor of a forgotten man, a nobody. Perhaps I can wake you from the trance you’re in, but I doubt it.”

Fifty people laughed in delighted recognition, and a light spontaneous applause broke out. I heard a woman in the row ahead whisper appreciatively, “He always says that.”

“I’m ashamed of myself,” said my father.

The applause grew. Buddy Green shot upright from his chair and led the clapping. Only Pflug refused the consensus, turning in his chair.

“I’ve wasted my life.”

This was the last thing I made out before my father was drowned in the ovation. A two-way masochism was at work here, made possible by the total insularity of the gathering. The bohemian demimonde, as Abraham called it. My father was their pet heretic, their designated griever for lost or abandoned possibility. The way he brandished his failure thrilled this crowd, and they’d obviously known it was coming. By accepting his contempt like a lash on their backs, the Elk Lodge of ForbiddenCon 7 could feel ratified in their unworthy worthiness, their good sense of humor about themselves and their chosen deficiencies.

And yet I felt his not entirely withheld affection too. Through his eyes I could even share it. I thought of my namesake’s “Chimes of Freedom”— tolling for the aching whose wounds cannot be nursed, for the countless confused accused misused strung-out ones and worse, and for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe! Certainly I’d witnessed gatherings of rock critics or college-radio DJs, on panels at the South by Southwest conference or the CMJ, which were no less self-congratulatorily marginal. Only the costumes were different. I flashed on a vision of a world dotted with conferences, convocations, and “Cons” of all types, each an engine for converting feelings of inferiority and self-loathing into their opposites.

The panel was over. Another man had made his way to the front and taken the left-hand microphone from Sidney Blumlein. Now he tapped it repeatedly to get our attention. The new arrival was as eccentrically dressed as anyone in the room, but to an entirely different effect. His clean blue pinstripe shirt with white collar and red bow tie, natty mustache and slicked hair—all suggested a Republican senator who’d run a calculatedly old-timey campaign bankrolled by dark and secretive private interests. His voice was incredibly loud.

“This is my first chance to welcome you to ForbiddenCon 7,” he barked. “What a beginning, hey? Mr. Ebdus is too modest so I’ll remind you myself, we have the privilege of a special screening of a portion of his film, tomorrow at ten in Wyoming Ballroom B. Really, don’t miss this, it’s a rare opportunity.”

“Him,” whispered Francesca. She tugged my arm. “He loves your father.”

It’s you who loves him, I thought but didn’t say. You’re projecting, Francesca, you see it everywhere. Seated beside her, the Cumulus of Love, I felt enveloped in perfume and emotion. Nevertheless, I contemplated this bow-tied man at the microphone, the one who stirred my father’s girlfriend to such a peculiar excitement.

“One more big hand, ladies and gentlemen, for our artist guest of honor, Abe Ebdus!”

It was my first glimpse of the man Francesca had called Zelmo the Chair. The important lawyer. An unlikely emissary for secrets pertaining to my whole existence, but he had a few.

chapter  4

The restaurant, Bongiorno’s, was bad and didn’t know it. Everything was presented with a passive-aggressive flourish, as though we probably weren’t savvy enough to appreciate the oregano-heavy garlic bread, the individual bowls for olive pits, the starched napkins stuffed into our wineglasses, or the waiter’s strained enunciation of a long list of specials. Zelmo Swift seized control of the wine list and addressed everyone by name, making sure we took the whole episode personally. “This is on me, not ForbiddenCon,” he stressed. “They wouldn’t know food if it bit them on the ass. They’re happy with that crap in the hotel. I know how gruesome that whole scene can get, so I always try to take the guests out once.”

“Nice,” I lied. At the table Zelmo still barked, his voice shockingly large. And he was master of the sudden conversational stop which demands tribute, his whole face and chest near to bursting with his readiness to resume once he’d been endorsed with a No kidding? or You devil, you!

“Dinner and real conversation,” he said now. “Real life. That hotel is full of mummies. God love ’em.”

Yes, and aren’t you the King of the Mummies? I wanted to ask. But I understood it was precisely Zelmo’s superiority to the gathering at the Marriott that our candlelit dinner was meant to authenticate.

“Also, I knew Madame Cassini would appreciate the best Italian food in southern California.”

Francesca, seated to Zelmo’s right, twinkled at the flattery. I was pretty sure her Italian heritage went not much deeper than knowing the difference between a Neapolitan slice and a Sicilian square in the pizzerias of outermost Brooklyn. But then I was pretty sure this wouldn’t be the best Italian food in southern California. Maybe in Anaheim.

Zelmo’s costume and manner had initially disguised the fact that he was, like me, and like Jared Orthman, in his thirties. It was the second time in a long day I’d been forced to see that my dress and affect, contrasted with peers in other professions, was less that of a grown, employed man than of a gas-station attendant or homeless person. The scruffy credibility my gear signified in my native habitat was lost on the Jareds and Zelmos, my antique wire-frame glasses only suggesting I couldn’t afford contacts. Los Angeles held this lesson around every corner, I suspected. Berkeley, still in its dream bubble of the sixties, never did.

The wine arrived, and Zelmo tasted it. “That’s the one,” he proclaimed. Then he confided in me specially: “You’ll love this.” Apparently the son wouldn’t be allowed to float in a funk through the meal. I required winning over.

My father sat beside me, separated from Zelmo by Francesca. Inserted between Zelmo and myself sat Zelmo’s date, Leslie Cunningham. That Leslie in her gray suit perfectly resembled an actress playing a legal intern on a certain television show didn’t prevent Zelmo’s announcing that she actually was a legal intern, one who worked in Zelmo’s firm. At Bongiorno’s we were past irony’s county line. I didn’t trouble myself to wonder what nestled behind the trim tailoring; I refused to desire Zelmo’s woman. In Berkeley I wouldn’t have glanced at her, I told myself. She’d have been a bank teller, an office manager, just another style-deaf California blonde. I also didn’t trouble wondering what she was doing on Zelmo’s arm, figuring the best things in life are free, but, as well, you can leave that to the birds and bees.

The women on either side of Zelmo bubbled along on his stream. My father sat in grave silence. I suppose we made two of a kind, only he’d earned his supper by two decades of service to the field. I was expected to at least act impressed and grateful. It was Abraham’s trademark, I’d learned at the panel, that he wouldn’t.

The sommelier filled our glasses. I had mine to my lips when Zelmo said: “A toast.”

“To you!” said Francesca. “Your generosity!”

Zelmo shook his head. “I have a toast. When I invited Abe to be ForbiddenCon 7’s artist guest of honor, I could have hoped the man would be as wonderful as his work. He is. But how could I have known he’d bring along a beautiful, magical lady! Francesca and Abraham, your story touches me. To have found one another, so late in life.” Zelmo was nearly bellowing by the time he raised his glass to the table’s center. “To the human heart! ” Diners at other tables glanced to see what the matter was.

We clinked, a plate of fried calamari was set down, and the celebrated couple fell to some low squabbling. Zelmo put his arm across Leslie Cunningham’s shoulders and leaned to face me. “So how was it growing up in the home of the great man?”

I’m sure the look on my face was awful, and Zelmo said, “You don’t have to answer that. Abraham’s a tough bastard. That’s the only way anything gets done in this world. Too few people understand what toughness is. Nobody back at that hotel has any idea.” He laughed. “Leslie here doesn’t know why I bother running the convention year after year. She wouldn’t set foot in a place like that. Isn’t that right?”

“I don’t like science fiction,” she obliged.

“Well, I grew up loving it, honey. I didn’t discriminate. Star Wars, Star Trek, I loved it all. Abraham wouldn’t want to hear it, but it’s true. Later, I developed taste. That’s how it happens, Les—it develops, like film. And in the great men of the field I saw the same toughness that got me where I am. Only nobody pays your father six hundred thou a year—do they?”

“No,” I agreed, just to kick him loose again.

“I wanted to give something back. So I created ForbiddenCon. It’s my puppy. Seven years. You think I need this, dealing with the committee, those types? They hate me but they need me. A night like this is what makes it worthwhile.” He was still making certain I knew he mostly despised his puppy.

“Why ForbiddenCon?” I asked.

“You’ll find this hard to believe, but ours is the classiest of the conventions. Real talent goes begging at a majority of these things. Your father, he’d be pearls before swine.”

“I mean why the name? What’s forbidden?”

“It stands for things hidden, occult, revealed. The rare, the taboo, the seldom seen. Elusive or neglected wisdom. Acquired tastes, like caviar, or single-malt scotch.”

“I see.”

“Also it’s a reference to Forbidden Planet, the greatest science-fiction film bar none. Many people would catch that implication.”

“Ah.”

“I go all out. You think Fred Vundane has been to a convention in the last twenty years? He couldn’t afford the badge to get in, let alone the plane ticket. I had him flown out here, just for the privilege of Abe saying he never read the book.”

“A painful moment,” I suggested.

Zelmo waved his hand. “A man like your father should have whatever he wants.”

I couldn’t disagree, but I wasn’t sure Vundane’s public shaming had been high on the list.

“What do you do?” asked Leslie, leaping into the breach.

Zelmo took charge of this, too. “Dylan’s a writer,” he said proudly. “A journalist.”

“I write about music,” I said. “Lately I package collections for Remnant Records.”

I gazed into Leslie’s blue, stupefied eyes. I wished to have met her in a singles bar on my last night on earth, not in this moronic conversation.

“Remnant’s a reissue label. I put together collections on various themes, write the liner notes, stuff like that.”

“Give us an example,” said Zelmo, gesturing with his wineglass munificently, as though if I said the right words he’d whip out his checkbook and bankroll something. Again I was pitching.

“Well, The Falsetto Box is one you might have seen. It got some press. Four CDs of, you know, the history of falsetto soul—Smokey Robinson, Curtis Mayfield, Eddie Holman. And some unexpected stuff. Van Morrison. Prince.”

“We missed that,” said Zelmo, speaking for Leslie. “What’s another one?”

“Some of it’s pretty gimmicky,” I admitted. “Remnant has sort of a novelty slant. So, uh, one example is we did a disc called Your So-Called Friends —all the songs that have that phrase.”

“I don’t understand,” said Leslie flatly.

“It’s just a vernacular phrase that shows up in different lyrics— so-called friends. Like, you and your so-called friends. Elvis sings it in ‘High Heel Sneakers,’ Gladys Knight in ‘Come See About Me,’ Albert King in ‘Don’t Burn Down the Bridge,’ and so on. It’s like a meme, a word virus that carries a certain idea or emotion . . .” I trailed off, humiliated.

Our entrées were set in front of us. “I’ll want to hear more about this,” Zelmo warned, wagging a finger at me.

But the lawyer was too busy presiding over the women’s meals, and I slipped his bonds for the time being. Instead I turned to my father, and over our twin plates of spaghetti and meatballs—had Abraham and I had the same instinct, to deflate the pomposity of Bongiorno’s list of specials with the downscale entrée?—we at last shared a moment of privacy.

“Are you enjoying yourself?” he asked.

“Sure. You?”

He only raised his eyebrows. “Before I forget, this is something I wanted you to read.” He palmed me a triple-folded sheet from his inner jacket pocket and passed it to me covertly, at the level of the table. I unfolded it in my lap. It was a photocopy of a clipping from Artforum. “Epic Crawl: The Hidden Journey of an American Titan,” by Willard Amato. It began:

What chance that the most dedicated abstract painter in the United States abandoned canvas in 1972? Or last showed in 1967, in a two-man show of figurative work which was barely reviewed? As likely that the most profound avant-garde filmmaker of our time would never receive a single screening in his native burg of New York, or that the last monumental modernist artifact should be eked out secretly, in an unnameable medium, through the long heyday of modernism’s toppling. Each of these improbabilities leads to the same place, an attic studio in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, where—

“Read it later,” he begged. “Keep the copy, I’ve got others.”

So the forgotten man, the nobody, wasn’t quite content to be. It wasn’t news that Abraham’s aspirations still burned, but the clipping was a surprise. I stuffed it into my pocket.

“Tell me, how is Abby?”

“She’s okay.”

“Too bad she couldn’t be along.” I suddenly saw our table in another light: two couples and a broken third. I had no idea where Abby was tonight.

“She’s got school,” I said, hearing my own defensiveness, unable to stop it.

Francesca overheard and announced, “I wish we could have seen her, Dylan. She’s such a sweet girl!” This drew Zelmo and Leslie’s attention. “She’s a black American,” Francesca explained, wide-eyed in sincerity. Francesca and Abby had met just once, when Abby and I passed through New York on our way to a music conference in Montreal. “You should meet her,” she gasped to Leslie. “Such lovely skin.” Francesca’s good intentions vaporized conversation. We were left seated at our pasta and veal like obedient soldiers.

“Still in school?” said Zelmo at last, with pious sympathy: yes, my absent black girlfriend was underage too. Count a grown-up, employable blonde in the same category as bow ties, contact lenses, and wing tips: appurtenances Dylan Ebdus was not yet mature enough to brandish.

