Sway

by Zachary Lazar

  A sudden rise onto his toes, seizing the microphone. A quick spasm that jerks his head upright and carries out into his back-stretched arms. A lazy slouch, hips slung to the side, one hand up, one down, drunken and sliding. A pause before he rights himself, turning his head and clapping, a sideways glance at no one, guarding his space.

  It turns out that the point of touring is speed. Time moves faster and faster, the moments bunching up on top of one another, so that it’s difficult to experience any of them as real. To stay awake, they take pep pills, the same pep pills that performers have been taking for years, but it affects each of them in different ways. Onstage, Brian has started to smile between postures of menace. He’s started to act a little bit like a pop star, standing with his feet apart, raising his eyebrows wistfully when he plays harmonica. It’s mostly a joke, except when he gets frantic and starts vying with Mick. He winks at the girls as they’re carted off on stretchers, grins at them as they pull out their hair. The speed gives him an intense feeling of focus for a while, a sense of presence and wit, until the details get exaggerated to such enormous proportion and significance that time becomes impossibly dense. His face stares out into the crowd and either acknowledges them or shrugs them off, it’s never quite clear. It’s a face he’s had all his life, one that has molded his personality, and now it’s a face that carries him as the personality begins to fade.

  Backstage, the girls hover around him — the assertive, the shy, the fat and devoutly hopeful. He speaks to them in a faint, spacey lisp, mixing good manners with a sudden spice of profanity. They let him do whatever he wants, but they’re not seeing him, they’re seeing what they’d imagined they’d see, some projection of their awe. They can seem like predators, especially the shy ones, and he begins to take Pleasure in the ways he makes them leave: feigning a helpless, melancholy fugue that requires immediate solitude. Retreating into the toilet to emerge a few minutes later as an older, businesslike stranger. Pouring himself a drink, then tossing their clothes out the door in a pile and telling them to get out before he calls the front desk.

  When he misses another show in Newcastle, their manager, Andrew, has a talk with Mick and Keith. They don’t realize that Andrew has taken a sharp, animal dislike to Brian, almost from the moment of their first meeting. It’s the fact that he’s vulnerable and arrogant at the same time, the fact that he gets so many girls. In the dressing room, Andrew tells Mick and Keith that according to his records Brian has been paying himself an extra five pounds for every show.

  Keith punches a hole through the dressing room wall. He can’t speak; he has to leave and stand in the alleyway, staring at the dampness that steams and drips off the black stone building. His anger and disgust are compounded by the apprehension that this stupid rivalry among them is somehow at the heart of their sound. It’s a sound that even Bo Diddley has told him would make them famous if they persevered. But he knows that the sound starts with him, that the drums follow the lead of his guitar so that the backbeat always comes just a millisecond late, lazy and blunt and stamped with his imprint.

  “Forget it,” he says to Mick a few minutes later. “Now’s not the time to fuck around.”

  “Not now,” says Andrew. “But when we get back to London, we’re going to sit him down, have a little palaver.”

  “I think we should do it now,” says Mick. “How much longer are we going to carry him?”

  “He has style,” says Andrew. “Do you know how to speak like he does? I don’t think so. Brian speaks like Hollywood.”

  “It’s two guitars,” says Keith. “That’s what I’m talking about.”

  “We need his bloody face,” says Andrew. “His image.”

  “Image?” says Mick.

  They arrive in America and are treated like a comedy act, a scrofulous, second-rate version of the Beatles. A deejay drives them around Detroit in a convertible Ford while a loudspeaker plays their songs to empty streets. Their songs are too much like American songs, too raw and unmelodic, and they seem on the verge of failing once again, faking their way through an America they’d always imagined as their rightful home. They pose like teen idols with a circus elephant in California.

  But it turns out they’ve only gotten started. The tour will go on for much longer than they’d expected — in fits and starts, it will go on for another three years — and they will have no time to assess what has happened or how they’ve changed. They play a week of sold-out dates in London, and everything reverts to violence. The fans charge the stage, smash the instruments, pull off the band’s clothes. Every show erupts in a riot. When they make their way into Europe, the tour becomes like a military exercise: attack dogs, tear gas, truncheons, armored vans. They see through their limousine windows a row of cars with flames rising from the hoods, coalescing into startling blossoms of thick, dark smoke. In Paris, the fans are joined by student mobs who smash windows and throw cobblestones at the mounted police.

