Anger turned away. He looked at the branches above his face, oak branches that were so still they were almost artificial-looking in the moonlight. When the breeze came, the leaves moved like lifeless hands, shaking and stopping, shaking and stopping. He waited to hear Mick walk off, wherever he was going, then headed in the opposite direction. The pale leaves jostled on their branches, a mimicry of living movement that was utterly without mind. All he could see of the porch and the people on it were vague, elongated shadows, almost like mirages, disturbing the glow from the candles.
He was awakened the next morning by the sound of rifle fire. There was no clock in the room, nothing to orient him at all but the dark mahogany bed and the Gothic chairs that reminded him he was at Keith and Anita’s house. When he looked out the window, he saw the abandoned lawn, a plush rolling green that led out to the trees and the moat and the lake beyond. It was a sunny day. There was a quilt left out on the grass, a single leather sandal, a whiskey bottle with a black-and-white label, nothing else. He heard the rifle again: a firecracker pop elongated by its report. It was coming from out in the fields or in the trees where he’d been last night. He realized then: it was just Keith, Keith and his friends out playing with their guns.
He looked across the room at the wrinkled shopping bag he had brought with him yesterday. In the bag were two top hats. One was black like the one Bobby had worn in San Francisco. The other was an Uncle Sam hat with red and white stripes and a blue brim. He held them both in his hands, looking down at them quizzically. He had brought them to give to Mick, props for the Lucifer film, but also stage props for the band’s American tour. They would be good for large crowds, visible from a long distance. He could see Mick onstage in either of them, moving toward the microphone, raising his fist. The devil in the top hat — they were associated somehow. The god of power — money, politics, war. The sly, sophisticated con man who in the end was just a bewildering reflection of all the people who were looking at him.
Something hit the gutter on the eave above his window. It clanked down onto the stone porch below, then rattled for a few seconds and stopped: an empty tin can. From the distant fields, there was another round of rifle fire. Were they shooting at the house?
THE LOVERS, 1969
FOR MORE THAN A YEAR, Bobby had just been drifting, moving up and down the coast, playing music in bars, not thinking very much about where it would lead. He had managed to keep some of his musical instruments, some of his good clothes, the black top hat he liked to wear onstage. He had pawned almost everything else he had of value, including the 16 mm camera he’d stolen from Anger, which had brought him less than forty dollars. No one had offered money for the Lucifer film, and so he’d just kept it for a while, moving it from place to place, not knowing what to do with it, until eventually he’d lost it, like so many other things, still thinking it might be worth something someday.
In his ruffled sleeves and top hat, he bent over his guitar now, his legs crossed, listening through his hair for the underlying pattern in the endless, coiling melody Charlie was playing. Beside him, Charlie looked feral, his face and hair visibly grimy, black grit beneath his broken fingernails. He was moving through a strange progression of chords, his song at first a blur of lullaby and muted groans, then an improvised poem that, like the music itself, made no literal sense but was full of suggestions: a desert road, darkness over the Santa Susana Pass, a night ride into the city, clouds passing over Devil’s Canyon. They had just recently met, so Bobby wasn’t used to this phenomenon of Charlie being the uneasy center of the room whether people were looking at him or not. They were in a Mission-style house in Benedict Canyon, not far from Beverly Hills, at a fashionable party full of record industry minions and full-fledged stars. In the living room, the girls Charlie had brought with him all wore five-inch Buck knives fastened to their belts. They were sunburnt, their clothes stained, their hair tied back with bits of string, and this raggedness made everyone in the house aware of them — anonymous girls who looked alike, sweetly vacant, conspiring. Bobby could see his girlfriend, Kitty, in the darkness in the corner of the room, huddled next to another girl named Leslie. Kitty’s fingers were entwined in a cheap necklace on the floor between her feet. He didn’t know how to read anything about her anymore, whether she was really lost or just manipulating him by acting lost. He leaned in and tried to follow the unpredictable curves of Charlie’s music, the most unusual music he had ever played. He used all the technique he had to make the song even stranger, elongated and off-center, avoiding the simple pentatonic scales of blues and rock for the mysterious spirals of the Dorian mode, the Mixolydian mode. The music reflected back a range of tensions in the room, all the social hierarchies that no one wanted to admit existed anymore, drawing them out, magnifying them. It was not aggressive — it had an ethereal, dreamy sound — but it spread a malevolence that came at first as a faint surprise, then blossomed into something so familiar that it seemed obvious. It was the music of dim rooms, of red wine in gallon jugs. It was the music of slow violence unfurling in a secluded house in Benedict Canyon.
