All Tomorrow's Parties

by Rob Spillman

  The villagers were weathered and gnarled like the coast itself, with its inhospitable red volcanic cliffs, its hard, choppy waves of icy water that masked deadly riptides. They were mostly fishermen and a few farmers, so it had been surprising to come across Xica and Andreas. But they told us that the area had a long history of sheltering artists, drug dealers, and terrorists. “I knew there was a reason we were drawn here,” I told Andreas, who acknowledged my humor in the way of his people—­dismissively. “Yes, yes,” he said, “but in seriousness, if you see a car with a German shepherd outside, stay away. The drug dealers always have German shepherds. And be careful on your bike if you go up into the hills. There are ex-Baader-Meinhof members hiding on some of the farms.”

  Few tourists stayed along these cliffs, preferring the glitzy Algarve, with its hotel towers, accessible beaches, and smooth, calm waters. German slackers, on the other hand, found it ideal. It was a twenty-four-hour drive from the Ruhr Valley to the Alentejo region, and we met several young, hippieish Germans who had figured out how to live in Zambi for six months at a stretch. They would team up, and one would work for half the year as a baker or waiter to qualify for unemployment. He would then take off for Zambi and give his job to his friend, who would ship the unemployment money to his partner in Portugal, the two switching off every six months. The one in Zambi would stretch the unemployment money by living in a room on one of the neighboring farms, none of which had electricity or running water, and only buying food from a farm or the weekly markets.

  We befriended several of these professional slackers, including Horst, a beatific, emaciated-looking German with a long, wispy blond beard, who told me his life philosophy, after he drained the last of an absinthe-and-passion-fruit cocktail: “Leave no trace.”

  I envied Horst and his compatriots, to a point. While I, too, loved being off the grid, I viewed Portugal as our Tangiers, as a staging ground, mental preparation for when we reemerged on the world stage of Berlin. I thought of James Baldwin, retreating to Paris in order to catch his breath and be stronger in his fight against oppression back home. I wanted to stomp the earth and leave giant footprints. What is the point of living if you don’t leave your mark?

  7

  “I am not a myth.”

  —Marlene Dietrich

  Soundtrack: Marlene Dietrich, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?,” 1962

  BOTH OF MY PARENTS decided they were going to be professional musicians at the age of four. I was not so blessed. Or cursed. Like most sons, I wanted to be like my father. But the desire to be a pianist like him was not met with the desire or discipline to sit down at the piano to bash through countless repetitions of Czerny and Hanon exercises. My father didn’t push me, telling me that in time I would find what gave me joy.

  My impatience with the piano didn’t, however, deter me from being enthralled by the production of the art. I loved to watch it all happen, from practice to dress rehearsal to performance and finally to the payment rituals. In the European classical music world, the link between patron and artist was still direct. “Singing for your supper” was literal. After my father’s performances in European concert halls, it was tradition for the patrons to have a dinner for him and the other talent, usually in a grand room backstage. I would sometimes fall asleep during these tedious dinners, but I remember one late night in particular, when I was six, after a performance of Franz Schubert’s Winterreise by my father and the singer he accompanied, Barry McDaniel. They were making their name as American masters of the classic German song form—lieder. The patrons, as usual, paid the performers in cash. For the first time I was close enough to see how much they were paid. My father received ten 100 blue-eagle Deutsche Mark notes ($275, or the equivalent of $1,275 today). Barry received forty notes. That night, I was certain I wanted to be a singer.

  But more than that, it was the first time I put together that my father and Barry were receiving money for doing what they loved. They felt passionate about these German Romantic poems set to song, and had dedicated themselves to mastering the form, to proving that non-Germans could not only interpret, but inhabit these emotional song cycles. Backstage, it struck me full force—my father was living for art. I couldn’t image anything more romantic and ideal. I still can’t.

  8

  “All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity. But the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.”

