Dissident Gardens

by Jonathan Lethem

His mother wrote to ask Tommy if he had warm socks in winter. She wrote to ask him to petition Rye please to send her a note. She wrote in every letter that the music shop on Burdon Lane still did a tidy business with Fireside Evening.

  Which made it the sole music shop on the planet doing so. And he wouldn’t be shocked to hear that for every copy sold his mother brought the proprietors on Burdon Lane a warm gooseberry pie—made, of course, by the housekeeper.

  When he wrote to say he was going to marry, his mother cabled immediately to ask if he would be “bringing the girl over.” When Tommy wrote explaining a visit would have to wait because of career opportunities, and that in their happy rush they would be wed in a small ceremony in the front parlor of a minister in Queens, New York, with just a handful of friends and needless to say his brothers in attendance, it was with measurable relief that his mother gave her blessing. (The check enclosed in this letter made a useful fund for Chinese food and marijuana the night of the day of the ceremony.) Though there was, as he expected, no consideration of his parents crossing the pond themselves (in which case it would need to be clarified that the minister in question was a blind black singer), suffice it to say they looked forward to meeting the girl, and any photographs Tommy might send would be greatly enjoyed.

  “Yes, certainly,” Tommy said to Warren Rokeach now. “I must be severed from the Boys as neatly as possible.”

  “Strictly for the sake of the new work.”

  “Strictly for the sake of the new work.”

  Yes, yes, it must be this. If it was to come to anything, this Chelsea night, “the Night of the Short Cigarettes,” as Tommy was inclined to dub it now, watching his last Marlboro dwindle, soon to join the butts raining ash on the cracked linoleum tile of this dire hotel’s floor. Tommy Gogan’s Second Album, if it be animated by wellsprings deep within him, as he knew it ought, must gather its force and substance from the Tommy Gogan that had sprung into being that day of the snowstorm, that found its beginning in the reverend’s parlor. He must regain that essence of selfish munificence, of benevolent egotism, in which his guitar had never left his grasp except to be replaced by Miriam—Picasso days, when guitar and woman’s body, waist and hips and neck, and the way he played on both, became mixed up and entirely one thing. Those days when for him song seemed to flow even from the speech of passersby—a black in argument with a shop owner, a Dominican cabdriver’s paean to the Statue of Liberty—or from the calamitous roar of an el plummeting below ground, from the barstool revolutionary’s rumor of a gunpoint eviction or a forced confession, from Cousin Lenny’s insane baseball scheme, practically from a dog’s waning bark on a distant fire escape. Tommy had briefly possessed this city and been vehicle for its secret song, and the city seemed to want him to sing of it, all proceeding from the certainty he was wanted by Miriam. In her eyes the city had stopped to behold him. For that same instant he’d been keen to behold himself. Himself, himself, it was in himself that he must quest for the songs that wouldn’t come, wouldn’t permit themselves to be made. His cold guitar pulsed guilt from the bedspread.

  “Had She Ever Lain with Rye? (Wouldn’t Wish to Know)”

  “My Mother-in-Law’s the Real Thing, Comrades”

  “Call Me Not a Tourist’s Irishman”

  He knotted his shoelaces and thrust himself from the room, leaving the guitar but taking the notebook and pen along just in case. The Chelsea’s corridors were as vast and wide as the rooms were cramped and oppressive, though no better appointed, the carpet oiled and ratty with a thousand years’ worth of footfalls. Still, the size of the corridor seemed to mock that of his room. The lobby even worse, absurd chandeliers and walls thick with paintings and the furniture bobbing everywhere as if at sea. New York hotels had a certain Potemkin village aspect, a false front meant to impress—whom?—with fulsome public space. Meanwhile, quarters narrow as a coffin. Tommy’s room was a place to die, not to compose an LP’s worth of confessional songs, as he’d been commanded by Warren Rokeach, who in desperation at his client’s blockage had booked him five nights in the hotel, drawing against Tommy’s advance from the record company to pay for it, Warren having bankrupted himself in the purchase of a mountain. Perhaps this was Warren’s disguised intent: Enter your room there and die. A second album will never exist and Verve Records wants free of the contract and is willing to front you a suicide room at the Chelsea to be shed of you.