“Graduate school,” I said. “She’s completing her dissertation.”

“That’s wonderful,” said Zelmo, turning it into a congratulation to Abby’s race that she should be in such a position. I understood it was impossible to squirm from beneath Zelmo’s patronage. Artists were his broken, defective flock, and he’d herd as many as he could into the safety of his care—a plate of meatballs and a ticket to ForbiddenCon. And black people were pretty much artists by definition.

“Darling,” said Francesca to Abraham. “Tell him about his friend’s father.”

“Eh?”

“That poor man down the street, Abe. You said he’d want to know.”

Abraham nodded. “Your old friend Mingus—you remember his father, Barry? Our neighbor?”

Barrett Rude Junior, I corrected silently. Francesca’s logic was endearingly bare: Dylan has a liking for black Americans lead directly to That poor man down the street. I promised myself I’d be patient, though hearing Abraham begin so ploddingly made me want to scream. Our neighbor! Mr. Rogers has neighbors—we had a block. I merely grew up in that house, I wanted to say. I merely wrote the man’s biography in my liner note to the Distinctions’ box set. But the first I wouldn’t mention because Abraham would feel it as a rebuke. And the latter he didn’t know of, because I hadn’t mentioned it or sent him a copy.

Barrett Rude Junior couldn’t be dead, I was certain of that. I’d have heard. Rolling Stone would have called on me to write the obit—my guess was they’d ask for about four hundred words.

“His kidneys collapsed,” said Abraham simply. “Awful. They came in an ambulance. He was on a machine to keep him alive.”

The subject was too remote, and perhaps too vivid, for Zelmo Swift. He threw another conversational gambit at Leslie and Francesca, and my father and I were left to ourselves.

“He’d been alone in the place for weeks, basically dying there. Nobody on the street had any idea. He’s lived among us so long, but since the shooting, he’s very rarely out of the house.”

Abraham and I had never discussed what he called the shooting, either in the two weeks of summer that remained before I decamped to Vermont for college, or after. Mingus and Barrett had left my name out of any conversations with the police. My presence in their house that day had been kept secret from anyone but themselves, so far as I knew.

I recalled for the thousandth time those heaps of white powder— of course his kidneys collapsed. What had they been waiting for? I began writing those four hundred words in my head.

“At that point a miracle occurred. Your friend Mingus was found. In a prison upstate. They got a court order, and he was released to a hospital, to give a kidney.”

“What? ”

“They made a special provision—Mingus was the only possible donor. He saved his father’s life by submitting to the operation. And was returned to prison.”

I brought my wineglass up, a phantom toast, then sucked down what remained inside. Behind the glass my head was heating, and my throat tightening, so I nearly choked on the mouthful of Burgundy.

“So, Mingus is back inside,” I said.

“You thought he wasn’t?”

“Last I knew, Arthur said he was out. But that was maybe ten years ago, more. I don’t know what I thought, honestly.”

“Barry is a very sweet man,” said Francesca, leaning in, selecting her moment. “Very quiet. I think he’s awfully sad.”

“You know him?” I managed. Why shouldn’t she? It all seemed equally likely now. A mist fogged my glasses.

She nodded at Abraham. “Your father and I bring him food sometimes. Soup, chicken, whatever we’ve got extra. He doesn’t eat. Sometimes he just sits, out on the stoop. Sometimes he sits in the rain. The people on the block don’t know him. Nobody talks to him. Only your father.”

“Excuse me,” I said, and tossed my napkin on my chair. I was able to reach the men’s toilet before I wept or vomited into my meatballs. I was unwilling to brandish this new misery of mine before the lawyer who appreciated single-malt scotch and Forbidden Planet. Let my tears remain occult, elusive, seldom seen, ineligible for display in Zelmo’s Museum of the Pathetic alongside R. Fred Vundane.

He saved his father’s life by submitting to the operation. Every once in a while, every decade or so, I was forced to know that Dean Street still existed. That Mingus Rude wasn’t a person I’d only imagined into being. I took a minute to be shamed and then I pushed Mingus back to where he’d been, where he always was whether I bothered to contemplate him or not, among the millions of destroyed men who were not my brothers.

Then I rinsed my glasses, blew my nose, and returned to the table, where through the latter courses I ignored my father and Francesca, though they were my only reason for being there. Instead I did my honest best to get potted on expensive cognac and to demolish Leslie Cunningham with my wit and charm, my roguish innuendo. I think I might even have made an impression on her, but it was all wasted on Zelmo Swift. I would have had to bend her over the table to dent his implacability.

Zelmo took me aside as we rose from the table. My father had wandered off to the men’s room. “You’re staying for the film tomorrow?”

“Of course.”

“It means a lot to your dad.”

It must be hard to strangle a man using a bow tie. That might be the reason for them. “I’ll try not to do anything embarrassing,” I said.

Zelmo frowned as if to suggest he hadn’t been worried, but now would reconsider. “What time is your flight?”

“Right after.”

“LAX?”

“No, my flight’s out of Disneyland. Goofy Air.” The joke soured in my mouth; it was indebted to one of Abby’s, earlier this endless day.

“Har har. I’ll drive you, if you’ll let me.”

Maybe I’d had more to drink than I realized, but this confused me. “I can take a cab,” I said angrily.

“Let me save you the fare. We can talk.”

Then Francesca was beside me, whispering. “Go with him, Dylan.”

“Talk about what?”

“Shhhh,” said Francesca.

 

I lay on one of the Marriott’s twin doubles in my underwear and spun channels, watched crocodiles fucking and Lenny Kravitz. Twice I rolled over to the phone and punched in my number in Berkeley; twice I hung up on my own voice on the machine. I tried to focus my eyes on the Artforum photocopy.

—Ebdus abjures the comparison to the Wittgenstein-like protagonist of Thomas Bernhard’s Correction , who labors for years in the forest constructing a mysterious, unseen “cone,” just as he rejects any conceptual or philosophical reduction of the essentially material, “painterly” nature of his exploration. All in Ebdus’s work proceeds from the purely physical nature of pigment on celluloid, and of light through the gate of a projector. A more fertile comparison might be made to the decades-long, meditative (not to say obsessive) journey of modernist composer Conlon Nancarrow, who during a blacklist-inspired exile in Mexico explored the unique compositional possibilities of the player piano, developing a unique and painstaking method of hand-punching the rolls which operate the mechanical keyboard. Two or three years of Nancarrow’s effort was required to produce a five- or ten-minute composition, a rate only marginally slower than that of Ebdus in his painted film . . .

I was glad for my father, but my attention wasn’t held. My sick heart swirled with distraction. When I closed my eyes it felt as if Mingus Rude was in the room, perhaps on the second bed or in the bathtub. I borrowed from some grisly urban legend an image of a man packed in ice, robbed of his kidney by a gang of organ bandits. Alternately, despite a room party chattering and clunking through the wall, and the fact of my own father in a suite five floors above, I felt the possibility that my hotel room was detached in the void, a plush sarcophagus with cable television, drifting in space. This second hallucination jolted me from my daze on the bedspread, to reach for the key to the minibar.

I’d emptied my pockets on the dresser. Now I saw what was arrayed there. Beside the minibar key, the room’s keycard, and some crumpled dollars, lay Aaron X. Doily’s ring. I’d pocketed it that morning, to rescue it from Abby’s interrogation of my stuff.

I wondered if the ring still worked, and, if it did, whether its powers had changed again. Before I was done wondering I’d pulled on my pants and slipped the keycard into my pocket and the ring onto my finger. In bare feet I crossed the carpet to the door, and out into the corridor, to stand blinking in the bright light.

I couldn’t see my hands or feet, but then I was drunk too. It wasn’t until the elevator door opened and I stepped into its mirrored interior that I was certain. I was alone there, and the elevator’s cab appeared empty. I pressed my hands to the mirrors and blew breath around them, saw invisible fingers outlined in visible steam. No matter that I’d left the ring alone for years: this was still its power. Mine, when I chose to wear it.

Upstairs, I’d lain tripping on misery for what felt like hours. So I expected the lobby to be empty. Instead it was full of gabbling Forbiddenoids. So was the hotel’s bar. I crept in, easily dodging the usual collisions. I’d become a skilled invisible man ten years before, and the expertise was ready in me.

The convention’s denizens surrounded the bar’s round tables in gathered chairs, groups of ten or fifteen. Their conversations had a sprung, argumentative quality, like regurgitated panel discussions. But they were human; they imbibed, galed with laughter. Some would probably pair off tonight, like the crocodiles. I was glad to be invisible. The bar itself, an island in the center, was mostly empty. I overturned a glass of melted ice at one end to make a diversion, then, as the bartender groused over to swab it up, snuck behind him to grab a third-full bottle of Maker’s Mark. As I clutched it to my chest it was enclosed in my transparency. I tiptoed back through the lobby. Paul Pflug was there, pinned on a couch between identical women in leather bustiers, and high-laced boots not so unlike Abby’s. I toasted him with the invisible bottle, then brought the whiskey up to my room, to render invisible by other means.

 

Ten was too early, but at least the room was dark. My father dithered angrily, threading the projector, insisting on doing it himself, while the pair of hotel staff who’d wheeled it into the room were exiled to one side. I sat with Francesca in the front row, unable to completely avoid the knowledge that only a scattered fifteen or twenty filled the seats behind us, in a room which wanted a hundred. The audience waited patiently, more patiently than I. Some drew orange juice from small boxes through straws, others munched Danish. Zelmo wasn’t in evidence, not yet.

Under my starchy lids a film of hangover already played. I’d barely showered and made it out of the room in time to find Wyoming Ballroom B. I was relying on coffee and a bagel on the plane, for now an Advil from Francesca’s purse. My floppy bag was repacked and stuffed under my chair, Aaron Doily’s ring returned to my pocket. The emptied bottle of Maker’s Mark I’d hidden in the minibar—it took some jostling to get it inside.

“I’ll show two sequences,” my father explained, beginning without any warning. “The first is from 1979 to 1981 and lasts twenty-one minutes. The second is more recent, from 1998. About ten minutes, I think. If it’s all right I’ll leave any remarks or questions for the end.”

No one objected. No one but myself or Francesca could have known a reason to. The small population of hardcore Ebdus fans shifted in their chairs with that rote hushed excitement which proceeds the start of any film, even one shown at ten in the morning in the Wyoming Ballroom of the Anaheim Marriott. They had no idea.

I cared about the film. What choice did I have? I’d cohabited with that presence longer than any other, apart from my father himself. In my childhood life the film was a sort of crippled, mute god, one nursed upstairs like a demented relative. I knew the twenty-one-minute 1979–81 section well—I’d attended its one other public screening, at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, four years ago, and watched it twice in practice runs during the same week. It was a sequence Abraham thought particularly definitive. A landscape lit by an unseen moon, the horizon splitting the screen, the ground brighter than the sky—though Abraham would have rejected the terms “landscape,” “horizon,” and “ground.” Nevertheless: the sky gray-black, the ground gray-gray. The effect more or less that of a thousand late-period Rothkos, stacked in time, and vibrating in projected light. The years 1979 to 1981 were just two in a half-dozen when Abraham had painted this one image—black and gray wrestling in fierce tandem. The ground might rise, or roll slightly, as though an ocean had swelled and waved. The black might leak from the sky and briefly roll across the lower frame—the moments when it did were shocking action in the dazzling, dancing stillness. Just once a red-and-yellow pulse moved like an occluded sun behind the black, then dissolved in shards. Had Abraham secretly gotten his ashes hauled that particular week, so long ago? I’d never dared ask.

As it happened, I was reasonably sure that the twenty-one-minute segment included my sole contribution, a single frame I’d forged one day after school, during my senior year. I’d come home to find Abraham out, perhaps shopping. Later I couldn’t remember the exact circumstances, only the compulsion which had come over me, to sneak into his studio and paint the frame. Abraham’s brushes were wet—he’d just been working. The empty frame was centered in the sprockets, and I would only have to ratchet it one position farther to conceal my addition. The chance was handed to me on a platter, but still I barely dared. With a loaded brush tip I trembled over the frame, not setting the pigment down: the irreversible act. I was terrified of authority —not Abraham’s, but my own.

I painted it—laid down black, laid down gray. Then broke out in a fearful sweat and fled the scene. I spent a week waiting to be accused, and wasn’t. Whether I was caught I’d never know. My father was more than capable of detecting the forged frame and opting not to speak. Leaving it in or splicing it out, but saying nothing. Now, though, I permitted myself to imagine he’d left it in. One twenty-fourth of a second in twenty-five years: mine.

