The End As I Know It

by Kevin Shay

  Eventually we reach the personal-history portion of the meal. Gina grew up in New Jersey, where her family still lives. Dad’s a bond trader in Manhattan. My stomach gives a quick flip of foreboding when I hear this. New York City. Deathtrap. Times Square on New Year’s Eve, half a million tipsy revelers, and the power dies—too horrible to think about. The only thing to prevent mass looting might be cold weather, but on the other hand, the worse the weather, the worse the desperation once the island runs out of food and water—

  I realize I have no idea what anyone has said for the past two minutes. I force myself to focus, set aside the calculations of calamity. Let’s put on the rose-colored glasses, just for tonight. Bond traders are savvy dudes. Gina’s father will be shrewd enough to recognize when it’s time to get the family out of harm’s way. Sure. That’ll happen. But anyway, pay attention. She’s talking about art school in Pasadena. Already, enough info has passed me by that I’m at risk of asking a question she just answered. That sort of thing can scuttle a guy’s chances. And damned if I haven’t started to think in terms of my chances.

  “So what’s Pasadena like?” I say, knowing “Little Old Lady From” will be running through my head for days. I pour more beer. Gina really does seem like a nice girl. Hannah looks on, observing the progress of her matchmaking with clinical detachment. Find me a find, catch me a catch. I cobble together a winning smile and paste it onto my face.

  We step out of the brewpub onto a well-lit street, ears ringing slightly from the band. Gina says she knows a bar close by, but Hannah pleads exhaustion. It turns out my hotel is right near where Gina lives, while Hannah has to take a bus the opposite way. Maybe Gina and I want to share a cab? She frames the question in such a way that either of us could politely decline. Neither of us does.

  “You going to the office tomorrow?” Hannah asks Gina.

  “Yeah, I was thinking I’d stop by. How about you?”

  “Oh, I guess I’ll put in an appearance.” It takes me a second to catch on to the sarcasm. Gina tactfully goes to find a cab, leaving Hannah and me alone to say goodbye.

  “Good to see you, Randall. How long you in town for?”

  “Probably just another day or two. I’m playing it by ear. Listen, this Y2K thing.”

  “What about it?”

  “You know, never mind. I’ll email you some links.”

  “OK, give me a call if you’re still around this weekend.”

  “I will.”

  After a couple of awkward feints, we come together for a quick, cold hug. “Take care of yourself, Randall.”

  “You too.”

  “And have a nice cab ride.” She cocks her head toward Gina in case I didn’t catch her meaning.

  Gina has procured a cab. We get in, wave to Hannah as we pull away. Gina directs the driver to my hotel.

  “You don’t want to have him drop you first?” I ask her.

  “Nah, I can walk from there, or whatever.” Yes, it’s the “whatever” option that intrigues me.

  I ask her if she likes it here. She’s lukewarm about her job but adores the city. Ridiculous opportunities in San Francisco right now, she says. So many companies, so much money flowing. “A couple of guys I know have been talking about starting up a nonprofit to work with charities. They’re thinking of, like, an e-commerce platform but for collecting donations. They’re working on the backend already.”

  “They’re programmers?”

  “Crazy programmers. Like, hardcore. They turn down offers from Sun and Oracle, like, every week.” It figures. The best and the brightest—and civic-minded, even—and are they doing the code remediation we need? No, they’re working on e-commerce for charities. No wonder we’re screwed. Jesus, can’t I just once have a five-minute conversation without thinking about this shit?

  The cab pulls up in front of the hotel. I reach toward the Plexiglas to pay the driver, but Gina has also taken out money. “Oh, I was gonna get it,” she says, gently grabbing my hand. First contact since our introductory handshake. It feels significant. I insist on paying. We get out.

  “Cute hotel,” she says. “I walk by here all the time, but I never noticed this building was, like, a little inn.”

  “Yep.”

  “I should have my folks stay here the next time they come. Is it nice inside?”

  That’s an invitation to an invitation if I ever heard one.

  “Oh, yeah, they’ve done a nice job with it.”