  —T. E. Lawrence

  Soundtrack: Everly Brothers, “All I Have to Do Is Dream,” 1958

  BEREA, KENTUCKY, 1939. My three-year-old father is stacking blocks while his mother plonks out a tune on the old family upright piano. Distracted by her two older boys’ squabbling, she investigates and when she comes back to the piano and reopens the score she jokingly asks my father, “Where was I?” Without hesitation he gets up and points to the exact note on the page.

  Zeigler, Illinois, 1952. Driving on a dusty road back from church, my fifteen-year-old mother asks, “When can I drive?” Her brother, Jerry, age sixteen, has recently been allowed to get behind the wheel of the family car. My grandfather, who runs the town’s garage, pulls over, gets out, and says, “You want to drive? Then drive.” He orders my mother behind the wheel and gives her no further instructions. Both of her parents are taciturn Scots. Their first pregnancy ended with a stillborn child, which, my mother says, must have hardened their already flinty souls. They sit by a field of withered corn, my mother shamefacedly jamming the gears and flooring the gas, her brother not daring to offer any help. Her parents, grim and silent, watch her struggle.

  My parents rarely spoke of their childhoods, and whenever they let loose some scrap of information, I added it to the other fragments, constructing an incomplete mosaic, the missing tiles as fascinating to me as the filled-in images.

  When I was thirteen, my father and I drove to a nursing home in the Tennessee hills to meet his high school piano teacher, Miss Consella. She was tiny up against my bearish father, whom she hugged fiercely on seeing. Though bent and shrunken, she was a whirlwind of energy and insisted that she drive us to her favorite diner, even though she could barely see over the steering wheel of her giant green Oldsmobile. In the diner all the truckers called out, “Howdy, Miss C.” It was obvious why she had been such a big influence on my father—besides being a brilliant teacher, she was warm and encouraging and funny. His mother, on the other hand, had been withholding and moody. She was always in slight pain from when a drunk driver crashed into their car when she was pregnant with him (she would ban alcohol in her house from that moment on). At the hospital, everyone was worried she might lose her baby, and she was so grateful to them for saving her son that she named my father for the two doctors who delivered him—Robert Armstrong. Even though he was born healthy, the doctors were worried about his future, since trauma in the womb was thought to sometimes later cause “deviancy.”

  Still, my grandmother recognized her son’s talent and gave him the opportunity to realize it. Miss C., however, guided him, going so far as to bring a Ouija board to his house to determine his fate. In front of his scowling mother, she asked what my father was going to be. The answer came up “Composer.” Like me, he was a good kid, the kind who saved all of his allowance and U.S. Savings Bonds so that he could buy the family a real grand piano. At age sixteen, he got a scholarship to the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, and he rarely looked back.

  In his senior year at Eastman he met my mother, a freshman from Zeigler, a crumbling town in southern Illinois surrounded by a depressed patchwork of family farms and spent coal mines. She had once more followed her brother, now a junior at Eastman. A musical prodigy, from an early age Jerry was showered with praise and lessons. And then so was my mother, on whom her parents spared no expense getting her lessons and driving her to perfor
mances and competitions. When I gave up on the piano, she said it was just as well since if it hadn’t come easy, it probably never would. She told me that when she first took it up “I’d walk to my teacher’s house, which was only three blocks away, and I could learn the week’s lesson while walking and reading the scores.”

  At their church, the charismatic choir leader fitted my mother and uncle with angel wings and put them in the balcony to sing during funerals. Soon they were performing all over southern Illinois. She won her first singing competition when she was in fifth grade. For the winners’ concert, she bought a pretty yellow dress and black patent Mary Janes. She desperately wanted to wear nylons, but her mother insisted on bare legs and frilly yellow anklets. My mother felt exhilarated to be singing “The Wind’s in the South” in front of such a huge audience, but also humiliated at being dressed like a five-year-old. At least she got to wear the Mary Janes. For most performances, my grandmother crammed my mother’s feet into tight, pointed dress shoes; as an adult she would have to have surgery to correct her crushed, twisted toes.