Now I cadged a painkiller from Francesca and tried to ignore the pressure of my dehydrated brain against the top of my eyeballs. The room was silent apart from the film’s clicking passage and the whine of the projector’s fan. It was hard to give the film its due (whatever that was), between hangover and my sense of Abraham, back with the projector, watching us watch from across a distance of empty seats. Hard not to feel his disappointment in this venue on the back of my neck. I waited for that one strange flare of yellow and red: there it was. Twenty-one minutes passed.

“This is how your father tortures these people who love him,” whispered Francesca. “By subjecting them to such darkness.”

I didn’t reply. I could have used even more darkness at the moment.

The second excerpt was a surprise. A dispatch from the frontier: my father had discovered a green triangle with blunted corners, one trying and failing to fall sideways against the phantasmic, blurred horizon.

The triangle occupied perhaps a quarter of the frame’s area. It trembled, tipped a degree, nearly kissed earth, jumped back. Progress was illusion: two steps forward, two steps back. Impossible, though, not to root for it. To feel it groping like a foot for purchase. Daring, hesitating, failing.

I was unexpectedly moved, forgot the room, forgot my headache, suddenly wept for the triangle’s efforts, a tragedy in no acts. Francesca handed me a tissue from her purse. Prisonaires, triangles, I was a pushover these days. Then it was done, and the lights came on. No one clapped—they’d forgotten how, or perhaps the film had persuaded them to fear that their hands, urged together, would fail to meet.

Zelmo Swift appeared at the front and taught us to be brave: a clapping sound could indeed be produced. He led the way. We applauded and my father came to the front, was seated before another microphone, though he hardly needed it to be heard in the sparse room. The few questions that came were either timid or inane. Abraham took them politely.

“Have you ever considered adding a soundtrack?”

“You mean conversation? Or music?”

“Uh, music. It would give you something to listen to.”

“Yes, it would do that. And then, yes. We’d be listening to music.” He paused. “It’s something to think about.”

Another asked about the progress of the film since the second excerpt. What did it look like now?

“I find a paraphrase almost impossible. Some progress has been made. You’d see a superficial resemblance to this sequence, I think.”

“Is the triangle—” This is what the questioner had really wanted to ask. “Is the triangle, uh, lower ? Has it finished falling?”

“Ah,” said Abraham. He paused a while. “The green, yes. It continues in its struggle. More or less as you saw.”

There was a hush within a hush.

“Will it ever —?” someone managed. The question on everyone’s lips. That unfinished falling had broken a lot of hearts, not only mine.

“I prefer not to speculate,” said Abraham. “That’s the daily task, in my view. A refusal to speculate, only encounter. Only understand.”

Zelmo, waiting in the wings, could stand it no longer. He swept up the microphone. “In other words, folks, stay tuned. Abraham Ebdus isn’t done yet. Pretty amazing.” Yes, the film had gone into extra innings, but Zelmo the Chair, Zelmo the Connoisseur, he wasn’t one of those philistines getting a head start to the parking lot, no sir.

With that the spell was broken. My father’s fans drifted from the ballroom, checking their pocket schedules. Maybe somewhere in the building R. Fred Vundane was seated on another panel, if they were lucky. Abraham hurried back to prevent the hotel’s employee from rewinding the film incorrectly, and Zelmo and Francesca surrounded me again.

“You’ve got a plane to catch,” Zelmo said merrily.

“There’s plenty of time.”

“Sure, but my car’s waiting downstairs. So—”

“You better go, dear,” said Francesca.

I was too blurry to fight. Zelmo was a thug by nature, and Francesca a thug of love, and together, in the name of convenience and some irritating secret agenda, they would cheat me of a half hour more in my father’s company. He’d fly back to Brooklyn and another year or decade would go by. But I’d made no use of the visit so far, and there wasn’t a lot of potential in half an hour at the Marriott, not with Zelmo and Francesca and my hangover all circling, making their claims. I slung my bag over my shoulder.

“Son.”

“Dad.”

“It was good to see you. This—” He waved. “Impossible.”

“The new segment was beautiful.”

He closed his eyes. “Thank you.”

We embraced again, two bird-men briefly touching on a branch. I’d showered but already reeked again of the liquor working through my pores. I wondered if my father thought I’d come to Los Angeles in the middle of a breakup, or a breakdown. I wondered if he’d be right to wonder.

Then I smudged Francesca’s face and was escorted downstairs, through the lobby, and into the backseat of Zelmo Swift’s chauffeured, window-tinted limousine.

Disneyland was distantly visible from the gray suburban freeway strip, a clutch of spires like a sinking ship in the industrial sea.

“You don’t like me,” announced Zelmo, with no regard for the driver’s hearing. On the leather-plush seat there was plenty of room between myself and the lawyer. I suppose it seemed I wanted to climb out the window.

“What do you want me to say?” I needed orange juice, a toothbrush, a blood transfusion, a Bloody Mary, Abigale Ponders, Leslie Cunningham, a Thneed, someone to watch over me, a miracle every day—anything but a moment of truth between myself and Zelmo Swift. I needed a volume knob on Zelmo Swift.

“Nothing. I’m doing this out of respect for your father and Francesca.” He took an envelope from his jacket and placed it beside my hand.

“What is it?”

“An accident. You’ll understand when you look. I go all out for my guests, Dylan. Whatever you might think of ForbiddenCon, it’s a moment in their lives, I like to make it a big one. We usually do a ‘This Is Your Life, Abraham Ebdus!’ kind of thing at the Saturday banquet. Surprise appearances from the past, very sentimental.”

I opened the envelope. A single sheet, two typed paragraphs. Some legal secretary’s notes, unsigned. Nothing official, but dry legalese aspiring to the official, language dead with indifference to its subject.

Ebdus, Rachel Abramovitz, conviction for forgery, conspiracy, Owensville Virginia, 10/18/78, sentence suspended. Subsequent arrest and indictment, Lexington, Kentucky, 5/9/79, accomplice armed robbery; bail flight, whereabouts unknown; warrant issued 7/22/79.

And:

Ebdus, Rachel A., last verifiable address, 2/75: #1 Rural Route 8, Bloomington, Indiana, 44605.

“I hope you don’t feel I was prying,” said Zelmo. “We have an excellent research staff at my firm. What they discover is out of my hands.”

“Why am I seeing this?” What I meant, really, was: Why am I learning this from you? Why in your limousine, Zelmo?

He understood. “Abraham wanted me to destroy it. He wasn’t interested. Francesca spoke to me privately.”

“So Francesca’s wishes prevailed over my father’s?”

“She’s well-intentioned, Dylan. She thought you had a right.” His voice rose to a declamatory, courtroom-finale level. “You shouldn’t be furious with her. It’s difficult coming into a family, knowing what’s right to do.”

I glanced at the sheet again, and felt Zelmo’s eyes on me. I wanted to fly at him in my rage, but I sat. Fuck you looking at? I wanted to ask, then throw him in a yoke.

But I sat, a white boy saying nothing.

“Forget it, if you want,” said Zelmo. “I’ll destroy the traces.”

“I don’t care what you do. Just don’t bother Abraham with it again.”

“Assuredly.”

I put the sheet in the envelope, the envelope in my bag. We fell to silence, Zelmo gratefully for once. I wondered if he’d ever been so little rewarded for what he regarded as his generosity.

Still, it was hardly his fault a legal researcher in his firm knew more about my life than I did.

Destroy the traces. I’d never tried to do that. Instead I’d lived in their midst for thirty years, oblivious, a blind man fancying himself invisible.

chapter  5

Perhaps every male animal has an idea what he’ll do with himself the evening of the day he comes home to a newly empty house—rooms which show signs, as mine did, of a hurried start to permanent departure. Perhaps every man has a consoling, self-abnegating fantasy lined up for such a moment, a rabbit hole down which to plunge. Anyhow, I did. I only had to stretch out on my daybed for a few hours, dozing slightly as light turned to dark in the trees outside, the jewel-case shambles of Abby’s tantrum still decorating the floor at my feet, to have my chance. Once night fell I only needed to change my shirt, splash water on my face, and walk a few blocks south through the cool evening to put my plan under way. My scheme of self-wreckage was that near at hand, that much in my back pocket all the time.

Shaman’s Brigadoon, on San Pablo Avenue, was a Berkeley institution, a dingy, poster-layered blues-and-folk nightclub where for some thirty-odd years black musicians in dark suits, narrow ties, and freshly blocked fedoras came to sit on a tiny stage and perform for an audience of white people wearing berets, fezzes, ponchos, and dashikis. As a music journalist known to Shaman’s longtime floor manager I could rely on being waved in free of charge. I always fulfilled the two-drink minimum at the candle-in-mason-jar tables, though—it was worth it for a seat nearer the stage, and lately for the sweet, slow-cooking flirtation I’d been engaged in with one of their typically zaftig young cocktail waitresses, a wide-faced, green-eyed, cigarette-raspy blonde seemingly just arrived from Surferville, named Katha.

Katha had been born in the late seventies but her flippant smile, easy banter, and the pitch of her sturdy hips as she moved with a tray, all were film-noir vintage, whether she knew it or not. Though I gobbled her up with my eyes, she was only an easy, impersonal icon of sexual cheer in my life the first dozen times she waited my table. I took her friendly provocations for nothing more than an aspect of her art, and tipped accordingly.

As has sometimes been the case for me, it was one woman who focused my attention on the reality of another. “You and that girl really get a kick out of each other, don’t you?” Abby said one night in May, as we walked home from a Suzzy Roche show.

“She’s got a Drew Barrymore smile,” I joshed, denying by not denying.

“She’s got Drew Barrymore jugs,” said Abby, and punched me on the arm. We laughed, chummy, jaded cohorts in my self-deception. And that was the last night Abby and I went together to a show at Shaman’s Brigadoon.

My next visit I learned Katha’s last name, and a few other things. Katha Purly only looked nineteen—she was twenty-one. Despite appearances, she wasn’t up from some beach town, but down, from Walla Walla, Washington. Flying in the teeth of cliché, she was an aspiring singer-songwriter waitressing at a joint where she hoped someday to headline. She lived in a commune in Emeryville, along with two of the other waitresses from Shaman’s who’d come south with Katha at the same time. No, the three weren’t a band, just friends. I couldn’t keep from asking the questions but after I learned the answers I pretended I didn’t know them. My sincerity had almost spoiled our breezy, effortless repartee, but on my next visit we fought our way back. And that was where we’d left it, until this night.

Onstage was a trio of African musicians, an organist, xylophonist, and bongo player, billed as the Kenya Orchestra Vandals. They weren’t creating a lot of excitement, and I wondered if a major portion of the orchestra hadn’t been detained at the Nairobi airport. There were free tables near the riser, but I didn’t sit as close as I could have. Instead I picked the quietest corner of Katha’s section.

“Hiya, buster,” she said, and dropped a menu on my table.

“Katha, Katha, Katha.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing at all. Just saying your name. It sounds like panting, actually.”

“I guess, if you’re a dog. You drinking?”

She brought me scotch and I pretended to admire the band. Whenever she was near enough I made jokes about Walla Walla and tried to make her sit at my table for a cigarette break. Once I succeeded, I said: “So what are you doing later, anyway?”

“Who, me ?” Katha’s tone of delighted surprise was all I wished to inspire in her, or for that matter in any other living human, ever again. When two bodies felt the raw uncanny instinct to be joined, and before any damage had been exchanged, it was so easy for one to make the other smile.

“You. You and your so-called friends. You and what army.”

She squinted. “What about the horse I rode in on?”

“The horse especially.”

“You want to party with me, Dylan?”

“I want to hear you play your guitar.”

I felt her hesitation, avoiding a trap. I will not trap you ever or tonight, I willed.

“I’m not off until one-thirty,” she said.

I shrugged and she began to know that I was serious.

“Some people are showing up later,” she said, precisely vague. “But if you don’t mind coming along we could get some hanging-out time.”

I wasn’t much into the Kenyans, so I took a walk to the marina. Mexicans fished off the pier by night, hunched against the indifferent skyline, the Orwellian Transamerica pyramid. I went as far as the pier’s crumbled tip, where lovers walked, though I couldn’t decide whether to count myself as one.

Then ten blocks back to Shaman’s, to an alley door Katha had told me to use. A rap beat pulsed from a small boom box on a kitchen shelf, playing Digital Underground’s “Foghorn Leghorn,” a song which happened to include a few sampled bars of Doofus Funkstrong’s “Bump Suit.” You could hear Barrett Rude Junior’s tenor moan deep in the sample, if you listened hard. The lights in the kitchen were up, the chairs in the darkened front room already turned on the tables. Katha and one of her friends counted the till, mumbling numbers aloud like a prayer, hurrying through the work. The third girl had drawn lines of cocaine on the counter with a kitchen knife.

“Deirdre,” said the girl with the knife, and handed me a rolled bill. Hair had fallen to cover her face as she concentrated over the drug and now she swept it back behind her ear.

“Dylan. Thanks.”

“You know Katha—?” She left it for me to fill in.

“Just from here.”

“Cool.”