  In West Berlin, Brian gets sick and spends two days in bed. He misses the entire city, doesn’t see the Reichstag or the rubble of Potsdamer Platz or the newly erected Wall. He dreams of stray dogs running through the rubble of a blacked-out London, taking cover beneath the piles of beams and crumbled stones. He wakes with a smothered sense of distance that makes it difficult for him to move. It comes as an ironic surprise, how ill-equipped he is for this life he’s always wanted. He has an odd relapse of his childhood asthma, a sudden fluttering in his heart that leaves him light-headed. He misses all four shows, and Keith has to fill up all that space with only one guitar.

  But it doesn’t really matter what Keith plays anymore, it doesn’t matter if he plays at all. The crowd is screaming. The stage is overrun before the first song is over, and the band races for the limousines through the fire door. The next single goes to number three.

  All Brian can think to do is push himself harder. He splashes water on his face, steels himself with liquor and barbiturates, liquor and speed.

  When the tour makes its next brief stop in England, Andrew locks Mick and Keith in his back bedroom and tells them they can’t come out until they’ve composed an original song. He doesn’t mention any of this to Brian. He explains that this is the next step, the way they will be like the Beatles. It’s where the real money is anyway, not in some five extra pounds on a package tour of England.

  The short film Invocation of My Demon Brother had its premiere at the end of 1969. The images rush by like a strobe light, rapidly intercut, sometimes superimposed: Mick Jagger’s face, Keith Richards’s face, the face of Bobby Beausoleil, a rock musician whom nobody would have heard of at the time. In the film, there is a violent merging, a trance, all of their images blurred into one. The filmmaker, an older man named Kenneth Anger, is shown conducting an occult ceremony while helicopters land in Vietnam; Hells Angels menace fans at a Rolling Stones concert; a nightmare begins to unfold. Within months of the film’s release, Bobby Beausoleil would appear for the first time in newspapers in the company of Charles Manson — he had committed the first of the Manson murders. That same week, a fan would be killed by Hells Angels at a Stones concert at Altamont Speedway. The sixties would come to an end.

  An invocation draws forces in. It can lead to an evocation, which spits the forces back out.

  — from Dream Plays: A History of Underground Film

  The dream starts with Bobby Beausoleil, the would-be star. He’s walking by himself at night, his clothes soaked through to the skin, cuts on his hands. People hurry by with bowed heads beneath umbrellas, water pools on the sidewalks, lights burn dimly in the liquor stores and bars. Bobby thinks about how he used to know people like that, but now they don’t see him, the hunch-shouldered kid with his hands in his pockets, the runaway fingering his change.

  The entrance to the theater is a tiny vestibule of darkness that seeps into his lungs, a musk of cigarettes and mold. He finds the gap in the heavy blackout curtains and pushes them open with both hands. Before him, the screen is enormous, mayb
e six stories high, far enough away that a fog of blue light seems to waft in the air before it. He goes up to the balcony, where a few people whose faces he recognizes are passing around a skull-shaped pipe. Ron, Carol, Sharon. They stare at him but don’t say hello.

  He sits down by himself, his face hidden in the darkness, his hands cold and stinging where they’re cut. Hanging from the ceiling is a silver eagle gripping a swastika in its talons. The theater is more like a warehouse or a hangar, he sees now, with catwalks on the ceiling, lights hung from girders, condensation trickling from the gridwork. He recognizes it without knowing from where, a forgotten part of some recurring dream.

  The lights go out. There is total darkness. Then a pale half-moon of light slowly rises over a man on a stage before the screen, accompanied by a sound like the purr of distant helicopters. At the man’s feet, there is a blue nimbus of fog. He raises his arms, extends them fully so that his heavy sleeves form the shape of a cross. In his left hand he holds a wand. Above him, on the screen, a shirtless boy sits and stares. He seems barely awake, his hair and sideburns dyed a lifeless white, his pupils moving sightlessly in the slits of his eyes.