  Time to make a decision, then. Should have had less of that second pitcher of beer. Things are cloudy, fragmented. But let’s work this through. Woman A believes ex-boyfriend wants to sneak back into her life. Tries to solve the problem by pawning him off on Woman B. Thanks for playing, we have a lovely parting gift for you. He should be insulted, right? Going along with the scheme would be a blow to his dignity, no? But he wasn’t actually after Woman A in the first place. Does that make hooking up with Woman B more demeaning or less? Discuss.

  Oh, fuck it. I’m too tired to parse the situation. I’ve woken up alone in too many Holiday Inns. A few months from now we could all be dead, and here I stand worrying about salvaging self-respect from a failed romance? The cascading software failures won’t care if my pride is intact. The embedded chips won’t give a damn if I hate myself in the morning. No, hedonism, that’s the ticket. A perfectly reasonable response to knowing the world’s about to crash. Have some fun while things still run.

  “Well, if you feel like a nightcap,” I say, “I have some complimentary sherry upstairs.”

  chapter 7

  442

  Days

  Bonnie, Bonnie, Bonnie, I tell myself all the way up the steps to Rick Del Vecchio’s door. Rick’s new wife is Bonnie. Not Bobbie, his wife by common law for most of the fifteen-plus years I’ve known him. Bobbie, whose howling quarrels with Rick turned several of my childhood guitar lessons into exercises in dodging airborne pottery so as not to become a collateral casualty of their epic blood feud. Bobbie, who drank herself out of a driver’s license and into several hospital beds and finally all the way to some yoga-cult ashram in West Virginia. Bobbie is out of the picture. The woman who opens the door will be Bonnie, the sane and saintly woman who married Rick two years ago with full knowledge of the burden of his coming decline. Please, I beg myself, don’t call her Bobbie.

  When Rick told me he was moving to San Francisco, I assumed he’d end up in the heart of Haight-Ashbury, but here he is in a funny, couth little neighborhood called Bernal Heights. It feels like five square miles of suburbia condensed into five acres and tilted onto a hill. On the main drag a few blocks down from Rick’s house I saw two baby strollers, an octogenarian couple, a young lesbian couple, and dogs galore. A far cry from the tie-dyed life I pictured for him, squeezing out the last drops of the long-depleted Woodstock spirit with a bunch of fauxhemians a third his age who want to touch the hem of his garment (or, more likely, smoke him out) because he used to hang with Dylan. Rick was never a true creature of the sixties—too cynical for utopianism and too musically traditional for electric psychedelia. But he did have a weakness for the debauchery, the free love and jug wine and three unfiltered packs a day. So I’m relieved to find him in such a straight, quiet quarter of town, removed from the lifestyle that ate his health and killed half his friends.

  I reach the second-floor porch and ring Rick’s doorbell, yawning. Been awake since six this morning, when Gina left so she could get home, shower, and roll in to the office. She has an interesting day ahead of her, given that she and Hannah sit in adjacent cubicles. Not that Hannah will feel betrayed—it was her idea, after all—but it’s bound to be a delicate situation. I can’t help but feel a twinge of adolescent pride at having catalyzed such awkwardness. After Gina left I lay awake for several hours, wired, and by the time I started to doze it was almost checkout time. I can’t afford to splurge on any more nights at the inn, so either Rick and Bobbie—Bonnie!—will have room for me (they’ll offer even if they don’t) or it’s back t
o the motor-lodge circuit.

  The door swings open. “Hi,” Bonnie whispers. She tiptoes over the threshold to join me on the porch, eases the door closed behind her. “Randall, right? I’m Bonnie.”

  Not sure why the need for quiet, but no point speculating. When Rick’s involved, all possibilities are open. Bonnie is a robust outdoors type with a ruddy, weathered face and a head of unstyled graying frizz. She’s maybe forty, only twenty years younger than Rick, but Rick hasn’t looked a day under retirement age since I met him. I shake her hand. “Hi, Bonnie.” Should say her name as often as possible, train my tongue so “Bobbie” doesn’t slip out at a crucial moment. “Good to see you again.”

