Boomer1

by Daniel Torday

  Hallucinating wasn’t like the scenes she’d seen in Dumbo as a kid at the Sedgwick Theater on Germantown Ave.—no elephants exuding bubbles and turning colors. It bore no resemblance at all to the paisley-and-purple-swirled posters her kid would hang in his room thirty years later, lit by cheesy black light. It was more like the whole world lost its purchase on her mind—she understood later it was the other way around, but that was how it felt—and in that new state she might imagine something awful. Her back ached and her stomach felt like it had contracted into a gravity-sucking black hole somewhere at the immediate center of her body, and for what felt like hours or weeks she couldn’t stand up. If she stayed perfectly still this would all at some point pass. But when it started to feel bad, like it might never end—and she understood then that nothing ever ended, it only repeated on some eternally recurring imagistic loop—if she dragged her bow across the fat G string of the fiddle she’d been playing since before her father was institutionalized, since before she had ever seen red blood on the white subway tiles that she pushed, pushed, pushed away lest it shift her trip to some whole new horror, taking over the beauty of hallucination with the ballast of memory, if she felt her right thumb against the cool ebony of the frog of her bow, things settled. The prodding of her fingertips against catgut felt right, cool and solid in the hot, vacillating world. The edges of the world still flitted up and sizzled, but now they turned toward her, everyone turned toward her while she scratched out “Wheel Hoss” on just the G and D strings of her instrument—then turned back to what they were doing. The morning a week later when some acquaintance of Willie’s came by their Dolores Street apartment asking after Tiff—okay, TFG—okay fine, The Fiddle Girl—she couldn’t even remember having played with his band. But what she’d done had impressed him.

  “We’ve got a show down in Noe Valley later this week,” the guy said. He had huge muttonchops like some kind of deep-forest insect larvae had grown homeostatic inside his cheeks, and the spice of his unwashed armpits seemed to enter her and Willie’s room before he did. She looked at Willie. They’d been going so hard since that party they’d never even acknowledged she hadn’t yet returned to Philly as she planned. She was still here. She didn’t appear to be going anywhere anytime soon. The muttonchopped guy said his name was TR. He was the bassist she’d played with the other night at the party. She didn’t remember playing with a bassist at the party.

  “But listen,” he said, “I’m shit on that old double bass and I know it, tears holes in my fingers, had blisters like water balloons after that night, I’m a professional on the electric, you’ll see, you’ll see, I promise you’ll see.” He did after all have his fingers wrapped in duct tape. He mentioned for the third time since his odor had preceded him into the room how much he loved her fiddling. “And then our manager talked to Bill Graham about a gig backing Spencer Willmont at the Fillmore next month.”

  This was a whole new thing now. This was something more than TR’s BO entering into their place. Spencer Willmont had been a student at Yale before he dropped out to start a band out here playing what he called “Transparent Eyeball Folk.” They made a record in Bakersfield that came out Julia’s junior year of high school, and in addition to the pile of old Decca records her father had left her, it was the only thing she’d listened to for months her senior year. What had drawn her in, of course, was their version of Bill Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky”—what Elvis had done at Sun Records to slow that song down and make it a pure country hit, Spencer Willmont had blown up the way Bear’s acid had blown the top off Julia’s head. It was listening to Spencer Willmont that had led her to the Grateful Dead in the first place, and in turn to an education in a whole area she never would have encountered. In their wide-ranging covers it was as if they were her own personal jukebox. She knew when she heard them cover Hank Williams or Marty Robbins what she was listening to—but when Pigpen sang Elmore James, or when Jerry found his way all the way to Sam Cooke, she found herself tracking those records down at a shop in Old City, where worlds of music now became familiar and new all at once.