  The evening was cool, summer air cleansed by a brief shower, the weather outside an improvement on that inside his room. He found cigarettes at a newsstand at the corner of Twenty-Third Street and Sixth Avenue and noticing his hunger purchased a Gabila’s knish from a hot-dog vendor there. Then embarrassed by the notebook under his arm returned with his smokes and knish to the hotel. Outside the entrance a panhandler beckoned, requesting “a quarter for something to eat” and Tommy nearly handed him the tissue-enfolded, steaming, greasy knish but thought better of it, and passed over a dollar instead.

  There’s a wide canyon between, on one side, the revivalist folkies and New Left topical songwriters and, on the other, the newly emergent and likely more important school of songwriters channeling the transformative currents of the contemporary scene. Emboldened by Bob Dylan, many believe this canyon one that can be nimbly leaped—alas no. Aesthetic responsibilities and a utopian sociopolitical integrity seem arduous if not impossible for most of the New Guthries littering the scene. Among those committing lemming-leaps into said canyon, none could be more poignant than Tommy Gogan’s Bowery of the Forgotten, a nauseous amalgam of keening country-blues ingratiation and arch poetry, larded through with platitudinous pity toward its subject matter. One can hardly picture the actual Negro Bowery vagabonds who donated their names and life stories to the project actually listening with any pleasure whatsoever to the wincingly meticulous enunciation and baggy verbiage of the so-called “blues” that resulted. Gogan exports the liberal condescension of Alan Lomax to the lost island of Manhattan, but hey, at least Lomax had the decency to drag a tape recorder along with him. Is my objection that Gogan drapes himself in the skin of a Delta bluesman? No—to entertain that objection I’d be obliged to reject an awful lot of what’s best in the work of white singers in the recent mold, including Dylan. My objection is that Gogan drapes the bluesman’s skin over so little that’s his own. He drapes it on a pious dressmaker’s dummy—or, more specifically, a tourist’s Irishman. In a recent number like “Spanish Harlem Incident” Dylan’s got the brass and, yes, the respect to want not only to suffer like a member of the underclass (Gogan’s great wish) but to fuck like one too. People call Dylan arrogant, but I’ll take that over Gogan’s sob-sister hand-wringing any day.

  Bowery had at last been released in ’64, following months of arduous composition, too long a search for a sympathetic record company, then last-minute wrangles with a Verve lawyer who’d discovered a clause in the Gogan Boys’ contract requiring a duration of six months of noncompetition on the part of any solo recordings by individual members. Too late to beat certain others to the marketplace, if it could have mattered. “Who’s this fellow P. K. Tooth?” Rye had growled the night they’d gathered in whiskey commiseration and spaghetti supper at the Horse Shoe. “Seventeen-year-old kid, I heard. I say we storm the offices of The East Village Other and knock his teeth down his throat.” Miriam, who ordinarily took the opposite of Rye’s view in any matter, seconded this loudly, then suggested something in a more nuanced vein, involving kidnapping the critic and locking him in a room with the Spanish Harlem hooker of his presumed fantasies.

  When Tommy had sobered up from their binge Warren Rokeach told him to forget it. To go back to work. A year later he had accomplished neither. Tommy could recite long sequences from the review that had murdered his album, but he’d failed putting those, or any other words, to song. Now, reentering the hotel faced with his fourth and penultimate night of fruitless woodshedding, he felt incapable of returning yet to the measly room, to the guitar he’d not touched today.
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  He settled into a love seat in the cavernous lobby, devoured his knish, and wiped his greasy hands on the seat cushion. Then lit a cigarette, deciding to play hotel detective for a stretch, study the comings and goings, the Chelsea’s incoherent population. Here, passing upstairs, the seemly balding Brit who’d introduced himself in the corridor, stammering to Tommy that he was writing “space fiction” as if in defense against some misunderstanding. At the desk, demanding mail the management had seized in lieu of payment, the rumored exiled Warhol girl, if she was a girl. Of that, no guarantee whatsoever. Occupying the corner by the lobby’s front window, decorated with sneers of boredom, two with Beatle haircuts and nighttime sunglasses, at their feet a case for electric guitar and a small amplifier. Tommy supposed they might even be Stones or Animals or some other benighted subspecies of Beatles. Waiting at the telephone booth, having presumably given out the lobby telephone’s number to some uncalling caller, the permanent-resident poet with the mien of a pickpocket. Tommy had the opposite problem, a phone number in his pocket he was trying not to call, for fear no one waited where it would ring.