  For my parents, music was a journey and a destination. Music allowed my parents to escape toward something. Their stories of determination, drive, and single-minded focus formed the stark background to my opposite childhood of indecision, lethargy, and scattered focus. I didn’t know what I wanted to do at age four, or eight, not to mention thirteen or sixteen. My father was on constant alert for signs of a calling. When I played tennis with him and nailed a forehand winner, he arranged for tennis lessons, hoping that this would be like the fateful moment when he’d found the right note in his mother’s score. When I started enjoying mini-golf, golf lessons followed. When I started reading, he gave me money for books. If I liked an author, he had ten recommendations for similar ones. While I enjoyed tennis and golf, and especially reading, I felt like I was letting my father down. Where was my spark? Where was my thing?

  My mother, on the other hand, was dismayed by my meager, unenthusiastic piano-playing, grimacing through each of my mirthless lessons, and had no idea how to handle my easily changeable enthusiasms. She would encourage, but in generalities, like, “You’re so smart and quick, you need to get serious.” To which I would think, About what? Or, “You should apply yourself.” To what? “You need to have a life that matters.” To whom?

  9

  “The truth doesn’t have to do with cruelty, the truth has to do with mercy.”

  —Ken Kesey

  Soundtrack: Bob Dylan, “Like a Rolling Stone,” 1965

  MUCH OF MY CHILDHOOD was spent playing quietly under ­pianos while my father practiced and accompanied or coached singers. As long as I was invisible and silent, I could stay in the safety of his sonic cocoon, the vibrations of the piano strings rumbling through my chest, a soothing sensation that would sometimes deepen with the rumbling of nearby tanks. The spartan apartment where my father and I lived was across the street from a giant U.S. Army base. At least once a week, piercing sirens would rouse me out of bed and to the window, where my father and I would watch the entire base scramble into full combat readiness, column after column of soldiers marching around the base. On the other side of the Wall, just a mile from us, Russian soldiers were also marching in formation, their movements reported in the morning papers.

  Born in 1964, the year of Dr. Strangelove, I was a child of the Cold War, living in the epicenter, a city two hundred miles behind the Iron Curtain. During the weekly “duck and cover” drills at the John F. Kennedy School, our teachers would remind us, “Flying glass will rip you to pieces, so make sure you are completely under your desks, curled as low as you can go.” While we played in the gravel yard, B-52s flew low overhead, their huge bombs hanging from the wings like distended water balloons, looking so heavy I wondered how they didn’t drag the big planes down. The halls hummed with the constant low-level buzz of the Cold War. Many of my classmates were the sons and daughters of officers. They were exotic to me—neat and tidy like their uniformed parents, most with a mother and father at home, their mothers packing them lunches and picking them up in cars.

  For fun at recess we had rock fights in the playground. A group of kids would climb onto a cement shed that was covered with gravel; the kids on the roof were “snipers” and the kids below “civilians.” An ex–marine sniper had shot forty-seven people from the University of Texas Tower in 1966, and the memory of this horror still lingered in the military community. In our game, the snipers would rain rocks down on the unsuspecting civilians, who would then try to brave the onslaught and storm the roof, where they would roughly “apprehend” and “subdue” the snipers. Like most of the kids, I loved this daily ritual and threw myself into my role, working myself into an indignant rage while pinging the poor riotous sods below me. The snipers were always greatly outnumbered and doomed. I always chose to be a sniper.

  I can recall only one classmate with any clarity, a nice enough kid in my grade whom I played soccer with. But I remember him mainly because of his name—Bobby Fischer. At the time, another Bobby Fischer was the world’s greatest chess player, and was engaged in epic Cold War battles with Boris Spassky, a humorless Russian who was the embodiment of Soviet-style communism. My classmate Bobby Fischer didn’t play chess. No kid wanted to sit across a chessboard from me, as I would always mercilessly destroy them. My father had taught me how to play when I was five, but stopped playing when I started to beat him. He had only a basic knowledge of the game, and I took it much more seriously, even at that age. I wished that he had kept playing with me, but he practically lived at his piano.

