All Tomorrow's Parties

by Rob Spillman

  “Sure, yeah,” I said, trying to sound adult. “Going to get a drink.”

  “Okay, kid, come back and I’ll sing you something.”

  I nodded, trying to look casual, like I belonged at this adult party.

  My father made his way through the knot of singers and I followed in his wake. Ahead, stagehand Dean, looking like a townie in his jeans and embroidered western shirt, passed a joint to two teenage Korean violinists who were crashing the party. We stepped out onto the deck, to the table with the booze and mixers. I breathed in the cold, clear night air, the high-altitude sky bright and sharp, then filled a red plastic beer cup with Orangina, which I loved as a kid in Berlin.

  “Well,” my father said, “everything in excess is dangerous.” I stared at him, wondering if this was one of his absentminded-artist outbursts. But then it came to me that he was finally responding to my earlier question. “Alcohol, for example,” he said, lifting his Stoli and cranberry. He’d drink one, at most two drinks over the course of a party. I’d never seen him tipsy, much less out of control.

  “But cocaine—isn’t it addictive?” I asked.

  My father looked at me, blinked, blinked again, measuring his response. Two years before, we’d had a talk about smoking. In Berlin everyone smoked, but my father had told me flat out, “I never want you to smoke. Period. It will kill you. So tell me what it’ll take for you not to smoke. Would you like me to set aside some money and when you are twenty-one you can have it if you don’t smoke?”

  I didn’t have to think. I said, “No,” and I meant it. It didn’t ever occur to me to refuse him anything. If he didn’t want me to smoke, I wouldn’t.

  I was ready for him to make me the same offer now—but this time I would think about it. I was curious about the white powder, and maybe I wouldn’t mind going a little crazy.

  “You’re a smart, curious boy, and you’re probably going to experiment with drugs.”

  “But . . .” I protested, not wanting him to think that I could ever be bad. Yet part of me was curious. And I wondered if I needed drugs to be creative, to feel things, the way most everyone around me seemed to.

  “You might,” my father continued. “But you should know what you’re getting into. Cocaine is, yes, addictive. It’s a powder that you snort, and it can do incredible damage to your nasal passages and deviate your septum.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The connective tissue between your nostrils. And if you’re a singer and get a hole in your septum, your career is over.”

  I nodded, imagining my nose collapsing like a pug’s.

  “Cocaine is a stimulant, and it can make you feel powerful,” my father added.

  “Okay,” I said, wondering how he knew this, whether he had done it himself.

  “Do you know about marijuana?”

  “Sort of,” I mumbled, not wanting to confess my unsatisfying cough-fest.

  “It’s smoked like a cigarette or in a pipe, but is even worse for your lungs than tobacco. It makes you mellow and slow, and dumb. Everything is funny. Imagine a mellow drunk.”

  So that was what was supposed to happen. Not just dizziness and nausea. “Is it addictive?” I asked.

  “Mildly. Not like cocaine. Or heroin. Heroin can be smoked, but is usually injected into your veins with a needle. It’s highly, highly addictive and can kill you instantly if you get too strong of a mixture. I don’t want you ever experimenting with heroin.”

  “Right,” I said, staring at my father as if he had been replaced by a stranger, some dangerous deviant who shoots up, snorts coke, and gets high. Was my dad a closet junkie?

  “LSD,” my father said—and this hit me harder than if he had said, I’m a flesh-eating zombie—“LSD makes you go crazy and is only for hippie freaks, right? Please make this book knowledge, not personal knowledge.

  “Acid,” my father continued, even though I wished he’d stop, “is a psychoactive drug, meaning that it plays tricks with your brain. You see things that aren’t there, hear things that aren’t being said. It’s called tripping, and some people go crazy from doing it.”

  “How?” I asked, and made a silent prayer that my father—or worse, my mother—hadn’t lost it on acid.

  “They don’t stop tripping. Same with PCP or angel dust, which also can make people violent.”

  “Sounds great,” I joked.