The quick onset of alliances were the stuff of these girls’ days, that was the impression Deirdre gave. She’d make a place for me, mildly weird older guy, if I’d make a place for myself. So it was here, as elsewhere, Gowanus, Hollywood, ForbiddenCon 7, other secret zones of belonging. Entry points between zones are hidden until they aren’t, until they become as obvious as a lit kitchen door in a club’s alley, behind which three young women from Walla Walla pool an evening’s tips. And as so often in my experience, passage between was eased by alcohol or marijuana or cocaine, those boundary medicines. Line, Mr. Mildly Weird Older? Of course I’d like a line, and to cross one too, please. How could I not find myself doing Barrett Rude Junior’s drug before this weekend was behind me? That was precisely what I’d come here to do, without knowing it. It wasn’t that I didn’t want Katha. I wanted her badly, but now I’d sensed that the price for having her would be a reschooling in the provisionality of my being, in the futility of my illusions of control. And I wanted to pay that price as much as I wanted Katha herself.

“You really write for Rolling Stone ?”

“I have.”

“Who’d you meet?”

“Uh?”

“Like, did you ever meet Sheryl Crow?” The questions were flat, unashamed.

“Nope.”

“R.E.M.?”

“I was backstage with R.E.M. once, at the Oakland Coliseum.” How to explain that I’d spent the time talking to the dB’s—the opening act?

“What are they like?”

“Well, Michael Stipe was sucking from an oxygen tank after the show.”

“Wow.”

Katha was at the wheel of her Ford Falcon, Deirdre beside her, up front. I was being interviewed by Jane, third and youngest, in the backseat, as we whistled down San Pablo Avenue into Emeryville. A bag of bottles from Shaman’s sat on the seat between us. Velocity, the company of girls as brash as Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly in Anchors Aweigh, and revelatory after-hours views of streets I took for granted in daytime, these were the intoxicants I was high on, as much as the cocaine. Or at least I couldn’t parse my other thrillments from the drug. Katha hadn’t spoken to me directly, back in Shaman’s kitchen, only taken the rolled bill from me with a wry, welcoming smile before doing a line herself. And she ignored me in the car, left me to Jane’s questions. That was another thrillment. The silence seemed consent that we’d taken a step. That this night was already earned. We could rest the banter for now.

We slowed in front of a big, turreted, three-story Victorian, set back from the street and with a low white gate around its weedy yard. Bare bulbs and postered white walls blazed from behind curtains of bedsheet and hippie tapestry, so the commune stood out like a piñata from the two-story cookie-box apartments which slumbered on all sides. The cars parked on the street included two that weren’t going anywhere, and one that looked lived in. As my eyes focused I made out a black man in a white undershirt, seated in a lawn chair under the carport of one of the neighboring apartments, and crumpling a paper bag around a bottle. His gaze followed the sputtering progress of the Falcon into the alley beside the commune, impassively.

“You wanna meet Matt?” Jane asked, as Katha parked.

“That’s just her polite way of saying goodbye,” said Deirdre from the front. “Jane and Matt pretty much just fuck all the time.”

“Shut up! ” said Jane, and slapped at Deirdre’s head.

“You can’t deny it because you know it’s true.”

On the porch Katha smiled at me again, as though she knew she was handling a man in a trance. “Go ahead,” she said. “My room’s on the second floor. You’ll find it.”

Jane and Matt lived in the attic, reachable only by ladder from the commune’s third-floor landing. When Jane summoned him Matt didn’t come down, just peeked his bare-chested torso over the edge of the loft. Despite a Christian beard he also wasn’t past nineteen.

“Hey,” he said.

“Dylan knows R.E.M.,” Jane told him. “He’s Katha’s friend.”

“Cool,” said Matt, blinking, waiting, if I believed Deirdre, to fuck.

“Okay, bye,” said Jane to me, shy now for the first time. She climbed the ladder, squirrel-like.

I turned back down the grand ramshackle staircase, which was lit by a bare violet bulb. Music seeped from behind various doors, and the air of the house was stale with fumes—laundry, cigarettes, old beer. This was my chance: I could have crept past the second floor, found my way out and to a cab on San Pablo. I didn’t.

Katha’s two rooms formed a suite at the back of the second floor, and with their built-in bay-window seats and ornate ceilings and mosaic parquet they would have been grand rooms in a grand house, if the house were anywhere but Emeryville. As it was, the ceiling was water-stained, the parquet warped, and I was sure the landlord was grateful to have tenants to fill the place, even if they mostly used strings of Christmas lights for lamps. Katha’s guitar case leaned against a wall near a CD boom box; a shelfless, doorless closet was heaped with clothes. The smaller second room was empty except for a tapestry-draped single mattress. There was nothing at all on the walls.

In the main room Deirdre kneeled on the floor, slicing more coke, on a mirror now, with a taped blade. Katha, tucked into one of the bay windows, spoke on a telephone, low murmuring not audible over the Beck on the boom box. Another couple sat, knees up, on a futon against the wall, a light-skinned black with a large Afro, faint mustache, and mild eyes, and his girlfriend, a somewhat older-looking woman with choppy short black-dyed hair who, when she spoke, disconcertingly revealed a German accent. Sprawled in a butterfly chair was a Mexican-appearing teenager, fifteen or sixteen at most, gangly in oversized hip-hop trousers, his hair in a blue handkerchief. Deirdre didn’t offer any introductions. Sultry and hollow, she seemed a player in a Warhol film of the mind. Rolando and Dunja, the couple on the futon, gave their names and smiled pleasantly. The teen in the butterfly chair said, “Yo,” and presented for a black-power handclasp. I took his hand and he chewed his name: Marty or Mardy or Marly, I couldn’t be sure.

It was the least of the uncertainties which gave shape to my long night in Katha Purly’s rooms. Katha’s slighting me in the shuttered nightclub and again in the car had turned into a policy. We weren’t together in any sense that I could tell. I did coke and talked with Deirdre and Rolando and Dunja. Maybe-Marty refused, his expression haughty, full of childish disdain, like a housecat preening to avenge an indignity. Maybe-Marty was silent, though when the last track of the Beck ended he moved over and found N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton in Katha’s small collection, then twisted the volume up. The rest of us raised our voices to be heard. Asking some innocent question I unleashed talkative Dunja, who was, it turned out, an Israeli German, raised both in Germany and on a kibbutz. Her life wasn’t a history lesson or an allegory to her, only a story. I listened, marveling that I had followed my waitress crush to a ghetto mansion in Emeryville to sit, cross-legged and stoned in Christmas-bulb light, learning of a sixteen-year-old German girl’s losing her virginity on a moonlit Middle Eastern soccer field to an émigré Russian engineer. Meanwhile, elsewhere in California, Abby slept or didn’t sleep, and in Anaheim, my father had a few hours earlier been treated to his banquet.

Katha made a couple of calls and left the room. She returned, perhaps half an hour later, with a six-pack of Corona, and trailed by someone she introduced as Peter. Peter was twentyish as well, demure and chubby, maybe gay, I thought. Katha took a line of coke, but Peter waved it off, instead helped himself to a beer. He seemed to know the others, or anyhow he was comfortable with Deirdre and Rolando, and began explaining to them how he’d had a fight with his roommate and now refused to return—that was where Katha had gone, to pick him up. Meanwhile Dunja went on telling me of kibbutz days, her cokey tales like an encyclopedia entry, devoid of highs or lows. Katha offered me a beer, the first words she’d spoken to me inside the commune. I took one, just to rinse my gummy throat. It was sweet and sharp, a treat I hadn’t anticipated. Maybe-Marty did some shy, tentative break-dancing in the corner near the boom box. No one watched. The time was three in the morning.

I leaned away from Dunja and the others, to Katha. She still sat to one side, distracted—on duty, it seemed to me.

“Play your guitar,” I said.

“You want to hear me play?”

“Something you wrote.”

We moved off, sat in one of the bays. Under a humming, sneaker-draped streetlamp the street was dead calm, poverty calm. The lights were out even in the lived-in car. Katha told Maybe-Marty to turn the music down—not off, just down—and he did, then flopped back in his butterfly chair. The others, Deirdre, Peter, Dunja, and Rolando, paid us no attention, went on murmuring. Rolando rubbed Dunja’s shoulders; she talked with her eyes shut. I saw Peter had changed his mind, accepted a line. The supply was low. Deirdre shaved the mirror in an obsessive, mechanical action. Katha tuned her guitar, not looking at me.

She began suddenly. Her voice was deep and gorgeous, the lyric remorseless:

Psychedelic twitches in my mood

I’m getting down I’m gonna have to get high soon

I didn’t mean to smoke your last cigarette

I love you baby but sometimes I forget

It was the drugs that made me lose my mind

It was the drugs that made me so unkind

It was the drugs

That made me love you in the first place

And:

Last thing I remembered before I passed out

Were your needful eyes staring from across the couch

I never look at you like that

I guess I don’t need you, I just need you to need me back

It was the drugs that made me lose my mind

It was the drugs that me so unkind

It was the drugs

That made me want you in the first place

Maybe-Marty’s hip-hop selections throbbed on in the silences. The talk had quelled, though. Katha tuned again, then began a simple blues. She bluffed some verses, humming, but sang the refrain clear.

I don’t need you to tell me I’m alone

don’t you think I know I have no home?

I just want to call my mother on the phone

I just want to call my mother on the phone

“That’s new,” she said, interrupting herself.

Peter got up sobbing, both hands on his face, and left the room. To my dismay, Katha put down her guitar and followed him into the hall. Dunja too, jumped up and went after them.

Maybe-Marty turned up the music.

Rolando switched to kneading Deirdre’s shoulders, which I wanted not to resent. Deirdre had been doing an awful lot of coke and reminded me more of an anorexic raccoon than anything alluring, but the dishonorable truth was I yearned to be touching one of the women by now, and I felt a little bitter about Rolando’s access. I wandered over for another beer and peeked into the violet-hued stairwell, but it was vacant. I heard thin trails of music from other floors, nothing I was tempted to follow. I ducked back inside.

“Yo.”

It was Maybe-Marty. I’d gotten used to pretending he wasn’t in the room, the universal strategy here, it seemed.

He’d switched off the music. “You wanna hear my shit?”

“Sure,” I said, helpless.

“Okay, but hole on, I gotta get set.”

“Okay.”

I sat against the wall near the boom box. In the silence I could hear Deirdre’s breath sighing from her as Rolando labored over her shoulder blades. Maybe-Marty shrugged his wrists together and cocked his head, then planted one foot ahead of the other and dipped his knee like Elvis onstage. He pushed the words out in a stream, his high voice slurring the syllables, popping for emphasis on the p’s and g’s.

Check it out like this and then like that

Li’l gangsta M-Dog with that smoov-ass rap—

“Hole on, hole on, I gotta start over.” He spread his hands in an appeal, as though he’d been challenged. When he resumed he went on tossing out poses, but his eyes were closed in shy concentration.

Check it out like this and then like that

Li’l gangsta M-Dog with that smoov-ass rap

Y’know it goes like this and then like this

’Cause when I bus’ my gat I never miss

I’m good in the hood with my homie Raf

So if you step in our path you might get blown in half

Don’t laugh ’cause I’m ill from Emeryville

Where if you don’t survive then your memory will

“How you like that?” he said defiantly.

“Let’s hear it again,” I said.

He rewound into his starting pose, absolutely ready to oblige. The second run-through was more confident and precise, and fiercer, or mock-fiercer. Maybe-Marty looked younger each minute to me, twelve or thirteen now, despite gangstas and gats.

I’d spent fifteen or twenty years being angry at rappers, black and white equally, for their pretense, for claiming the right to wear street experiences, real or feigned, like badges, when mine were unshown. I’d spent fifteen or twenty years senselessly furious at them one and all for not being DJ Stone and the Flamboyan Crew in the yard of P.S. 38, for being ahistorical and a lie, for being ignorant of Staggerlee and the Five Royales, for not knowing what I knew. M-Dog, with his bashful Mexican face and utterly derivative rhymes, couldn’t offend me this way. Perhaps Katha would have said it was the drugs, but I adored him. He’d never lived in a rapless world, I understood. M-Dog’s cobbling a rhyme of his own wasn’t pretense—and now it seemed terrible that I’d ever been so punishing in my judgments. His reaching for this language was as elemental as wishing to be able to roof a spaldeen.

At some point Katha had returned, and when M-Dog finished again she said, “That’s great, you wrote that?”

“Me and my homeboy worked it out, yeah.”

“It’s nice.”

“There ain’t nothing on paper,” he said, eager to be understood. “I got it all up in my head.”

Katha took my hand. Something had changed. I’d done something right, soliciting M-Dog’s performance—or at least admiring it, as I had. It was as though Maybe-Marty’s presentation was what we’d been waiting for this night, as though it had broken some stalemate and freed Katha’s movement toward me. Perhaps the change was in myself. I felt now that instead of being sharpened to the icy edge of cocaine, I’d been bathed in some river of love—as if I’d taken ecstasy, a drug whose effects I’d only imagined, often resentfully, with the same sort of grudgingness M-Dog’s rhymes had just overwhelmed in me.