  Miriam had taken this opportunity to convene at a planning retreat, upstate in Kerhonkson, a war protesters’ party in the woods. He would have liked to be there with her—it wasn’t as though he had nothing to add to the peace movement. Miriam’s nose ever to the dissident weather, she’d early that spring enlisted Tommy’s voice and guitar for student teach-ins at City College and the New School, at Queens College, all her phantom alma maters. By the time of the April march on Washington Tommy’d even written a set of songs for the occasion. “Sunrise Village,” “McGeorge Bundy, Not Me,” and “A Student Movement Can Derail This Train” weren’t meant for an LP, nor even for a slot at the microphone at the April gathering in D.C., where Tommy hadn’t in any case been asked to perform. Rather, with their simple refrains and chords, the songs were calibrated to those seated in circles, for teaching to lads with ill-tuned guitars and less talent, for kindling local solidarities. Tommy hadn’t even taken his instrument to Washington, instead marched with Miriam in the astonishing throng, a body among millions, the movement sprouting into being around them.

  Miriam knew everyone that day, or did by the time of the bus trip back. She gathered up bosom friends with a rapidity that spun Tommy’s head. The first years, he’d had to work to understand that Miriam wasn’t somehow fucking her new friends, or wanting to fuck them, whether man or woman. It was a great deal worse, in fact, to understand that Miriam’s appetite for populating their lives with acolytes no less in awe of her than he’d been himself was nothing Tommy could justly forbid. Her ability to plunge into commonality with others made Tommy’s gift look paltry. Miriam’s was the higher music, cast in his direction less and less. Faultless in affection and support, hilarious and companionable in bed, she’d withdrawn the deep Jewish fire poured over him so copiously at the start. Tommy’s guitar was a barricade he’d never learned to climb over, a needless ornament on the plain speech by which Miriam achieved routine communion with anyone: teenagers, blacks, suspicious cops, the cowboy-hatted gas station attendant where they’d come off the highway at Kerhonkson, five long days ago now.

  Consummate New Yorker, she’d no driver’s license, no aspiration for one. It was just the day before taking residence at the Chelsea that Tommy ferried her to the retreat, in summer rain, highway maps crumpled across her lap in the passenger seat. Kerhonkson, when they found it, was tucked into the disconcertingly named Ulster County. As if he’d never gone anywhere at all, only conjured the mystic Jewess to his father’s Opel, on some teenage excursion from gray Belfast. No matter that he held the wheel, Tommy felt himself a teen beside her. Why not follow her inside? But Warren Rokeach had with magnanimity bestowed the Chelsea room; Warren Rokeach had brushed off Tommy’s half-assed tape of the teach-in songs; Warren Rokeach had said it was time for Tommy to write a love song, a memory song, something “sensual,” something “cinematic,” something “groovy.”

  So Tommy had released her from the car. He helped her with her bags to the door, there greeted by the hosts. The center was run by amiable Quakers who had, Tommy suspected, no grasp of what was about to hit them, what amplitudes of reefer smoke they’d soon involuntarily ingest. She’d taken her bags and kissed him and wished him luck and he’d turned back to the humid mercies of the island in August, to the hotel from whose lobby he’d by this point phoned and left her messages four nights in a row, not once speaking with anyone who could locate her, though those he spoke with were groovy, they were cinematic, they were even sensual in their willingness to pass along his messages.

  He wouldn’t call tonight, bless the sepulchral poet for standing as an emblem of the pay telephone’s uselessness. The pay telephone nothing more than a device for ridiculing human solitude.

  Without doubt Kerhonkson was where the action was. In contrast to this bogus bohemia. So far as a lobby detective might care, the morose human specimens arrayed here appeared disastrously unthreatening. Supposedly some kind of creative hothouse, the Chelsea felt instead like a desultory station, a place where insolvent pretenders washed ashore or were like Tommy installed by their managers. Tommy wondered how many other failed singers were entombed upstairs. He should tour the upper floors and take depositions. His second album, Chelsea of the Soon-to-Be-Forgotten. Or, Chelsea of the Forgettable: A Sob-Cycle. Tommy’s talent was, he’d begun to suspect, a load of bricks. He was growing exhausted at not being permitted to set it aside.

  A man possessed by the spirit of sheer prose.