  “Right! You too.” She doesn’t remember we’ve met, probably has only the foggiest notion who I am. Rick’s not the kind of guy who’d think to brief his wife on guests before they arrive.

  “We met at the picnic in Concord, the reception.”

  “Oh! Of course.” Clearly I still don’t ring a bell. Which is understandable. What passed for their wedding reception, after a justice of the peace joined them in matrimony, consisted of a few dozen of Rick’s closest acquaintances sweltering in a field near the Old North Bridge of Minutemen fame on a sticky ninety-five-degree day. You’d stretch facts to call it a picnic. Someone brought chips and soda. Nobody had thought of chairs. Rick and Bonnie held court at the base of a tree. Cantabridgian folkies and artisans and hangers-on filed by to pay their respects, then fled the heat after the minimum length of time decorum required. I remember Bonnie looking dazed by all the attention, and a little lost with so many people present on the groom’s side and so few on hers. She’d moved to Massachusetts only a few years before, spent most of her time since then traveling in South America as a photojournalist, and didn’t have much of a social network. Rick has no living family he’s ever mentioned, so Bonnie had no in-laws to get to know, only this motley conglomeration of local characters to meet and greet. A sweaty, unfestive affair, but what can you expect from a wedding planned four days in advance?

  “So listen, when you go in, just kind of keep your voice down. Rick’s on the phone for a radio interview.”

  “Ah. Would it be better if I wait out here?”

  “No, no, come in. Just don’t, you know, shout hello or anything.”

  The front of the apartment is one large room, with the kitchen delimited by a single wall and a big hardwood island. Uncluttered, coherently furnished. That must be Bonnie’s doing. You could barely put your feet down in Rick and Bobbie’s cyclone-blasted living room, which had twice as much furniture as it could comfortably hold, no piece matching any other, and an outrageous assortment of tchotchkes of all nations—“my souvenirs,” Bobbie called this dusty collection. And look, another first for Rick: the pictures on the walls are framed. Including a few nice black-and-white photos, maybe Bonnie’s own work.

  “So this is our place, such as it is,” Bonnie whispers. From further back in the apartment I hear the hard-to-mistake strains of Rick’s high, pockmarked voice.

  “It’s very nice,” I whisper. I follow her past the kitchen into a hallway. She opens a door opposite the bathroom and flips on the light. “The Chamber of Horrors,” she says. Rick’s music room. So I see she hasn’t rid him of his slovenly tendencies, just confined them. The room brims with record albums, notebooks, recording equipment, and instruments: four guitars on wall-mounted hooks, three on floor stands, and a banjo, a mandolin, and a ukulele thrown in for good measure. Built-in bookshelves line two of the walls, each shelf tightly crammed, stacks on top of rows. I recognize the battered volumes of ballad lyrics I once spent many a fond hour poring over, from songs of the Civil War to obscene Scottish ditties Rick shouldn’t have let me read. For homework he had me set some of these alien stanzas to music. The forgettable melodies that resulted were an early indication that I shouldn’t set my sights on a songwriting career.

  “Are you spending the night? You could stay in here.”

  “I haven’t quite, um—”

  “No need to make up your mind right now. Anyway, we have an air mattress. I can shovel you out some floor space. Or there’s the sofa, if you’d rather.”

  “That’s great. Thank you.”

  She turns out the light and continues to the bedroom door at the end of the hallway. “Right…that was 1973, I believe,” I hear Rick say behind the door. Bonnie gingerly eases it open and nudges me inside.

  It’s a large bedroom, windows on three sides. The shades are drawn on the side windows, which must look directly out on the neighboring houses, but the rear windows have a great hilltop view of the city. Rick sits in an armchair by one of these windows, holding a cordless phone to his ear. And wow, does he look like hell.

  “I don’t know if I’d put it that way,” he says. “But certainly at that time—” He sees me and indicates I should come in and sit. “You see, on that record we had set out to do more of a re-creation of the sound of the Old West traveling minstrels. Shooting for, you might say, period authenticity, at least as far as instrumentation.” He holds up a “With you in a minute” finger. I take a seat on the bed.