It was an amorphous party in the style of the time, a place an intruder could walk into without much chance of detection, much less confrontation. People were gathered in the kitchen, surrounded by ashtrays and bottles, and every bedroom had a shrouded group whispering in the shifting glow of tea lamps inside paper sacks. When he’d first seen Charlie tonight, Bobby had been fighting with Kitty in the backyard, struggling with her wrists in his hands, trying to wrestle her into being quiet. She was spitting insults at him in a muffled shout, scattered and fierce, and he’d turned to see a small figure in the darkness at the edge of the bushes, his hands crossed behind his waist, his long hair and slightly hunched figure somehow suggesting a crone beneath a shawl. When he stepped closer, his angular face was like a daguerreotype from a hundred years ago, a bearded man in deerskin pants and shirt. He gestured at his forehead, pointing with his index finger, and told Bobby to stop acting like a pimp, some low-life pimp slapping his whore around in an alley. There was a small moment of jockeying over how serious he was being. It was hard to see Charlie’s face beneath his hair in the darkness. But as he stepped closer it became clear that he wasn’t joking, that he didn’t like what he was looking at, his eyes appraising Bobby and Kitty with a barely curious scrutiny, as if unsurprised by the lack of anything interesting or distinctive there. Bobby adjusted the top hat on his head, letting Kitty go, and she pushed her hair behind her ear, embarrassed but oddly still as Charlie stood in front of her, one hand on her shoulder, the other one caressing her cheek. He was the comforter now, menacingly strange, his stern face somehow enhancing the biblical overtones of the pose. It was a con, Bobby felt certain of that, but he didn’t object, sensing some cynical game just beginning to unfold, knowing that if Charlie had seen through him, then he had at least seen through Charlie too.
It was September 9, three days before the band was to leave for the American tour. They had finished one album, the next one was already in progress, and Keith was sitting outside his house on a plain wooden kitchen chair, playing his guitar. It was early afternoon and the sun was hitting everything at a tilted angle, the wind tossing the boughs of the trees, filling the air high above him with a sound like thousands of rattling plastic bags. Some friends were playing golf on the lawn, using plastic balls that wafted back toward them in wild curves. He looked out at the old carpets on the grass, the shabby furniture, all the things he would be leaving behind for the next three months, and all of it looked perfect. The golf cart sagged in the high grass beside the moat, a purple banner trailing behind it like a giant, colored serpent coiling in the wind.
“You don’t even see me sometimes,” Anita would say. But it wasn’t true, he saw her all the time. She was upstairs now, getting her things into suitcases, the bedroom a heap of clothes and jewelry, magazines and cosmetics. He could see her standing with her hips canted forward, one hand on her thigh, the other on her cheek, l
ooking down with pensive hostility at the mess. She was not coming on the tour. She was going to a drug clinic in St. John’s Wood.
She had given him a lot of things to forgive lately. She had slept with half the people he knew — that was what he had signed on for, he knew that. She had even slept with Mick, because she was crazy, or just to hurt Keith, or possibly just because she wanted to. She was threatened by Keith in some way. Maybe she had reason to feel threatened, because after all he had forgiven her even for Mick. She didn’t have as much power to faze him as she’d thought. He had forgiven everything except the scene last week, when she had taken too much heroin and blacked out for close to an hour.