  The clerk, weary of negotiations with the Factory girl, snapped on a transistor radio to drown her out. “Mr. Tambourine Man.” The summer’s first inescapable song, it had lately been overtaken by Dylan’s own electrified vitriol. The Byrds, another false-Beatles, softening up the world for Bobby’s rant. Dylan’s psychedelic weariness was now rendered amazing, apparently, even to teens who’d never heard an honest folk song in their lives. Tommy’s own weariness amazed only himself, and then only a little.

  For two weeks now the new Dylan had poured from every radio in Greenwich Village, from parlor windows thrust wide as if to draw the last shreds of oxygen from the suffocated sidewalks, the track’s sound mercurial and seasick, its scorning inquiry forcing each lonely person to give account, if only to themselves: How does it feel? Tommy suspected Bobby hadn’t a clue in this case, for Dylan had never, like Tommy, been married and felt his wife’s attention slip away. Whatever Dylan’s qualifications for being its author, or lack thereof, the despicable song seemed to magnify loneliness: Each time you heard it, it acted as a mirror bringing your face disastrously close, forced you to study gray-fleshed sockets, to encounter the red-threaded yolks of your eyes. It did this, even as it declared its listener, officially, invisible.

  Was this, at last, Tommy’s woe, his grievance? Only if he kidded himself that his art reached deeper into his life than he presently suspected it did. He was disgruntled less on his own behalf than on that of Van Ronk, Clayton, so many others, all swallowed and disgorged, all eclipsed, all savaged by the splenetic fusillade pouring from the radio. For, what was it to believe yourself part of a cadre of voices, a zone, a scene, a field of engagement defined by its range and relevance—for what was it to be a folk? If not, well, what? What, that wouldn’t frighten Tommy to put in words, even to himself?

  Yet the thing that had just now collapsed was also a sketch for a better world that might be. Tommy did believe it, however appalling to confess. And so, to think yourself defined, however cursory one’s own talent, by immersion in a collective voicing deeper than that of which any sole practitioner could be capable, and then to have every third remark be did you ever open for Dylan, did you ever meet Dylan, was Dylan there is Dylan coming was it like Dylan I think I saw Dylan he’s a second-rate Dylan he’s no Dylan at all and why don’t we just pull down the signs and rename all the streets here Dylan. The corner of Dylan and Dylan where I first saw Dylan but you never see hi
m anymore, do you? Not the likes of you. Was it better or worse, to have been there at the princeling stumblebum’s invention? To recognize the communal property embedded in Bobby’s every utterance, or to be blissfully ignorant of all he’d devoured?

  “We Didn’t Open for Him, He Opened for Us (You Cunt)”

  Yet even antipathy was beyond Tommy’s range. He found in himself no conviction that this vanished world—one he’d entered merely as the recipient of Good Brother Rye’s summons to Greenwich Village to partake of beatnik pussy—was his to enshrine or defend. To be so affronted might be Phil Ochs’s prerogative. Not that of a Boy gone wrongheadedly solo. The situation was simple. Tommy had purchased a ticket. Tommy had been granted admission. Now the show was closing. Tommy Gogan was twenty-seven years old and simply needed a new gig. His next might as soon involve bricks as guitars. He heard nothing of what others did in the new music, and suspected they were pretending to hear it. The raw-scraped sonic travesties with which Bobby himself was now complicit. All commitment was gone from the songs. The poetry flayed out, too. As he sat watching the two Animals or Swine snickering behind their shades Tommy felt a certainty come to him: Their strength was numbers. The plural form, Byrds or Weasels. Now he saw the answer to the folk scene’s collective riddle, as to why Bobby was cluttering up his music with Mike Bloom-field and whoever was brutalizing the electric piano. Rather than a sincere musical epiphany, the choice revealed the hunger for mates, a Beatles of one’s own. Dylan, having shrunken an entire world to his sole person, was terrified by the isolation.

  It shouldn’t take a complete unknown to see it, but Tommy had an advantage in his power of recognition: He was lonely. He should have stayed a Boy. A phrase of Rose’s drifted now into his thoughts. It had never, since his hearing, been too distant from them. A phrase enigmatic, or perhaps he only wished it so: “The true Communist always ends up alone.” Rose had left the motto unexplained. It explained itself. Tommy left his pen in his pocket, for he couldn’t wish for even an instant to sing those words, nor form them with his script, not even to cross out like the rest. There were no second albums in Tommy Gogan’s notebook.