  “And that’s always a dual-edged sword. You see, among other things, I am not much enamored of the pennywhistle.” Rick’s voice still has a mesmerizing effect on me. I could close my eyes and listen for hours, but I force myself to look him up and down, evaluate his unfamiliar appearance. Objectively, I guess he doesn’t look so bad that you’d gawk at him on the street. But by contrast with my mental image of his healthier self, he’s in bad shape. Skin distinctly sallow in the bright sunlight. And many pounds thinner—not emaciated, but he hasn’t updated his wardrobe for his new weight, and his plaid shirt hangs off him. The ungainly plastic glasses he’s worn ever since he broke one too many pairs of wire-frames look more outsized than ever, and his wispy white hair has that yellow tinge I associate with homelessness. Most disturbing is the slack, boneless way he leans back against the chair, taking all the support he can get. I never knew him to carry on a phone conversation without pacing like a tethered puppy.

  He finishes talking and listens attentively. From his long silence, I suspect the interviewer is one of those know-it-all music mavens who asks multiparagraph “questions” primarily designed to showcase his own erudition.

  “First of all,” Rick says at last, then stops. “Mm-hm. Right.” Apparently the question wasn’t quite finished. He grimaces at me as the interviewer plods on for another twenty seconds.

  “Aha! I was worried you wouldn’t ask me about Dylan. I have a small running wager, you see.” And Rick gamely recounts for the thousandth time his small batch of anecdotes about the goofy-looking kid from Minnesota who showed up in Manhattan with his guitar one day. Along with Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Dave Van Ronk, and a few other fixtures on the burgeoning Village folk-revival scene, Rick helped transform young Bob from wet-behind-the-ears Woody Guthrie worshipper into iconic genius and spokesman for his generation. Or so the story goes, and it’s a story the press will never let any of those guys stop telling. Never mind that Rick hasn’t heard a word from Mr. Zimmerman since before I was born. In every review, every interview, like clockwork: Rick Del Vecchio, mentor to Bob Dylan in his early days. How did you first run into Bob Dylan? Rick Del Vecchio, who schooled Bob Dylan in the folk tradition. What were your first impressions of Bob Dylan? By now he’s stopped trying to fight it, resigned to the fact that Bob Dylan’s name will be in the subhead of Rick Del Vecchio’s obituary.

  “Did I feel betrayed? Of course not! At Newport—what those few people did was ridiculous, completely.” Ah, the obligatory rehashing of the Dylan-goes-electric episode. Interviewers who haven’t done their homework assume from Rick’s own meticulously traditional recordings that he must have sided with the anti-electric crowd. But he has an ecumenical ear, and instantly recognized Dylan’s postfolk records as masterpieces. I’ve heard him do hilarious impressions of the pissy Sing Out! purists, many of them his friends at the time, and their
impotent outrage.

  “But you see, you have to consider that he was crossing two lines, not just a musical one but a political one. Please understand, some of these people, the Irwin Silbers and so forth—you had such a level of self-importance attached to the folk movement.” He laces the phrase with venom. “They honestly believed they were changing the world! So, you know, they needed Dylan as a protest singer, a figurehead.”

  The whole situation makes me sad. You practice and tour and record your whole life, release two dozen albums and write a hundred songs, and forty years down the road they’re still asking you about the long-ago career moves of some other guy.

  Then again, it’s hardly the media’s fault Rick’s career didn’t outgrow Dylan’s shadow. He never strove for popularity, never adjusted his music to increase his audience. Instead he swam against the tide, journeying backward to ever-earlier folk ballads and country blues while the scene around him got loud and trippy and 64-tracked. He may have loathed the kneejerk Luddites, but he hated commercialism more, and if Dylan had plugged in for financial gain and not for artistic evolution he’d have cried “sellout” louder than anyone. Rick has always made exactly the music he wanted to make, and the public could take it or leave it. Mostly they’ve left it. So here he is, at the end of it all, doctor bills he can’t pay piling up and nary a gold record to his name. If he’d ever gotten any gold records, he’d have hocked them for booze sometime in the eighties.