Every sound had a slight flange to it, a little sag at the middle, as if he was manipulating time, bending it and stretching it. He chopped out a rhythm of big chiming chords and heard all the textures of the different notes lined up in rows. It was a sad song, but it didn’t feel sad to play it. There was nothing that needed to be done right now, nothing he could do anyway, nothing but the sight and sound of his friends beneath the trees and the ability to communicate it through the notes of his guitar. He was high in a way that slowed down the apprehension of sound just enough for him to hear little textures beneath the surface, a graininess of copper wire, steel wire. If music was just an escape — an evasion of “reality” — then how did you account for this moment when the wind and the light on the trees and the sounds of his friends’ tapping golf clubs permeated him so entirely that he seemed to embody these sensations, to encompass everything outside him so that there was no “him” and no “outside”?
She came down in her buckskin jacket, bare-legged, her head tilted a little toward one shoulder. “I’ll be ready in a few minutes,” she said. “Will you tell Tom?”
He nodded, closing his eyes, still strumming the guitar.
“I’m just going to take what I take,” she said. “It’s too much to think about. I don’t know how people pack.”
“I think there’s a sheet of paper somewhere,” he said. “Candace sent it. Addresses, phone, all that. The itinerary.”
“I’ll just ring her. I can’t be bothered with a sheet of paper.”
She was standing in front of him, her hand in his hair. Her eyes moved slightly from side to side as she stared at him. “You’re not coming with me, are you?”
He looked down at the patio. “I’ll tell Tom you’re almost ready,” he said. “I’ll be in in a minute, all right?”
It came back at the strangest times. It had been two months since Brian’s death and most of the time it still wasn’t real, except at times like this. This was the period when Keith was smashing up cars on the M1, falling asleep with lit cigarettes in his hand, staying up for three nights in a row, shooting rifles from the cockpit of his Hovercraft. It didn’t look or feel like mourning. In most ways, it was the happiest he’d ever been.
When he was a boy, maybe eight years old, his aunt had bought him an atlas of the United States, one of those well-meant gifts that triggers an unexpected enthusiasm in a child. He would linger over the maps before he went to bed — the legends, the statute miles, the shapes of the states, the words “Pacific Ocean.” He could see with his eyes how huge the places must be — Texas, Wyoming, California — the shaded areas of their mountain ranges, the pale blue contours of their shorelines and lakes. Stockton, Mariposa, Bakersfield — the names had nothing to do with the rows of brick houses outside his window. They led him through moviescapes of rubbled forts, horses in the sand, riflemen, cattle. He knew it was out there, a physical reality, not a dream. He had the maps, the names, the borders and geography. He was a boy who went to school in a cowboy costume with holstered toy pistols and spurs.
Right up until the time he’d died, Brian would call in the middle of the night, as if he were still a part of the band, as if they were all still friends. He had made so many tapes, why did he keep erasing them? Could he come over and play Keith his new tape? All his best songs went wrong because he waited too long, kept picking at them, second-guessing himself. Or maybe it was time for him to strike out on his own, start something new, a different kind of band.
Keith would hold the phone uncomfortably between his shoulder and his ear, sitting on a kitchen stool in the dark, playing his guitar. In the living room there would be a throng of people — friends and hangers-on, people whose names he knew and people whose names he didn’t — listening to music, smoking, laughing, sulking. Brian’s voice would lapse into silence, a child trying to tell a story but getting lost in the mire of details, or sometimes it would intensify into weeping, into outraged, paranoid tears. Keith would talk him down with a persistent stream of factual information: records he had listened to, meals he had eaten, places he had driven in his car. It was always he and not Anita who fielded these calls. He was the one who was always awake, always smiling, the center of things even when he wasn’t in the room, always feeling situated in his skin by three or four o’clock in the morning.
“You just have to get something down and then we can work with it,” he would say. “You have to stop thinking so much. Mick doesn’t hate you, he doesn’t even think about you, I tell you this over and over. No one thinks about other people half as much as you do.”
Keith put on a Chuck Berry record in the library. He stood in the half-lit room and gripped the counter with his right hand, staring down at the record player, waiting for it to start. He watched the record spin and listened and didn’t move, standing there in his sunglasses and his scarf and his cowboy boots, a cigarette burning in his hand. When it came on, it was loud. He could feel the warmth of it beneath his skin, the soothing pulse. He heard the clean, bright twang of the guitar, the thick bash of the snare drum, the rattle of the upright bass: a song about high school, girls, hamburgers, cars. He heard the piano with its splashy laughing trills, felt the stupid joy of it, and knew that this was why he had to go to America again, to make this sound. Even after it was over, he felt the perverse certainty that nothing else mattered, nothing was more important than this three-minute song.