Katha and I returned to our bay, without the guitar. Maybe-Marty put on another disc. Showtime was over.

“What’s up with Peter?” I whispered.

“He’s in love,” said Katha. Her tone suggested that to be so was a rare and passing condition, to be met with both skepticism and sympathy. “Dunja’s putting him to bed.”

“That sounds nice,” I said, surprising myself. It did sound nice.

She was willing now to hear a little smutty implication in that, one I’d only half intended. “I’ll chase everyone out of here soon.”

I nodded at the empty side room, suggesting the mattress there. “We could just disappear. Let them go on with the party.”

“No, that bed is—not for that.”

“Not for what?”

“Not for anything but my little sister.”

“What sister?” I asked, stupidly.

“She’s still with our foster parents, in Washington. Sometimes I bring her down for a weekend. I’m trying to get her transferred to a school here, but she’s only fourteen.”

“If she’s fourteen shouldn’t she stay with your parents?”

“It’d be better for her here.”

This level pronouncement finished the topic. I sipped my beer while Katha sent Maybe-Marty home, and dislodged Deirdre and Rolando from the futon where they were still engaged in a long massage, Deirdre’s head curled down between her knees, as though Rolando had committed to smoothing the long night’s worth of cocaine shivers from her body with his palms. After they’d slumped from the room, Katha, undaunted by the obvious, put on Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks. I was grateful, but also afraid of that album’s particular scalpel-like quality. I was near enough to bare as it was.

Now we were alone. Katha lit a joint from the tip of her cigarette and handed it to me. She closed the door and we moved to the futon.

“So, what are you doing here, Dylan?”

I’m here to party with you? I thought. No words came out.

“What about that lady you’re with?”

“You mean Abby?”

“If Abby’s your beautiful black girlfriend, yeah. I see her on Telegraph Avenue, you know.”

“You do?”

“Just going into bookstores, whatever. She doesn’t know me.”

“She’s in a hurry,” I said, picturing Abby moving on that crowded street, past the teen beggars in their hundred-dollar leathers—if I ran it like a video clip in my mind’s eye, the soundtrack might be Central Line’s “Walking into Sunshine” or some other not remotely depressing disco cut. Meanwhile in Emeryville it was darkest before dawn, and Van Morrison and the sacred fumes of sex and marijuana beckoned me into the slipstream.

“She looks kind of angry to me,” said Katha, startling and delighting me. “But it’s none of my business.”

“It’s okay,” I said, marveling that she’d said it. “Maybe she is. Sometimes it’s hard to figure out what a person is like, when you’re up close.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Like your song.” I was shameless. “Sometimes you understand all at once, in a flash.” I was so grateful to Katha for calling Abby angry. I wanted to reward her, stroke her, call blessings of orgasms down upon her for pardoning my bungled life with that passing observation.

Years ago, I’d read a novel, a thriller in which glamorous people destroyed themselves by sexual intrigue. One character was another’s shoals, that was what I’d remembered about the book—and the character who’d wrecked the other had explained how she was infinitely dangerous because she was damaged. This character’s damage made her an involuntary criminal, the book seemed to say. Her damage—orphanhood, abuse, I couldn’t remember what it was—made her unfit to mix with those who’d been luckier, who’d squeaked through life innocent of such knowledge. The story was enthralling bunk, impossible not to finish even as I’d loathed it for its implicit assertion that the undamaged ought to bolt their doors against the damaged ones, who would hurt them if they could, who couldn’t help wishing to. When I read the book, I’d never met anyone undamaged. I still think I never have.

Suddenly Katha Purly seemed to me a refutation of that book, refutation I hadn’t known I’d needed until this instant. I’d raged against the silly, trashy novel because of the nerve it twinged—my shame at my own hurt, my fear that it made me an untouchable, poisonous to others. Katha made nonsense of that. I’d thought I was following a dangerous angel to her lair, that I’d been drawn by some offer of destruction. But Katha was only an ordinary angel. Her sister’s room was evidence, and so was M-Dog, and so was Peter. But the best evidence was my own presence here. She’d taken me in when I’d needed her to.

Katha was only as good as her damage. It formed the substance of what she knew. What made me dangerous, or at least awful, wasn’t my damage, but the way I’d denied it. What I’d left undone. Katha sheltered her sister and M-Dog, Mingus surrendered a kidney, and Abraham and Francesca brought Barrett Rude Junior soup and chicken. In my visionary state I could see the Tupperware containers, could see a skeletal Barry as he smeared hot mustard on a fridge-gummed thigh or drumstick. Meanwhile, Abby and I conducted a witty war to prove which of us was truly depressed. Shunning my damage I’d starved my life, it seemed now. I was lost in feints and skirmishes three thousand miles from the homefront. Katha had a bed made, waiting for her sister in Walla Walla—I had The Falsetto Box and Your So-Called Friends.

When, ten months before, I’d delivered my Subtle Distinctions box-set liner note to Rhodes Blemner of Remnant, he’d let two weeks pass without calling to confirm he’d received it. Finally I cracked, and called him myself.

“You got it?”

“Sure, I got it.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing’s the matter. We’ll run the note in the box, I sent it to the art department. It’s scheduled.”

“How’d you like it?”

“It’s not your best work, Dylan.” Rhodes had perfected a lethal hippie frankness, after the manner of his heroes, from Bill Graham to R. Crumb. “I was disappointed, given how you pushed so hard for the reissue. It wasn’t what I expected.”

“I think it’s exactly my best work.”

“Well, it conveys the impression you think that. It’s full of big thoughts, if that’s what you mean. But I personally think it’s also full of shit. Beginning with the quotes up front, all that Brian Eno stuff, which I cut.”

“Fuck you, Rhodes. Send it back to me.”

“We’ll run it. What do I know? You’ll win a Grammy, that’s my prediction. For best hot air.”

I defended. “I had to create a context—”

“It’s a false context. The piece reads as if you sat in a small room listening to nothing but Distinctions records for a year and then postulated the history of black music. It reads like you were avoiding something. Maybe you were avoiding your research. You quote Cashbox, for crying out loud. That’s like something one of these British writers would do—write a note on living musicians and quote an interview somebody gave to Cashbox in 1974.”

Now, here on Katha’s futon, layering pot over coke at the outer reaches of a binge which felt stolen from time, my hand beginning to explore the waitress’s knee in automatic lust, Rhodes Blemner’s cavil to my liner note seemed completely of a piece with every other revelation. My failure to provide Jared Orthman an end to the Prisonaires’ story held the same message for me as M-Dog’s rhymes, as Katha’s sister’s empty room, as my father’s green triangle—I was halted in a motion half-completed. My facts were no good. I’d been scooped by Zelmo Swift’s interns, out-researched by Francesca’s soup. The man himself is still alive, I’d written, but I hadn’t believed it, had to be told again and again by the Jareds and Rhodeses and Zelmos. The man himself, and his son too, even if they only had one pair of kidneys between them.

Katha and I talked and kissed while my thoughts raced, and until they didn’t. My waitress and I had months of teasing in the bank, and we drew on them now. On the sticky tapestry-covered futon, in the streetlamp light which streaked the wall above our heads, with Van Morrison moaning Celtic inspiration, our addled bodies pushed and gnawed at one another. Hot blunt hands got stuck under blue-jean waistbands until we sighed and tugged apart the snaps. Katha’s flesh was smooth and sheeny, so rubbery I wondered if it was somehow an effect of drug-dust between my fingers and her skin. She was plush and uncreased, like a marzipan animal. An elegant margin of hairs rode the curve from her navel into her pubic tangle.

I paused where I always do, melancholy at the threshold, a make-out man. Thinking, We could stop here. This could be fine, this could be enough. I’m often more certain I want to be held than engulfed.

“I’ve got something,” whispered Katha. “I’ll be right back.”

“Okay,” I said.

My blondes had always been those Leslie Cunninghams, striding the world undamaged, or seeming so, impassive goddesses who regarded me dubiously. Or Heather Windle, or the Solver girls, forever circling away on bikes and skates, forever packing and moving from the neighborhood of me. Now I had my blonde in Katha Purly. At last one had given herself to me, completely and without bargaining, but she was different, realer, rich with damage. This was an ordinary, rapid-fading epiphany, the last of my dozens: my young waitress wasn’t a fantasy because nobody was. People were actual, every last one of them. Likely even the Solver girls, wherever they were.

I had my blonde now, yes, but I couldn’t stay hard inside her. It was the drugs—I couldn’t feel myself inside her from within the condom she’d unrolled. But Katha Purly was unbearably generous with me. In the pale daylight now infecting the room, long-shadowing the crumbs in the stale corners and the silent boom box, the streets below noising to dawn life, the house around us still and full of sleeping bodies like an interstellar ship, Katha touched herself, gorgeously gave herself the orgasm I’d wanted to provide, made her own face and throat flush red, temples pink beneath pale eyebrows, while exhorting me to give tribute onto her superb pooled chest, championing me with her voice, cooing me forward. I managed to do it, just.

When I woke it was in sweat, sun blazing over me and Katha in that barren room, our bodies peeled out of their embrace to opposite sides, sheets squirmed down around our ankles. Katha woke a little and said I could stay, but I couldn’t. I dressed and left, walked home into Berkeley along San Pablo Avenue. It was ten in the morning. I couldn’t stay at Katha Purly because Katha Purly wasn’t, after all, a place. Neither, for that matter, was Abigale Ponders. Or California itself, not for me. They weren’t Dean Street, specifically, weren’t Gowanus, and that was where I was going. I had to get back to where I once belonged. I phoned an airline and booked a coast-to-coast flight, then showered, then slept. When I woke the second time I packed another bag, and again I took along the ring.

chapter  6

Iremember almost nothing of the few weeks which remained of summer between Barrett Rude Senior’s death by shooting and my Greyhound ride from the city to begin my first term at Camden College. The tragedy became the communal property of Dean Street, of course, and my own close knowledge of it was a secret. So my sense of it was soon blunted into the pell-mell of general gossip. I spared little sympathy for Mingus, who was under arrest and being charged as an adult; I was a fierce rocket of denial awaiting escape velocity from the scene. The killing only gave a clear name and shape to my fog of reasons for wanting to leave Brooklyn. Anyway, I was scared of Mingus. He’d killed someone with a gun. That hadn’t happened before. This was 1981, before drive-bys made shootings commonplace. It was still a time of knives and baseball bats, of homemade nunchucks, of yokes. I’d seen guns brandished, but never fired.

Vermont was my antidote. I’d only been there once since my thirteen-year-old Fresh Air Fund voyage, and that just seven months earlier, in late January, for my entrance interview at Camden. Still, though the green hills of the Vermont landscape were fresh-quilted with snow, whiter than any I’d seen, and the wind on the vacant campus bit through my fake down coat, I felt stirrings everywhere of Heather Windle–ghosts, of my dragonfly-and-swimsuit summer. I bought a single cardboard-and-cellophane-boxed leaf of maple-sugar candy in the bus depot in Camden Town and when I melted it on my tongue as Heather had once taught me to do I got the most innocent and yearning erection I’d had in four years.

Camden College wasn’t Heather Windle’s Vermont, though. At Camden Heather would have been a townie, a girl glimpsed at the Brass Cat or Peanut’s, one of those small-town bars Camden students sometimes dared themselves to frequent on their sorties from the idyllic walled preserve, the bucolic acres of the campus itself. Inside that trimmed-green sanctuary was a sort of collective solipsistic laboratory, where high-strung urban children were allowed to play however they liked. Dressed in leather and fur and batik they and I—for I was briefly one of them—roamed an environment one part New England farmland, complete with white clapboard dorms, twisted apple trees bearing inedible fruit, low lichen-covered Frostian stone walls wending nowhere through the woods, and tattered cemetery plots with burial dates in the 1700s: one part experimental arts college, founded in the 1920s by passionate Red-leaning patrons, and legendary for its modern dancers and faculty-student marriages; and one part lunatic preserve for wayward children of privilege, those too familiar with psych counseling and rehab to follow older siblings to Harvard or Yale, and which recapitulated in junior form the tribal rituals of Mediterranean resorts and East Hampton summers and the VIP room of Studio 54.

I understood none of this. I was class-dumb, protected from any understanding of money by my father’s artisan-elitism and, paradoxically, by Rachel’s radical populist pride: I’d been raised by a monk and a hippie, each of whom stood willfully outside any hierarchy of class. The desires our little family couldn’t afford to indulge had never seemed important, only snobbish and silly and somehow misplaced, like Thurston Howell’s priorities on Gilligan’s Island. Besides, I’d had as much or more money than most kids I’d known in Brooklyn, if somewhat less than the majority of my Manhattan schoolmates at Stuyvesant, so figured I was somewhere in the middle. Yeah, sure, that was it: I was middle class.