  But Spencer Willmont, who hewed closer to the originals than any of those more hard-core rock-and-rollers, bringing space and edge to the Louvin Brothers or Delmore Brothers songs he covered, made a sound that felt like it had come out of her and found its way into his mouth. It was pure American music, America distilled as it was in “Young Goodman Brown,” as distilled as it was in the em dashes of Dickinson or the varieties of William James’s religious experience. Listening to him was like reading a line of Melville that reached out across the decades and thousands of miles and layers of stilted language to speak back to her what was in her own chest. Jerry Garcia himself had even played pedal steel—her father called it “the electric table”—on Spencer’s first record. And here she was, in the Mission, bridging those miles and languages right back, being asked to gig with Spence Willmont himself. It was like traveling to the Temple Mount only to discover the plan was to eat shawarma and tahini with King David.

  Julia actively avoided making eye contact with Willie.

  She said she’d come sit in on some sessions with them, when and where.

  The minute TR left the room—he didn’t take his spicy odor with him, but left it in the room for days after his departure, where it settled in like a new roommate, reminding her and Willie what had been proffered—while continuing to avoid eye contact she told Willie she wouldn’t do it. She didn’t need it.

  “I mean, Fillmore West? I’m not good enough to play Fillmore West. It could be the biggest opportunity for the biggest embarrassment of my whole life. It’s an opportunity to fail on a bigger scale than anyone we know has ever had an opportunity to fail before. It could be like failing myself and all of America all at once. It could come to define me.” Willie didn’t say anything. “Or it could come to make me. Who knows. It’s just so risky.”

  Willie put a shirt on for the first time since they’d arrived in San Francisco almost a month earlier. He found the roach of an old joint in an ashtray and emptied it on a whole other level. “I mean, I’ve never even played my violin through an amp before, let alone played one onstage in front of three thousand people.”

  “Bill Graham has roadies at the Fillmore to set up a fiddle player,” Willie said. “He could make your grandmother’s matzoh ball soup sound hip on that stage.”

  Now they did make eye contact for the first time since TR had left his pheromones behind. It was like the edges of her world were searing again, only this time not from a hallucination but from tangible jealousy and confusion in the man—well, boy—who’d brought her west in the first place.

  Willie left their apartment and didn’t come back for days. Julia wouldn’t have known he’d come back at all if it weren’t for the fact that three days after he walked out, a lid of weed was gone from their top drawer, and only the two of them had keys. She found herself thinking about something other than Willie Schtodt for the first time in a month. The next night, she went to the address TR had left for her. For the first hour after her arrival, no one said a word to Julia. She was The Fiddle Girl and she found that what had made her comfortable when she was tripping her eyelashes off at a party was the same salve in any social situation—she clamped down on her fiddle with her chin and sawed out a line of “Soldier’s Joy.” It was only notes to them, but in her head she blurted out the lyrics her father used to belt in his mock-drunkenest blurt when he’d come back to join them on their Mt. Airy porch: “Well, it’s twenty-five cents for the morphine, and it’s fifteen cents for the beer, it’s twenty-five cents for the morphine, won’t you get me out of here!”

  Spence’s new band was to practice in this huge empty house in Pacific Heights, in a part of the city Julia hadn’t even imagined existed after three weeks of the trek up and down hills from the Mission to the Haight. Long, open streets were lined with pastel-painted Victorians—but these Victorians reminded her more of the subdued ones she’d seen back in We
stcott, her favorite neighborhood in Syracuse, more than the rococo flourishes and bright solid colors of the Haight. These were buildings that had gone up since the fire of 1904, that had been around when Emma Goldman came here speechifying, that had been standing when the U.S. joined the war effort twenty years earlier and that were now better-up-kept, flourishing in the dollars flowing back across the Atlantic after V-J Day. San Francisco may have gone from haven to hellion in the last couple years, tens of thousands of kids flocking to a city that would never be able to hold even a million people total, burbling over into the outskirts of its Bay Area neighbors, but they were still flush with the ease of the two decades since their parents freed the world’s wealth for them, cashing in on the last breath of the breadth of resources all those European colonialists had been collecting from Africa and Asia for almost a century, freed to grow their hair and minds and drop out. Did any of these musicians give a thought to it then, in their lysergic smudge, as notes flew improvised from the instruments their parents had bought them? Julia sure didn’t, not then at any rate. Not until she was back on the East Coast with that same fiddle she would one day come to move to a second-floor guest room so her son could move back into the basement, anyway. Living in the moment afforded a freedom from memory but it demanded a freedom from thought as the price. Thought was not a primary mode of currency for anyone in those moments. It was in fact the one time in her life when Julia could live mostly free of thought, free of that thought-tormented age she would later live in, free of perseveration guilt and overweening memory. Free.