The room upstairs was bright but cool, a country room that smelled of moss. The light came in through a screen of trees and made a mottled, watery pattern on the walls, the wooden beams, the faded tapestries that hung from wrought-iron bars. Anita was on the floor with the baby, leaning toward him on her hands and knees. It was one of those moments when their eyes seemed telepathically joined, both mother and baby smiling, but just faintly — more than just smiling, communicating. She rattled the ball with its tin bells, and he lay there on his back, trying to reach out with his hands, watching her eyes. His tiny feet curved inward on bowed legs, a few inches above the ground, as if resting on an invisible stool.
“I’ve found him a job,” Keith said.
She didn’t look up. It was a running joke, already old. “You’ve found him a job,” she said. “What is it, factory work?”
“It’s physical work. Heavy lifting.”
“Quarrying. Building houses.”
“Has he got his documents sorted?”
“I haven’t asked him.”
“They’ll want to see documentation. Credentials.”
He sat down on the floor, sprawling, his head next to her knee. The baby had that drunken, slovenly look now, his head leaning to one side. It was as if he were puzzling over how to breathe or what breathing meant, how it felt.
“When he moves his head sometimes,” she said, “his eyes change. They look just like yours. They become adult eyes all of a sudden.”
“He hardly ever cries. It freaks me out a little.”
“He cries when I leave. But I never really leave.”
“You must flog him. Hit him with a paddle. Cane him.”
“It’s crazy what people think of, isn’t it? What they do.”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. You know how I am.”
“I didn’t mean to say I wasn’t going with you. I’m going with you. You know th
at.”
“I just don’t want to be here after you leave. The empty house. All that. I just don’t want to have to deal with all that, that’s all.”
“I wouldn’t want to have to deal with it either.”
“It’s also that I’ve been good lately. I don’t know, two weeks, maybe a little less. I think I could stick it out anyway, but not here. Not with all this stuff around.” She shook her head, bored with the topic.
“You’ll be all right,” he said.
“I know it. I know.”
“It’s just dope.”
“Yeah, and you’re one to talk.”
“I’m just taking the piss. What else is there to do?”
She leaned her head on his shoulder. He encircled her in his arm, looking out at the baby. He felt her arms go into a loose clasp around his waist, her body next to his, and he could imagine her face, not crying, but looking straight ahead, just thinking. He never thought he would be able to keep her, had only wanted to, hoped to, but now she rubbed his thigh with the side of her hand, then she scratched his jeans a few times with her fingernails. She sat up and kissed him, her lips moist where they came together, her eyes closed. She opened them and stared into his eyes, her face almost touching his, and he saw how unlikely it all was — this room, this house, this woman, their baby. None of it should have happened, it all had. There was no way to explain it, it was only luck. It would never stop.
On August 6, they found Bobby asleep on the side of the road, his car broken down on the shoulder of Highway 5 in the desert north of Los Angeles. He had been awake for more than two days before that. It took him a moment to remember why he was there, whose car he was in. Outside, the sky was a bluish gray. The sun cast a plane of yellow light on the dashboard. He stared at the cop, and the cop told him to put up his hands, not to move.
There were cuts and scratches on his hands, his arms, his face. There were bloodstains on his pants and shirt. They pulled him out of the car and spread his legs apart and had him lean forward with his hands on the roof. He watched them search the glove box until they found the registration with his friend Gary Hinman’s name on it. When they asked him who Gary Hinman was, he said he didn’t know. He was smiling by then, not realizing it, thinking of the beat-up piano he and Charlie had dropped off at Hinman’s house a few months ago, the joke of that transaction. He was remembering his plan of a few days ago: to sell Gary’s car, to get the money that way and then go to Canada somehow, but he couldn’t remember how he had lost sight of the plan, or how he had ever expected it to work, or why he’d driven here to the middle of the desert. He couldn’t believe that the last few days had occurred.
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