The truth was, few Camden students had ever set foot inside a public school, much less attended one. And I’d never set a foot inside Brooklyn Friends or Packer Collegiate or Saint Ann’s. A handful of students formerly from those schools, Brooklyn Heights kids mostly, were introduced to me by others, in those first weeks, as being “from Brooklyn too,” yet they were strangers, and when I admitted that I’d gone to P.S. 38 and I.S. 293 they knew, better than anyone else at Camden, what a freak I was to be in their midst here. Across this gulf of experience my new acquaintances and I stared, as though at denizens of a looking-glass world.

In a gesture which could be taken for either a muddled kindness or a cruel segregation, I’d been given a roommate who was also on financial aid. Matthew Schrafft was from Keene, New Hampshire, a town much like Camden, only lacking a glamorous college. He’d attended Manhattan prep schools until sixth grade, but his family’s fortunes had tumbled, his father abandoning a career as a junior producer at CBS News in order to live in a small town and write a novel. For this reason I suspect Matthew felt dangerously near to being a townie. We became friends, and it was a solace that my roommate and friend was, like myself, sometimes to be found on the wrong side of the dining hall’s counters, wearing a white apron, spooning hot waffles and sausages and eggs from steel vats onto our fellow students’ trays. Food server was one of the less hidden or euphemistic work-study jobs—those other charity cases who were tucked away quietly research-assisting or working in the alumnus office could afford to pity Matthew and me as they lined up for their meals.

Matthew and I had also been awarded an unusual housing arrangement, for a pair of freshman: Oswald House Apartment. Oswald was famously the rowdiest and druggiest of the dormitories which surrounded the Commons. Each of these eight clapboard buildings included one central “apartment”: a suite of connected rooms with a fireplace and a private bathroom. These upscale digs were ordinarily reserved for a graduate student or visiting professor, only no one expecting a moment’s peace would have accepted placement in Oswald. The floors in the living room there reeked continuously of cleanser-scrubbed beer spills, the carpet was riddled with burns, the doors decked with thumbtacked porn and spiky, punk-style graffiti. Oswald House was like a pirate ship sailing the apple-strewn lawn, one which blared Grateful Dead more or less around the clock in late summer, when speakers could be mounted facing outward in first-story windows and students sprawled on the grass. The Oswald Apartment had been the domain of a legendary pair of bearded, Belushi-esque partyers, and I think the Housing Office had a notion that by replacing these ringleaders with two fresh-faced, short-haired scholarship students they’d effected a kind of heart transplant on Oswald—that Matthew and I would temper the place from the inside out. That wasn’t exactly how it worked out, but I’m sure the established Oswaldites were every bit as dispirited to see us moving into the Apartment that September as the administration might have wished.

Matthew and I ironized our discomfort by sublimating it in culture. Devo, a band I’d never cared for in high school, became an emblem of our difference, not only from the Camden hippies, but also from the chic, Bowie-loving punk types who had subscriptions to Interview and vacationed in Paris. Devo expanded the nerd-brainiac ethos of a band like Talking Heads in a usefully hostile direction. Loving Devo, it was possible to indulge our class resentment by masking it as anticapitalist satire. They became an adjective: Certain things were awfully Devo around this school, weren’t they?

One balmy afternoon that first week in Vermont, still stunned at catapulting out of our high-school lives and knowing no one, Matthew and I attended an out-of-doors afternoon talk by Richard Brodeur, the new president of Camden. Brodeur seemed as terrified of the place as we were. Like Matthew’s father, he’d thrown over a corporate career for something more real, and his descriptions of why he’d wanted to preside at Camden sounded a tad defensive. In fact, Brodeur was an efficiency expert brought in to repair damage done by a charismatic and tolerant seventies type. Nobody but us gullible freshmen had bothered to attend his talk.

“There’s a story I like to tell,” said Brodeur. “When I was a boy I used to love pizza, and whenever my father took me to the pizzeria I’d order two slices. And I’d sit and he’d watch me wolfing down the first slice with my eyes on the second. I wasn’t even tasting that first slice. And one day my father said to me, ‘Son, you need to learn that while you’re eating the first slice of pizza, eat the first slice. Because right now you’re eating the second slice before you’ve finished the first.’ And a year ago I realized that I needed that lesson again. I took a look at my life and realized I had my eye on the second slice of pizza.”

The parable wasn’t completely lost on me, though I couldn’t keep from recalling the day Robert Woolfolk and his little friend had tried to mug me for my pizza on Smith Street. I wondered if Richard Brodeur knew of any approach to the problem of the one slice. I suspected not.

Afterward Matthew and I drifted back to the Commons lawn, where, beyond the outermost row of dorms, the mowed rim plunged out of sight—the place was known as the End of the World. There a gaggle of our housemates tapped an early keg. We lined up for plastic cups of frothy beer, against a backdrop of green hills dimpled with sunset shadows.

“What did you take away from that?” said Matthew.

“When you think you’re eating the first slice, you might really be eating the second slice?”

“Something like that. Anyway, it made me hungry.”

This would be a running joke: when he and I began sleeping in late in the Apartment and missing classes we called it eating the first slice. My career at Camden, as it turned out, wouldn’t involve a second.

That week we experienced our first of the famous Friday-night parties. Dorms were provided with a booming sound system, and plastic cups and kegs of beer from the food service—the administration had a stake in keeping its tender wards out of Vermont bars on weekend nights. Camden, truthfully, wasn’t an accidental hothouse, but a deliberate one, an experiment like the Biosphere. So by eleven o’clock two or three hundred of us throbbed in one mass to Rick James’s “Super Freak” on the sticky living-room floor of Fish House, another party dorm only slightly less notorious than Oswald. That easy appropriation of dance-floor funk was a first taste, for me, of something I desperately wanted to understand: the suburban obliviousness of these white children to the intricate boundaries of race and music which were my inheritance and obsession. Nobody here cared—it was only a danceable song. The Rick James was followed by David Bowie, the Bowie by Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark, and the OMD by Aretha Franklin. I threw myself into the dance, briefly freed.

A couple of hours later Matthew and I brought two girls back to the End of the World. Now the mowed edge plunged into mist-laced darkness, the nickname explained. Aimee Dunst and Moira Hogarth were, like us, freshman roommates, and suitably punkish, with eye shadow and gelled hair. Matthew had met them in a class on Milton and Blake. We four had talked or tried to talk in the spilling craze of the party, the penumbra of retching and squirming bodies, then ferried our plastic cups of grapefruit juice and vodka out into the chirping dark.

Aimee was from Lyme, Connecticut, and Moira was from Palatine, a suburb of Chicago. Hardly anyone, I’d learned, was really from a city. If they said Los Angeles or Chicago or New York they meant Burbank or Palatine or Mount Kisko.

As a trick of flirting I’d been boasting of my inner-city knowledge, turning discomfort inside out.

“Were you ever mugged?” asked Aimee.

Aimee, like anyone who ever asked me this question before or since, was thinking of a stickup in an alleyway, an adult transaction, a transaction of strangers. She was thinking of Death Wish and Kojak. The nearest I’d come was Robert Woolfolk’s holdup of the drug dealer. That event was beyond explanation.

“I was yoked,” I said instead. “Ever been yoked?”

“What’s that?”

“I’d have to show you.”

They giggled, and Matthew stared, not knowing any more than they did.

“I don’t know,” said Aimee, trailing backward, her footfalls stumbling.

“Okay, forget it.”

“Do me,” said Moira, boldly.

“You sure?”

“Uh huh.”

“It doesn’t really hurt. But you should put down your drink.” We nestled plastic cups in dewy grass. Straightening too quickly, I grew dizzy. The Vermont oxygen was like another drink, a chaser.

“Fuck you lookin’ at?”

All three turned their heads, fooled by my sudden volume and hostility. But we were alone there, at the End of the World. It was the only place I could ever have put on my mummery, my minstrel show.

I kept my eyes locked on Moira. The others were irrelevant. “That’s right, girl. Don’t look around, I’m talkin’ to you. Fuck you think you lookin’ at?”

“Stop,” said Aimee. Moira just stared back, rattled but defiant.

“See, that’s all right. I don’t mean nothing. Come over here for a minute.” I pointed to the ground at my feet. “What, you afraid? I ain’t gonna do nothin’. Just let me talk to you for a minute.” My drunken self was astounded at how well I knew the drill. These words had never come from my mouth.

Moira stepped closer, taking the dare, Bacall to my Bogey. I might have liked to quit already, but the script demanded I play it all the way. There was rage nestled in the script, urgency I’d never tapped.

“See, I’m your friend, right? You know I like you.” I threw an arm around Moira’s shoulders and tugged her close. “You got a dollar you could lend me?”

“Don’t give it to him!” howled Matthew, getting the joke now. Only it was barely a joke.

“No,” said Moira.

Trapping Moira gently as possible in the triangle of fist-elbow-shoulder, I dipped her, as I’d been dipped a hundred times. Not far. To my chest. “You sure? Lemme check your pockets for a minute.” I frisked the front pockets of her corduroys, found bills and plucked them out. Then Moira twisted against me and I took pity and loosed my hold. She sprang back angrily toward the others.

I raised the curled bills. “It’s just a loan, you could trust me. You know we was just foolin’ around, right?”

Moira rushed and tackled me into the grass. I felt the fury in her body at being handled as I’d handled her, a fury I knew precisely, from her side. But she was also drunk and excited and putting our hips back in conjunction. Yoking Moira, I’d also chosen her. A thick shock of sex was in the air—as it had been on the dance floor at Fish House. It was everywhere at Camden, only waiting for anyone to slice off a portion for themselves, and now Moira and I had done so. In all of high school I’d never kissed a girl without long spoken preliminaries, yet here it was simple. When she grabbed the bills in my hand I grabbed her hand and we returned the money to the pocket of her corduroys together, rolling on the wet lawn, kissing wildly, missing one another’s faces, kissing ears and hair. Beyond where we lay, Matthew and Aimee had gone past the End of the World and vanished in the dark.

What I could never have explained to Moira was that the sexual component of a yoking was present before she and I enacted it, was buried in the practice, as I knew it, at its roots.

Moira Hogarth and I spent that night in her and Aimee’s room in Worthell House, while Aimee and Matthew took Oswald Apartment. Moira and I were a couple for two weeks from that night—an eternity at Camden, where rehearsals of adulthood were rendered miniature by a compression of time and space. A whole relationship could be enacted in a weekend, wounds nursed before the next Friday night. In our case, by Halloween Moira and I wouldn’t be speaking. Then again, by Thanksgiving we were confidantes, whispering and laughing our way across Commons and spending nights in bed together so that everyone was certain we were a couple though we were in fact sleeping with others. Then before the end of the term we’d fucked and fallen out again. And so on: there was nothing notable, at that school, in the close recycling of the same few sympathetic souls. There were too few to waste.

My yoking of Moira, out at the End of the World, became the origin of a scheme: I’d throw Brooklyn down like a dare. I needed something. I’d been set up to feel like a square at Camden, where my short haircut and cardigan-and-loafer style, so decisively David Byrneish or Quadrophenia mod at Stuyvesant only looked ordinarily preppy to those who’d actually been to prep school. But nobody could question my street credibility here, where nobody had any street credibility whatsoever. I earned my stripe at Camden by playing a walking artifact of the ghetto. I pretended to be ignorant of what Baja and Aspen were, or why schoolmates named Trudeau or Westinghouse might be particularly well-heeled. I smoked Kools, I wore a Kangol cap, I called my friends “Yo”—and this, long enough before the Beastie Boys made it widely familiar, was funny enough to a couple of Oswald House upperclassmen, a pair of hipsterish coke dealers named Runyon Kent and Bee Prudhomme, that they made a version of it my nickname: I was Yoyo to them. Basically, I turned myself into a cartoon of Mingus. The shtick was a splendid container for my self-loathing, and for my hostility toward my classmates. And it made me popular.

I became adept at beguiling and mocking the wealthy, right to the point of their tolerance. I cadged, shamed them into floating me meals and haircuts and cartons of Kools, flattered and appalled them by mentioning what they’d already spent years preparing to spend lifetimes never discussing—their money, the trust funds that kept them in BMWs and designer clothes and brunches and dinners at Le Cheval whenever the dining-hall fare didn’t thrill them, the checks which kept coming though there was nothing, really nothing, to purchase in rural Vermont. Except drugs. And drugs were the other way I earned my stripe.