  “Well, you shouldn’t go into the world blind. Knowledge is power,” my father said. I nodded.

  “Any questions?”

  I had only two—Why did Mom leave? and Will you always be here?

  A couple of singers hovered, waiting to corner my father, but he had created a mental force field around the two of us, his focus on me alone.

  “Robby, you sure don’t have any questions?” my father asked, serious; he had all the time in the world.

  I shook my head. “No, Dad, I’m cool.”

  30

  “I have found that words that are loaded with pathos and create a seductive euphoria are apt to promote nonsense.”

  —Günter Grass

  Soundtrack: Can, “Halleluhwah,” 1971

  “I HAVE NOT SEEN my station in fifteen years,” Ralf said as he squeezed into the backseat with Elissa, Hank riding shotgun as we set out to find the sector of the Wall where Ralf had served his two years of compulsory military service. Ralf directed me through Prenzlauer Berg and onto a broad avenue, past a row of officious federal buildings where Ralf said, “Look up,” and pointed to the blank circles in the tympanums. “That is where the socialist hammer and compass had been pulled off, and before that the Nazi swastika, and before that the Prussian eagle.”

  “What’s next?” Hank asked.

  “McDonald’s,” Ralf said. I looked over at his straight face to see if he was joking, as he never joked, but I could detect the slightest upturn in the corners of his mouth, and then we all cracked up.

  Ralf had me turn off the avenue, back into an urban area where old stone houses pressed right up against the eastern side of the Wall. From these houses people had lowered themselves or relatives down and over the Wall in baskets, and then sprinted across No-Man’s-Land (Germans called it the Todesstreifen—“the death zone”), to the Western side of the Wall, almost invariably getting shot between the two sections of concrete, though a few did manage to make it.

  There were two adjoining four-foot sections of the Wall missing, and I drove through the gap into No-Man’s-Land. I cruised along between the two halves of the Wall for a few hundred yards, then ducked through another gap back onto the Eastern side. After less than a mile the concrete panels joined together to form one long, impenetrable ribbon, and the apartment buildings gave way to stand-alone houses and then fields of wild grass dotted with purple and yellow flowers. The missing sections of the Wall became fewer and farther between, with longer and longer stretches completely intact like impossibly long Richard Serra sculptures.

  Up ahead we spotted a small village with a few modest old houses, a church, some stables. It looked like it hadn’t changed in a hundred years, except, of course, for the twelve-foot-tall Wall running through the three backyards on the edge of the village.

  “Look at the kid,” Elissa said, her hand shooting past my right ear. “He’s chipping at the Wall.”

  “What? Where?” I asked, and she pointed over my shoulder at a boy, perhaps eight or nine, by the Wall in the backyard of the first house.

  “How’d I miss that? And what’s he using?”

  “Hammer,” Hank said. I stopped the car a hundred meters away so as to not spook the kid, but as soon as I opened the door, he turned around and bolted across his yard.

  “Wait,” I called, sending him dashing into a small house a mere twenty feet from the Wall. No one else was around, but as we walked up to where the kid had been, I felt like we were being watched.

&nbs
p; “He’s chipped out a good fifteen inches,” Hank said, measuring the hole with his large hands.

  “Every day this is what he looked at,” Elissa said. “This was the limit to his world. This was going to be his life, right here.”

  “I wonder if there was a certain comfort in knowing that,” I said, “a certain resignation to knowing the parameters of your confinement.”

  “I think,” Ralf said, “that the hammer answers your question.”

  “True, true, but wasn’t there some comfort in knowing that you all were going through this together?”

  “Are you high?” Elissa said.

  Ralf laughed, but continued his polite humoring of me. “In some ways,” he said. “We have our families, our friends, yes. The boy would not have suffered alone.”

  When I was the boy’s age I thought there were no confines. “You can do anything you put your mind to,” my parents told me. The world was wide open. Roots didn’t matter. Family didn’t matter. What mattered was passion and a devotion to your chosen craft. You lived for your craft, and this life could be lived anywhere.