  After the school bus dropped me off at home, I played soccer with the Turkish kids at the Gastarbeiter complex down the street, then my father would pick me up and we’d go to a rehearsal space or concert hall, where chess became a bridge to his world. I played backstage against singers and stagehands, divas and queens. There were seldom other kids around, but I didn’t think much about not having friends my own age.

  I also played chess at the American church where, on Sundays, my father played the organ and led the youth choir. Through the church we became friends with a number of soldiers and attended Presbyterian cookouts with GIs, complete with hot dogs and softball. Compared with the flamboyantly dressed artists whom my father worked and hung out with, the soldiers, and Americans in general, were otherworldly and of another time, as if they had stepped out of a Norman Rockwell painting. I found their exaggerated masculinity and reserve comical in comparison to the feminine, emotive men I was used to.

  Yet the church and the army base’s PX were the closest I came to “real” U.S. culture. After my mom left, we went to the PX to watch movies and eat burgers and fries. The first time I went with my father, as the two of us walked through the middle of the PX’s huge dining room, filled with officers and their wives and girlfriends, I was just learning how to whistle, or at least had the hint of a whistle on my lips, and was working on it as we walked to our table. I blew and blew and blew and nothing was coming out, when suddenly I hit it—the culmination of weeks of practice and struggle, a full-on wolf whistle, loud and clear, two notes in succession. There was laughter all around, and a beautiful officer’s wife in front of me said, “Thank you,” while her husband winked conspiratorially at my father. I didn’t understand why everyone was smiling at me, but I basked in the attention.

  Whenever the base’s sirens signaled the entire brigade into formation, my father and I would lean out the window to see if we could spot our church friend Tommy in the mass of ­camouflage-clad soldiers. We never could—there were simply too many men, and from a distance they all blended together, unlike when we were up close at the pizza place or at the PX.

  The PX movies were meant for soldiers, not children, so I missed the entire Disney oeuvre, and instead saw Easy Rider, The Graduate, and Five Easy Pieces. At age seven, I was intoxicated by the lush forests of Oregon that saturated Sometimes a Great Notion, directed by Paul Newman and
based on Ken Kesey’s novel, which would become, many years later, one of my favorite books. The walls of green were so unlike Berlin’s concrete gray island, and the romantic ruggedness of the central family was captivating in ways I couldn’t fully fathom. Near the end of the movie, Henry Fonda’s severed arm is mounted on top of the family boat with the middle finger saluting the town. I loudly asked what it meant, and the soldiers around us cracked up. “It’s the sign of defiance,” my father calmly whispered. I didn’t quite get it, but the notion of defiance became wrapped up in Oregon; freedom resided in its dense, wooded river valleys.

  Despite the tanks, soldiers, and drills, I felt safe with my father. I was, however, unsettled when we ventured into the East, that oppressively drab landscape scarred with barbed wire and German shepherds and stoic soldiers. I was too young to fully understand exactly how real the danger was, but the menace was palpable.

  The adults’ fear became much more pronounced during the Prague Spring of 1968, when local newspapers blared headlines warning that Russian troops once again would seal off West Berlin, as had happened at the end of World War II. While my father and his friends talked about what to do if there was a second Berlin Airlift, I only understood that there was an increased urgency in their discussions about “adult” subjects and that they were impatient or worse when Barry blithely declared, “Make mine a double,” when everyone else was talking about going to either the airport or the army base. My father later told me that when Russian troops drove into Prague and crushed the protesters, our soldier friend Tommy called him and said, “If I call again, hang up and go to the airport. Don’t pack. Just grab Robby and get out.” My father quickly and coolly packed a few things, but Tommy didn’t call back.