Camden provided us with free beer and movies and contraception and psychotherapy. These were spoken of, joked about freely. But the school provided other things, not named, which were free as well, like a class called Unorthodox Music, run by a benevolent white-haired professor named Dr. Shakti, and widely known to be a guaranteed pass no matter how rarely you attended, or the books and cassettes which could be boosted hand over fist from the campus store because someone had decreed that nobody’s transcript ought to be blemished with accusations—presumably the administration quietly compensated the vendor’s losses. Of course, our parents would have laughed bitterly to hear these things called “free”: the costs were folded into the absurd and famous tuition, our experience made seamless. Camden was so lush with privileges that it was easy to overlook the fact that a handful of us weren’t rich. We all rode in the first-class compartment, even if some of us also swabbed the deck.

As for drugs, the school didn’t actually supply them, but the blind eye they’d turned was understood as another privilege. Dealers like Runyon and Bee operated with abandon. Joints were smoked openly on Commons lawn, and parties at Pelt House were famous for acid punch concocted in an in-house lab. William S. Burroughs was nominated as commencement speaker, and during screenings of Eraserhead or The Man Who Fell to Earth a cloud of smoke rose through the projector beam in the tiny campus auditorium. Though it was considered polite to shut your door while doing a line of coke or meth few bothered to rehang mirrors afterward, and some kept them propped on crates as permanent coffee tables, much like Barrett Rude Junior.

I was a skunk for coke. It was part of my act. Afternoons when we should have been in class or the library Matthew and I played basketball with Runyon and Bee, out at the largely unused court which was carved deep into the woods at the edge of campus, beyond the unused soccer field—Camden was an unathletic place. Runyon and Bee enjoyed the way I tried to juke and fake, all the moves I’d absorbed and never dared attempt in the gymnasiums of my youth. Matthew and I became Runyon and Bee’s adoptees, their mascots. Like them we wore Wayfarer sunglasses on the court, played slack or nonexistent defense, and, between half-court games, snorted and smoked in the pine-carpeted shade at the perimeter of the asphalt. That I couldn’t pay for my share was irritating or endearing to the dealers, depending on their mood, but hardly important. Evenings I hung around Runyon and Bee’s rooms upstairs, and when another student casually drifted by to cop a quarter gram I’d be included in the obligatory tasting. Once I earned my keep by typing a paper Runyon had written on As I Lay Dying ; it was shockingly riddled with grammatical errors. I rewrote it, as I suspect he’d hoped I would, and we got an A together.

Three or four afternoons that autumn, high on something at an uncommonly early hour, and cut loose from whomever I’d partied with, Moira or Matthew or the dealers upstairs, unable to stem whatever it was that surged in me, I went into the woods and flew. I no longer had the costume, and I wasn’t really Aeroman anymore, just a kid from the city uncorked in the woods and venting crazy energy by soaring between branches. That I wasn’t Aeroman was probably why it was possible, after so long, to fly. I’d never flown in Brooklyn, not apart from one spaldeen catch. I’d been physically cowardly, but also too burdened with what I needed Aeroman to accomplish, with notions of heroism and rescue. Here there was no one to rescue from anything, unless it was all of us from ourselves, and a flying eighteen-year-old couldn’t have attempted that. So instead I wandered into the trees east of the End of the World, below the soccer field and the basketball court, screwed Aaron Doily’s ring on my finger, found a high rock to leap from, and rode air. To rise slightly above the campus, to glimpse the stopped clock on the Commons tower from afar, was to attempt to believe in my luck, in my improbable, intoxicating escape from Dean Street. I tried to make the hills real by confronting them alone and head-on, make the branches mine by grazing them with my fingertips. I don’t know if it worked or not. I’ve never been certain I could taste freedom, not for longer than the fading buzz of a line or the duration of a given song. And a song, when you press repeat, rarely sounds the same. Still, white powder, menthol fume, pine breeze—those flying afternoons my nostrils seemed reversed, so I could smell backward to my own minty-fresh brain.

One of those afternoons, having landed, I was startled in my stroll back up through the trees to Commons lawn by Junie Alteck. Junie was a sylphlike Oswald hippie, a durable partyer who could be found decorating Bee’s room late, after others had folded their tents. We suspected Bee slept with her but he’d never admitted it. Runyon liked to call her “Aspect.” She’d been walking alone in the woods. I understood from her expression that I’d been spotted.

“What were you doing?” she said dazedly.

“Performance-art project,” I said.

“Oh.”

“Pretty good, huh?”

“Uh, yeah!”

Cocaine and black slang and headfakes and flying: everything unsafe all my life was safe here, suddenly, and why not. Camden was designed to feel safe. It was in that state of mind, late one evening in the first days of December, that I took the call at the Oswald pay phone, from Arthur Lomb.

chapter  7

Arthur’s story tumbled out in a hurry. The odd entrepreneurial partnership forged between Lomb, Woolfolk, and Rude in the last months before the shooting had survived Mingus’s conviction for voluntary manslaughter, and his sentencing, in October, to ten years at Elmira, a prison upstate. The result was an even odder partnership: Arthur and Robert. They’d taken the money I’d paid for the comic books and the ring, and the rest they’d scraped together and bought their quarter kilogram. Then successfully dealt it. Barry being a primary customer, I also understood. And Arthur and Robert had kept from consuming the profits, held enough in reserve to cop another quarter kee and begin again. Only now they’d fallen out. Robert had come around Arthur’s place with a pair of cohorts from the Gowanus Houses, demanding money, and Arthur’s mother had freaked out and called the police. Now Robert had promised Arthur he would kill him if he didn’t produce a certain sum by a certain time, only Arthur couldn’t go alone to Gowanus to deal the stash, not with Robert’s friends knowing his white face and the stash he’d be carrying; meanwhile Barry had taken a trip over Thanksgiving, to visit a doctor in Philadelphia, and not returned—

I stopped him, not needing to hear more. In fact, it mattered to me that I seem uninterested in the details of that distant morass.

“No Mingus to protect you,” I said, with satisfaction.

In reply came only Arthur’s breathing on the line, and I detected a little phantom of fake-asthmatic seizure in his genuine panic.

“Buy a Greyhound ticket,” I said. “We’ll unload the stuff in a couple of days, no problem. You’ll come back with his money.”

It didn’t take much to persuade Arthur. The next day, a Tuesday, the first light snow of the season drifted down as I waited at the depot in Camden Town. The bus curled in the wide lot, making virgin treadmarks in the fresh accumulation. It sighed to a stop and the driver emerged to pop the undercarriage, but Arthur hadn’t stowed anything. He tiptoed through the snow with an Adidas gym bag slung on the shoulder of his inadequate bomber jacket, blowing into cupped hands and looking bewildered.

“This is your school?”

“This is the town. School’s three miles out.”

He regarded me blankly.

“It’s an easy hitch,” I boasted. This was another secret perk: someone from the school, an upperclassman or a graduate student with a car, sometimes even a professor, invariably recognized the style of dress which distinguished you from a local and picked you up on the side of Route 9A, to ferry you from the dying industrial center of Camden, past the strip malls which had vampired the town’s life, and into the woods, up the long driveway behind the college’s gates. I wanted Arthur cowed by the full effect. I hoisted his Adidas bag and we trudged across a Dunkin’ Donuts lot, to the gray-sleeted roadway.

As it happened, the car which stopped for us belonged to Richard Brodeur, president. Maybe he’d gone into town for a slice of pizza. As we climbed into the car I introduced Arthur as a friend visiting from New York. Brodeur greeted him uneasily, and reminded me of the official policy requiring overnight guests in dorms to register with the office. And of the three-day limit for such visits. I assured him we’d comply. Brodeur seemed aged from the man I’d seen deliver the pizza speech—I wondered if his first three months at Camden could have been as full as mine. I felt sorry for him, actually. Picking us up on the road seemed evidence of a desolate wish to be liked, to find a place for himself in the casual atmosphere, one he hadn’t found, yet.

Snow bunched at the windshield’s edges, smashed into crumbling pillars by the wipers, and flakes swam up madly to speckle the glass.

“Are you in college, Arthur?”

“Nah. Uh, I’m going to Brooklyn. City, I mean. But I, uh, gotta pick up a couple of credits first. So I’m taking the year off.”

This contradictory blurt didn’t leave a lot of room for a follow-up. Brodeur smiled and said, “You’re a bit underdressed for this Vermont weather, aren’t you?”

“Nah, I’m cool,” said Arthur. “Sir.”

Brodeur drove us all the way to the door of Oswald Apartment, when anyone else would have dropped a rider just past the guard’s booth. I had a ridiculous impulse to invite him in. I wondered if he’d been inside a student’s dorm room in his time here—probably not. And Matthew would be impressed. It would have been a very Devo move. It wasn’t likely any drug paraphernalia or stolen campus property was sitting out in plain view, but I figured I couldn’t take the chance and let the whim pass.

“Enjoy your time here, Arthur. Maybe you’ll want to transfer.”

“Uh, yeah, cool. Thanks.”

In the space of two days Arthur Lomb was locally famous. If I was the Cat in the Hat, I’d now revealed the more unlikely Cat hidden under my headgear. With his baggy jeans and fat laces and clumsy patois, his constant references to rap and graffiti, and his unvarnished, bug-eyed awe at the place he’d come to, Arthur struck my Camden friends as riotous confirmation that whatever it was I alluded to, with my ghetto shtick, I wasn’t completely kidding. Ironically, Arthur struck them as something real. When he insisted on counting their money before handing over the drugs—he and I and Matthew had spent the waning hours of that first afternoon divvying Arthur’s quarter kee into Camden-sized portions in folded paper sleeves—they were titillated out of themselves by his street sincerity. An actual drug dealer had come to campus at last. And though Arthur was the joke, he also got it, and pushed its limits. No one could have said who was laughing harder at the other’s expense.

Arthur’s third day on campus Runyon and Bee drove us to Camden Town’s hardware store, where we boosted a batch of Krylon and Red Devil. The four of us spent the small hours of that night spray-painting the sides of Oswald, then the campus pub and the arts complex for good measure. Arthur and I adorned the buildings with “authentic” Brooklyn graffiti, reproducing tags of FMD and DMD members, the gangs who’d toyed our own feeble tags out of existence. Those runes meant nothing here, though if we’d dared appropriate them on Brooklyn walls we’d have soon afterward seen the inside of the emergency room at Long Island College Hospital. Runyon and Bee wrote KING FELIX in erratic block letters a few times—the name was a private running joke of theirs—but after they saw our dexterity with the spray cans they mostly didn’t bother.

Arthur must have felt as though he’d been dropped into a Saturday Night Live skit: “Samurai Drug Dealer,” or maybe “Cokeheads in Vermont.” I dedicated myself to acting as though I’d fit in this atmosphere all along, as if I found it unremarkable, needing to make sure Arthur got the message: Dylan Ebdus had been a sort of prince in pauper’s clothing on Dean Street, waiting to assume his rightful place. I assuredly didn’t want to discuss what had happened between Mingus and Barry and Senior. I refused to reminisce, or even acknowledge how long I’d known Arthur. I doubt I mentioned Abraham, unless it was to scoff at how little my father knew of my life at this school. Abraham, who was of course footing the bill—but that was an inconvenient detail.

Friday we woke to find we’d scrawled the tags of our enemies all among the pastoral buildings. It was actually shocking to see the fresh red paint against the white clapboard in the morning light, as though Arthur and I had imported our urban nightmares in some sleepwalkers’ compulsion. The dining hall was buzzing with theories as to who’d done it, but Runyon and Bee, in whispered voices, persuaded me it was no big deal. We’d redecorated our playpen, that was all. Camden was ours to deface.

Arthur should have been put on a bus back to New York that day, to honor the rule, but the rule was far from our minds. I wanted him to see a Friday-night party—tonight’s was at Crumbly House—and, though word had spread among the campus cokeheads that I was holding a fire sale out of Oswald Apartment, and Arthur had already covered Robert Woolfolk’s payment, we needed another big night, a party night, to shift the last of his stash.

We had the Apartment mostly to ourselves. Matthew had lately been sleeping with his sophomore girlfriend in an off-campus house in North Camden, and Arthur had taken Matthew’s place in the bedroom in the rear of the suite. My bed was in the big common room, with the fireplace and couch. That afternoon Arthur and I lounged stuporously in that front room as the thin December light dimmed in the bare apple trees outside, the two of us recovering from the night before, waiting for the night to come. Arthur didn’t like the Devo and Wire and Residents records Matthew and I had in constant rotation those days, and he’d dug deep in Matthew’s collection to find something he liked better: Genesis’s The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. We slumped in the dark, me on my bed and Arthur on the couch, and the hysterical symphonic glamour of that music seemed to speak for the rich absurdity of our circumstance so well it felt as though we’d never need to utter a word again.

The first knock on the door wasn’t a customer for Arthur’s wares but a member of the cleaning staff, a woman I’d seen a dozen times before but without any name that I knew. Pale and thick and stooped, she seemed to me a kind of crone, though she was surely no older than forty. It was her job to scour the Oswald bathrooms, most of which were common spaces, adjoining public corridors. But once a week she had to clean the private bathroom in our apartment, and so we let her in. With barely a nod at Arthur she vanished through Matthew’s room, into the back of the suite. I flipped the record and sagged back on my bed.