  “Should we . . .” Ralf politely suggested. I was hoping the kid would return. I thought we would have a lot to talk about. I slowly worked my way to the car. I walked around Dusty a couple of times, pretending to look at the tires. But the kid stayed hidden.

  “We are close now,” Ralf said as I drove away from the boy’s village. After passing one more cluster of houses, Ralf pointed ahead to a ghostly guard tower—intact, graffiti-free, as if waiting for the next shift of snipers to take up their stations.

  I parked a respectful distance away and let Ralf go ahead. After a few minutes of pacing and a quick trip up to the observation tower, Ralf waved us over. “I would march back and forth, here to there, my gun ready,” Ralf said, pointing to the next tower, about a half mile off.

  “It must have been quiet out here?” Elissa said.

  Ralf looked around, took a deep breath, then shut his eyes, placing himself fifteen years into the past. He opened his eyes and said, “Yes, but it was always dangerous. The sergeant was in the tower, with his gun pointed at us below.”

  “Why?”

  “In case we tried to run to the West,” Ralf said matter-of-factly. “This happened. And sometimes the soldiers would shoot each other, and the sergeant, then escape.”

  “How horrible,” Elissa said. “How did you deal?”

  “We drank whenever we could, and I would work formulas in my head.”

  “Would civilians try to escape?” I asked.

  “No. Too easily seen here,” Ralf said with a shudder. “They and the others in my unit were not a worry. What was most dangerous was Russian soldiers. They would go crazy and shoot anyone in their way. It never happened here, but close to here. Some of the sections were secretly made to be easily knocked down from this side.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “So that tanks could attack the West faster. Only the senior commanders knew which sections were weakened, but one time when I was on duty a Russian stole a tank and tried to flee right here and we had to blow it up.”

  Later, at the CV, as I went to grab a round of beers, I overheard Ralf talking about our trip to his station, telling a young woman, “I went right back into the feeling of those Death-Strip Years.”

  “‘Death-Strip Years’?” I asked as I slid Ralf his beer, and he gave me a rare smile.

  “It is funny, yes,” Ralf said, “how one can reduce such a meaningful time that contained infinities into a dismissive phrase.”

  “Exactly,” I said, slapping the table. “With me it’s the ‘Car-Crash Years.’”

  “How do you mean?” Ralf asked.

  “I call the ages sixteen to twenty-one my ‘Car-Crash Years,’ a drunken, womanizing haze of five years punctuated by three moments of extreme clarity while in the teeth of three near-fatal car crashes.”

  “My goodness,” Ralf said, and looked over to Elissa with concern, but she shrugged.

  “She’s sick of my reductionist stories,” I explained. Ralf half-smiled and sipped from his beer, not knowing what he was in the middle of.

  “‘Wah, wah, wah, I’m so sensitive,’” Elissa said, and squeezed my right earlobe, a pebble of embedded safety glass rolling between her fingers. “You need some new material.”

  31

  “Anybody singing the blues is in a deep pit yelling for help.”

  —Mahalia Jackson

  Soundtrack: David Bowie, “Sound and Vision,” 1977

  OUR POSH SKI CONDO was right in the center of town, at the base of Ajax Mountain. Four stories below, on East Durant Avenue, everyone passed by sooner or later. When my father returned from the afternoon concerts at the music tent, he’d crank up the blender, which called friends, students, and friends of friends to come join the Sunset Society. Jan DeGaetani, my father’s best friend, musical soul mate, and Eastman colleague, lived down the hall, and she frequently joined us, as did her son Mark, who was slightly older than me, and much more worldly and wise. The balcony was filled with lawn chairs, and latecomers had to drag out the chunky walnut bar stools if they wanted to sit. The mountain sunsets were a two- or three-hour extravaganza. Each hot, clear day gradual evaporation from lakes and rivers would build until there were enough gathered clouds for a brief late-afternoon shower, the tall, billowing clouds lingering to give the setting sun a canvas. The sky would explode in garish reds and purples, streaks of color stretching across the Woody Creek Valley, where my new hero, Hunter S. Thompson, lived. When his part of the sky was at its most fiery red, I’d surreptitiously raise a glass of cranberry and orange juice in his honor.