  The man’s face suddenly appears onscreen, six stories high, staring right at Bobby. He wears mascara and green eye shadow. He seems to have deliberately made himself ugly, a zodiac glyph traced in ash on his forehead. He starts to dance in a slow shimmy, his arms extended, the wand still in his hand, his chest heaving in and out, eyes defiantly fixed straight ahead. Every time the body on the stage moves, the body onscreen moves in the same way.

  The music gets louder, more insistent. It’s a cacophony of noise — a tank’s engine, a helicopter’s blades, a satellite’s bleep, a missile’s thrust. The man takes off his hat, throws it into the seats. He puts his hands on his hips and rotates them back and forth, angrily staring straight ahead. He cups one hand behind his ear and one down by his waist, vamping, jutting his pelvis, then switches hands in rhythm. The credits roll.

  A film by Anger.

  Invocation of My Demon Brother.

  THE EMPRESS, 1928–1947

  HIS MOTHER CARRIED KENNETH past the olive trees, the backyard sprig of bougainvillea. The colors blurred and seared. His last name was Anglemyer. Later he would change it to Anger. Even in those years of the Depression, his mother spoiled him, buying him drawing paper, movie magazines, comic books, cutout paper dolls.

  While his father saved, they lived in his grandmother’s house in Santa Monica. Hollywood wasn’t far. His mother and his grandmother talked about movie stars, Hollywood stories Kenneth could only partly understand. Once, his grandmother took a sugar cube, soaked it in bitters, placed it at the bottom of a glass, then filled the glass with champagne. “It’s called a champagne cocktail,” she said, letting Kenneth taste. It was only a few months later that she left. In one of the first painful mysteries of his life, she moved in with a thin, dark-haired woman named Meg, who worked in the production department of MGM Pictures.

  It became his father’s house after that. His older siblings — terse, industrious — were already in his father’s sway. He was a silent man who worked as a mechanical engineer. When he wasn’t at the office, he made things on a lathe in the garage: tables, chairs, wooden stools. Amid the carpenter’s benches and the table saw, the utility lamps with their dangling cords, the three children would sometimes watch him work, and he would explain each step of what he was doing, tapering the spindles for a chair back or molding the hinges of a drawer. Sometimes he would allow them to hammer in dowels or turn the drill axle, peering with a surgeon’s gravity over their shoulders at the instrument they held in their hands. “Watch it from the side,” he would say. “The angle. You’re about to come in at an angle.”

  Kenneth daydreamed. His grandmother and her companion, Meg, showed a special interest in him that they could only feign toward his older siblings. They took him to the movies, the theater adorned with African designs, its walls broken up by enormous pillars carved with conga drums and crossed spears. There they watched epics from the Bible: bare-chested men, their muscles accentuated with grime and sweat, struggling with hard, implacable women who wore coiled bracelets in the shape of serpents. In science-fiction movies, men in skintight suits wandered Mars, stalked to the edge of madness by sentient beings who took form as blurs of light. There was a film set in Mexico, on the Day of the Dead, in which peasants ate candy skeletons and danced ecstatically under glowing torches. Skeletons in shrouds moved in carts beneath flames, while the living exulted in their own bodies, or suffered agonies of religious grief, or strutted clownishly in the abject shamelessness of their poverty.

  Even as a child, he suspected that there was another world being concealed from him by a mother and father who had conspired to lead lives of convention and disguise. The movies gave him clues about lives they had chosen to disown, or perhaps lived out at night when he was not there to see them.

  At dinner, there would be a pot roast surrounded by potatoes, which sat directly before the father. Nearer the children were bowls of beets and beet greens, white bread and butter. His mother would talk about the neighborhood women, the book club, the chatter at the bridge game. The father would interject terse commands: Kenneth, fork. Napkins. Sometimes he would strike the table. Sometimes the meal would be interrupted for a round of spankings.

  It was a ritual that started in dread and then accrued a kind of hysterical momentum. Each warning would lead to more noise, more pinching under the table, more desperate squealing and giggling. Kenneth would howl and grin, his legs twitching beneath the table, leering eyes fixed on his father. It was always as if the father would single out only one of them. The game was to plead helplessness, giddy innocence, as if innocence had a meaning or a value once the game began.