The woman was typical of an army of gray locals who maintained the buildings and grounds at Camden. They had none of the color or defiance of the usual townies, but were true servants, perfecting the art of deference to the point of invisibility. We knew the names of a few of the older men, those who’d served for twenty-five or thirty years and, having seen generations not only of students but professors come and go, achieved talismanic status. They had snaggly grins and names like Scrumpy or Red and were hailed as they bumped past on a mower or snowplow. But the toilet-scrubbing, Morlockian women never spoke. Runyon liked to call them little people, and I once saw him raise a beer and say, “I’d like to thank all the little people, especially the one that mopped the puke off the landing Saturday morning while I was still blissfully passed out.”

Before the album side was finished playing I had to rouse myself to answer another knock. Now it was Karen Rothenberg and Euclid Barnes. Karen and Euclid were friends of Moira’s, from Worthell House, and I suppose they were mine also. Now they were also customers—had been, already, during the three-day binge surrounding Arthur’s arrival. Euclid was a tall, soft junior with loose dark bangs that tumbled into his eyes. He was resignedly, mopily gay, never found anyone to have sex with, complaining bitterly of his isolation in Vermont. Karen was his protector and solicitor, a dark-haired, heavy girl who wore gothy makeup and affected a jaded exhaustion. In relentlessly pitching Euclid at various boys it seemed to me Karen was really protecting herself from a terror of her own desires. One desultory three A . M., weeks ago—which was to say, in Camden time, eons past—I’d fended off a double advance from Karen and Euclid. Now they were both openly obsessed with Arthur, the wild child of Brooklyn.

Euclid shook out of his pea coat and threw it over a chair, then immediately began fumbling with his cigarettes. “What are you listening to?” he said.

“Genesis,” I said.

“Nonsense, this sounds nothing like Genesis. Take it off.”

“Where’s Moira?” said Karen.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“She said she’d meet us here.”

“Okay, but I didn’t hear about it.”

Karen plopped herself on the couch at Arthur’s feet, startling him from his doze. This spree might be more wearing for him than I’d realized.

“I’m absolutely tapped,” Euclid muttered around his cigarette. He tossed four twenties onto the dresser. “My parents are late with a check, blame them. This has to be the last.”

“We’re almost out anyway,” I said. Arthur was sitting up, rubbing his eyes.

Euclid frowned, disapproving my unworldliness. “Isn’t there always more?” His eyes slid to Arthur, now understood to be cocaine’s personal escort in its inevitable passage from New York to Camden. For the first time it occurred to me this needn’t be a one-time thing. I’d thought of my dealerhood as a kind of paraphrase, a larkish appropriation of Runyon and Bee, upstairs. But then maybe Runyon and Bee had been ironic when they began too.

“This music is agony. It sounds like troll music.”

“What’s troll music?” said Arthur.

“It’s the music trolls listen to,” said Euclid. He shook his head to show that if you didn’t understand this it couldn’t be explained. “I always predicted Dylan and Matthew would succumb to the pressure of living in Oswald, but I’m sorry to see it happen so quickly.”

“This place is a hotbed of trolls,” I agreed.

“Ooh, play this, I like this,” said Karen, sing-songing for her pleasure like a child. She’d been flipping through a pile of LPs and now held up the Psychedelic Furs.

“Dang, I hate that shit,” said Arthur with dopey sincerity, and we all laughed.

“Do it yourself,” I told Karen. She replaced one record with the other, then cranked the volume. Richard Butler snarled Yaaah fall in love and as if on that cue Moira came in without knocking and joined us there as we sat, all of us on my bed now, while Arthur sliced lines of coke on a duct-taped scrap of sheet steel Matthew and I had liberated from the welding studios. In four days Arthur had come a long way toward the Camden manner of dealing cocaine, the casual sampling which surrounded every act of throwing down bills as Euclid had just done. In Arthur’s idiom the dealer was meant to be above partying with his customers, but that distinction was meaningless here.

I was happy to see Moira. The binge with Arthur and Runyon and Bee had been boyish, and I missed her. I was glad she’d invited herself with Euclid and Karen, glad she’d known to enter without knocking. In fact, as she slid in beside me, under that roar of guitars which made conversation unnecessary, I decided I probably loved her, that I’d need to be more than her confidante. In fact it would be two nights later, after Arthur had finally gone, that Moira and I slept together again, a costly mistake in a December of costly mistakes. Now I just smiled, assuming she felt what I did.

We all did lines. When Arthur objected that we’d given away too much I silenced him by buying an eighth myself with my share of our profits. In fact, everything I did was meant to chagrin Arthur. That I treated him so casually as my sidekick masked an obsession with Arthur’s witnessing eyes. While we did the lines Euclid and Karen plied Arthur with questions: Why were the laces on his shoes never done up? How he could walk with his jeans so low? Was anyone ever tempted to pull them down around his ankles? When Arthur looked to me for help in his bafflement, I looked away, pulled Moira closer, only laughed. See me get the girls, Arthur, and get the friends, and get the jokes, see how hip I am—if you’d grasped how I was on the brighter path all along you never would have thrown me over for Mingus. You and Mingus never would have thrown me over for one another. Arthur and I were still playing chess, two wretched nerds on his Pacific Street stoop, and now I’d toppled his queen but let him go on playing, hobbled and bound to lose. See, see? In another day or two I’d exile Arthur back to Brooklyn, to Robert Woolfolk. But first he had to take a good look at what he’d lost and I’d won.

It was five o’clock. The first wave of students would be lining up with their trays in the dining hall. The party at Crumbly wouldn’t be under way for hours but it was already dark and we were high and the music was loud. Our party was under way. Probably we’d skip dinner. If we were hungry Karen Rothenberg would be willing to drive us into town, we’d pile into her Toyota. Soon others would attach to our core, be led into the Apartment for drugs. We’d see Matthew, surely, and his new girlfriend, though she was a bore and making Matthew boring too, that was the consensus. We’d visit Runyon and Bee upstairs, tip back their six-foot lucite bong. Our ranks would grow, then split like a paramecium, we’d drink flavorless drinks, see all our friends and enemies, visit the dance floor, transmute yet remain ourselves. At some point Euclid would commit a sulky pass at Arthur, humiliating them both. Consoling Euclid would be a rich drama, occupying us deep into the dawn hours. Anyone could see it all coming and no one could possibly stop it and that was the beautiful thing. Friday night was open wide and writ in stone.

The cleaning woman barreled out with her body protecting her yellow bucket of cleaning supplies like a tiny fullback. She must have been cowering in the bathroom, her work completed, listening as the party developed, praying we’d disperse for dinner. Then, as the minutes ticked past, it would have dawned, with horror, that we weren’t going anywhere, that she had no alternative but to make her mad run. To get from Matthew’s room out of the apartment she needed to thread between the five of us arrayed on the bed and the couch, and sidestep a heap of LPs Karen had spread across the floor. This she did very nimbly, with the harried grace of prey. She might have muttered Excuse me, but not audibly. Whether she’d understood the references in our talk, or the scrape of razor against steel, she evidenced understanding by her fear, the way she’d dunned her rabbity eyes against seeing as she passed through.

Then she was gone, leaving us shocked into silence under the buzz-saw music.

Karen dropped the rolled dollar she’d held and covered her mouth in theatrical astonishment.

Euclid spoke first: “What. Was. That. ”

“Ho, snap,” said Arthur. “That’s fucked up.”

“I totally forgot she was there,” I whispered to no one in particular, my mind reeling at the insane mistake.

“Did she see?” said Karen, her black-ringed eyes wide like a bird’s.

“Of course she saw,” said Moira. “What do you think ?”

We knew what we thought, but none of us knew what it meant. A famous Camden story—I was certain Moira at least also knew it—concerned a student dealer at Fish House, a few years earlier, who’d been discreetly warned by the school of an imminent bust by the Vermont Police. A sympathetic faculty member had suggested the dealer lock his door and take a long weekend off campus. The point being: Camden had a monumental stake in protecting us from tangles with the law. Talented and eccentric children shouldn’t be judged by society’s harsh adult standards. Let them be eased through their difficult years—this was the deal implicit in the huge tuition, and in the school’s quarantine deep in the woods.

So what did it mean if one of the little people knew I dealt coke from Oswald Apartment? Maybe nothing. She might not tell. She might not have caught the full implication, anyhow, might not have seen money change hands. It was easy to imagine nothing crucial had occurred, only something freakish and funny. I could hear Runyon’s voice in my head, urging me to understand it that way. I tried not to race through recollection of the words we’d said aloud, the words she might have overheard.

“Well, I consider it appalling,” said Euclid, breaking the long silence. “The notion of keeping a cleaning woman locked in your bathroom as some kind of sexual pawn. I can’t imagine how you thought you’d get away with it.”

“Ew, she was definitely not my sexual pawn,” I said.

“Of course she was,” said Euclid. “You and Arthur both, you’re animals. It’s lucky we created a diversion so she could escape. Were you even intending to give her any food? Were you even intending to give her any drugs ?”

“Hey, man,” said Arthur, getting with the joke now. “Everybody pays.”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” said Euclid.

“Well, I’m glad she’s gone,” said Karen. “Because I have to pee.”

“That would have been a shock,” said Moira.

“Go see if she built a fire,” directed Euclid. “She probably tried to send smoke signals, to others of her kind.”

“Maybe she ate the soap,” suggested Arthur.

The scandal passed, and we resumed our evening’s plot. When Matthew appeared, we recounted the story, competing to exaggerate the details: the woman’s demented scurry, Karen’s nearly wetting her pants, Arthur certain it was narcs and ready to swallow his stash. The five of us were still laughing about it over ten o’clock cassoulet at Le Cheval, courtesy of Karen Rothenberg’s mother’s Mastercard. The next day I described the incident to Runyon, who, as I’d expected, waved it off. And so it was forgotten.

Two weeks later Arthur’s visit was a distant memory for us all, folded behind a dozen other dramas. Moira and I had had our third fling and imploded in misunderstanding, each hurt in a way we could never have articulated, each consoled by newer friends. And as the campus, wreathed in cold and dark, prepared to shut down for the long winter break, the whole term just past dwindled into twee irrelevance. Where were you spending January, that was the question now. Mustique? Steamboat? Well, I was going to Dean Street, but never mind. The future hurtled toward us—who would be our new lovers, in February, when we returned? We had our eyes on a few alluring prospects, ones we’d somehow overlooked the first time. The past term was already mute, and our glories and mistakes there were mute as well.

That was how it felt the afternoon of my conference with my faculty advisor, Tom Sweden, the last day of classes. Sweden was also my sculpture teacher, and he was a typical Camden sculptor, a gruff, inarticulate chain-smoker in a permanent proletarian costume of work boots and plaster-clogged jeans, a bit of a Marlboro Man. We didn’t like one another—I had as much use for his romance of faux poverty and mock illiteracy as he did for mine of faux privilege and mock sophistication. Yet somehow I’d imagined my wit and vigor put Sweden on my side of a line dividing the hipster students and teachers from the square administration. I don’t really know why I thought this, except that I was drunk on college.

Sweden was seated in his wreck of an office in the basement of the arts complex, ringed in a chaos of scrap dowels, overrun ashtrays, and unsorted paperwork. When I arrived, ten minutes late, he was already scowling at a sheaf of pink forms, final evaluations from each of my four classes that term. So he knew, as I did, that I’d failed sociology outright and taken an incomplete from my English professor.

“This ain’t so great,” he said, wrinkling the papers.

“I’ll take care of the incomplete,” I said, approaching the meeting like a negotiation. “I’ve got the paper half-written.” I didn’t have it begun.

Sweden rubbed his bristly chin with stained fingers. Like Brando, he was superior to the part he was playing, and it pained him. He couldn’t fit his deep thoughts to the banal language at hand, so he only frowned.

“I was just more excited about sculpture this term,” I said, trying flattery.

“Yeah, but . . .” He trailed off, leaving us both guessing.

“And I passed Unorthodox Music,” I pointed out.

Sweden raised an eyebrow. “Dr. Shakti?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah, but that ain’t really a class, is it?”

If Sweden didn’t know he was the only one on campus. I kept silent.

“Was there anything . . .” Sweden kept glancing at the door. “Was there anything, ah, bothering you this term, Dylan?”

“No, I just think it was a period of adjustment and I’ll probably focus better when I come back. On classes and stuff. But nothing’s wrong.”

He scratched his chin again. Perhaps my little speech was enough to get us both out of the conference—he seemed to be weighing this. Then there came a knock on his door.

“Yeah, come in.” Sweden sounded disgruntled, but not surprised.

It was Richard Brodeur, president.

“I thought I’d just run these over myself,” he said, showing Sweden a clutch of folders. Sweden grunted, gestured at his desk. Brodeur dropped the folders into the mess there.