  Despite the infusion of oil and ski money, 1978 Aspen was still Thompson territory. From our balcony I could look across the street onto a cluster of tepees where you could buy tie-dyed T-shirts and pot pipes. The cops wore shorts and bright blue ­Hawaiian shirts. Nine years before, Thompson had run for county sheriff and put up a biker friend for mayor on the Freak Power ticket, the campaign poster a double-thumbed fist clutching a peyote button. Their platform included renaming Aspen “Fat City” and violently discouraging tourists and investors. Legend has it that they lost by a single vote.

  The day after the cast party where my father told me all about drugs, he gave me two books, Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. He told me that these were the two scariest books about drugs he had ever read. Well, sure, Neal Cassady’s speed overdose on the Mexican train tracks was harrowing, but what resonated with me most about both books was not the drugs, but the improvised families of Kesey and Thompson. Kesey’s Merry Pranksters were an ad hoc family held together by their rejection of the square world, and Thompson had a fiercely loyal friendship with his lawyer. “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro” became my new motto. The world split before me into two kinds of rebellion, embodied by Kesey and Thompson, and it was hard to decide which one attracted me more. On the one hand there was Kesey’s communal celebration of creativity, on the other Thompson’s bold, riotous rage. The two paths were equally inviting, and equally scary. Both would involve risk, especially emotional risk, something I was averse to. My father clearly fell into the Kesey camp, of transcendence through art.

  The previous year, I was startled to come upon my father sitting in a chair quietly crying. He was reading a book, and I asked if he was all right.

  “Oh, yes, I’m fine,” he said, still reading.

  “Then why are you crying?”

  My father looked up, blinking, and said, “It’s just so beautiful.”

  He showed me the cover—Gravity’s Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon. I was stunned by the idea of a book moving someone so deeply. I always associate this memory with my favorite line about art: “He forces you to use the word ‘beautiful.’ What more do you want?” Robert Motherwell said this
about Joseph Cornell.

  Gravity’s Rainbow must truly be amazing, I thought, because the only other time I saw my father cry was when he sat down at the piano, and then he swayed and smiled and sometimes cried. I worried that I would never find something that moved me like this, and that even if I found something I loved, I wouldn’t let myself express my true feelings.

  A few days after finishing Fear and Loathing, while up on the balcony, I secretly acknowledged that my heart leaned more toward Thompson, and that if I went toward Kesey, I would live off the grid in the Oregon woods, happy but unengaged with the world. Like most teenagers, I thought didactically, that I had to choose one or the other, and not combine the best parts of both to form a third way that would suit myself.

  I struggled with this dialectic as I sat in my favorite orange lawn chair, feet up, enjoying the pre-party peace with Mark, the two of us scoping out the girls passing below. When the Pacer cruised by, about to pull into our building, I could see my father talking to Peter, his favorite grad student, in the passenger seat. Peter had flown out from Rochester for the last two weeks of the festival and had mixed right into the Sunset Society, even though he was intimidatingly tall, almost like a German with his clear, square glasses and the fastidious way he buttered his toast—he would take a rock-hard pat of butter and slowly, evenly spread it over the bread without disturbing the surface.

  Peter and my father banged into the kitchen and I could hear them opening the chips and salsa. Soon other students and faculty materialized around the blender, my father pouring out slushy red drinks. We stayed on the balcony, waiting for the party to come to us.

  “Robby, man,” Mark said, his usual smile sliding into a quizzical, serious frown.

  “What’s up?”

  “Dude, Peter just went into your dad’s room,” Mark said.

  “Yeah, he’s staying with us.”

  “Man, I didn’t know your father was switch-hitting,” Mark said, and I stared at him blankly.