  He would send them all to their rooms, where he would make them wait until he finished his meal. Kenneth would sit on the edge of his bed and bury his face between his knees, breathing. In this self-imposed darkness the fear would become an unwelcome kind of yearning, guilty and hopeless. His hands would grip the backs of his legs through the fabric of his jeans. He would imagine himself in a rough cave lit by a fire, a vision from the movies. On the cave’s back wall, a man struggled in chains, a few narrow cuts across his chest. Then he would see himself and his brother wrestling in the driveway, their hands joined in struggle, Kenneth’s head buried in his brother’s armpit. It would end with Kenneth grinding a rock into his brother’s knuckles.

  His father smelled like alcohol and cloves, the scent of aftershave. There was something almost shy about the way he entered the room, adjusting his glasses and clearing his throat, then telling Kenneth to take down his pants. Kenneth could not look at him. He felt detached from himself as he unbuttoned his jeans and pulled them down around his ankles, covering himself with his hands. Without speaking, his father removed his belt, then he bent Kenneth over his knee and beat him methodically with a small length of the doubled-over leather, breathing through his nose. He did it without emotion or even interest. Perhaps worse than the pain itself was the sullen intimacy of his lap, his rigid grip on Kenneth’s back, the idea that Kenneth couldn’t see his father’s face.

  Kenneth thought of the dinner table: the plates a dull white that showed their scratches in the bright light, the tablecloth olive green and mustard yellow. He saw the jelly glasses that he and his siblings used, the faceted garnet-colored goblets for his parents. It was a kind of ceremony: that was why his mother pinned up her hair and put on a clean dress, but also why his father was allowed to unbutton and roll up his sleeves.

  The blows came in a slow, precise rhythm that made Kenneth buck and kick. He became smaller and less aware of himself, reduced finally to the smallest pinpoint of whoever he was. When it was over, he lay curled up in the corner of his bed, wheezing and lost. His jeans were still down around his ankles, his warm skin exposed to the air.

  “Relax,” his father said. “Let’s try to calm down now. Let’s try to settl
e down and get some sleep.”

  When he left, Kenneth opened his eyes to the room he lived in. There were his careful drawings of Japanese scholars, of geishas with piled hair held in place by lacquered sticks. There were the cutouts of Flash Gordon and Aquaman, the illustrations from The Wizard of Oz. He turned to look at the marks on his buttocks, nursing them with his fingers. In the bronze light of his bedroom lamp, the pictures on his wall had been transformed. They were witnesses to this secret bond he shared with his father.

  It was his grandmother’s friend Meg who got him a small part in a movie adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. At first, he and some other kids in different costumes ran up and down a cellophane-wrapped staircase, reaching up for girls in cellophane dresses who were lifted away on guy wires. Next, they frolicked aimlessly in a forest of artificial trees. There was an odd stop-start quality to it all, a vacant pause between brief snatches of play. They ran with their hands at right angles to their hips, crouched or fell to the ground in laughter, teased one another in smiling pairs. The play began to feel important. They became immersed in it, aware of themselves as children. It was as if they each had unique talents that it was now their duty to exaggerate. Kenneth found himself running around the trees, faster and faster, waving his hands like wings above his head until he was shouting. By then, he was dizzy from the fumes, the acrid smell of shellac, the bright reflections of the lights.

  Afterward, in the costume room, they chose him for a special role: the Changeling Prince. He didn’t know what this role involved or even what the story was about. He stood in a shiny plastic suit with three strands of pearls over his chest, a thicker strand around his neck, and two rhinestone earrings that dangled to his chin line. On his head was a turban that culminated in a spray of white ostrich feathers.

  He would watch it a half-dozen times in the theater with his grandmother and Meg. Here was the important moment: the woman who played Titania lifting him onto her knee, her body softened by a fill light so that there was no distinction between the beaded fringes of her sleeves and the silver spray of hair that descended like a shawl to her waist. She and Kenneth were in close-up, his dark hair and small features nearly as Asiatic as his rounded turban. The plastic trees and flowers radiated a light that had nothing to do with any actual season or time of day. Onscreen, his body and the woman’s body were hardly bodies at all, more like figments. Gone was any vestige of the actual soundstage: no smell of shellac or hairspray, no visible trace of his own anxious joy.