  The newly formed Cherub Band rehearsed inside a house that must have been three, four thousand square feet, not an inch of it furnished—no rug touched its floors, not a chair to be sat in. The only way to sit was backed up against a wall or in the ample space of the house’s uterine bay windows. It was like playing music inside the body of a giant flat-backed violin, part of some acoustic infinite regress, San Francisco as imagined by M. C. Escher. In a room at the back of the house a guitarist in a raggedy poncho picked out the opening lick to Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” over and over and over and over, never looking up, bum bum bam-bum, bah bum bah-ah bum. Years later when Julia read Joan Didion for the first time she found the famous passages in “The White Album” about Didion’s going to visit the Doors both familiar and off-putting—of course the rest of the band had waited hours for Jim Morrison to show up for recording sessions! You didn’t become a rock star so you could arrive at rehearsal on time. You didn’t become a rock musician so you could drive straight to the hospital to give birth. You became a rock musician exactly so you could take a detour to eat some Chinese food on the way to giving birth to your first kid. It wasn’t a cleverly-if-cynically-observed ancillary. It was the thing itself.

  An hour after she arrived and just after she was herself considering leaving—she hadn’t learned the lessons yet that Didion herself hadn’t learned—TR came in, with Spencer behind him. TR’s muttonchops had taken on a whole new dimension, and the body odor now carried a sense of peculiar familiarity. It was its own kind of image, never as strong as the visual images Julia kept of her grandmother and her tinfoil or her white tile with its lines of blood, but the evocation of a different kind of memory nonetheless: sense memory. That smell. She would smell it on her own son when he got old enough to perspire but hadn’t yet discovered deodorant and again when he returned from his interminable games of pick-up basketball when he came home in his thirties. Spencer Willmont himself was a whole other variety of human. He was maybe six foot three, six foot four, and while in photographs she’d only ever seen him in the most audacious of his intensely American Nudie Suits, that first time she saw him in person in their Pacific Heights rehearsal space he was wearing a dun brown suede serape with beaded tassels hanging down off his thin, flat, hairless chest. An acoustic guitar was slung across his back even as he walked in through the door. His gait was reserved, genteel even, as if he was preparing to lecture to them from Wheelock’s Latin, not play his spaced-out American music. Before anyone said a word to him he flipped it around his body and across his chest and started pounding on an E chord with the flat pick in his right hand. For the first time since the first time she’d drunk Bear’s acid, Julia stopped sawing on her fiddle. She’d never heard anyone play Bill Monroe’s “Sitting Alone in the Moonlight” in E before, a key that would make playing it cleanly next to impossible on the mandolin or fiddle, and it took her a second to consider how she’d move from the E a step back to the E-flat that defined its changes before she realized everyone was looking at her. Well, not everyone—Spence wasn’t looking at her, but somehow the rest of the band knew he wanted her to kick it off on fiddle without his even having to. She hadn’t played a note yet. TR was thumping an open E string on his bass and staring at her. She could see the collective hairs of his left muttonchop writhing under the clenching of his jaw. But while it felt like they’d been staring at her for seventeen days, it hadn’t even been two bars yet, and no one had spoken or would speak, and Julia hit the first note of the melody as if she’d been waiting to voice it with the conviction of her own syncopation, hopping in on the shimmering slip between an E and an E-flat, jumping back and then away from that blue note in the melody, and it was clear now she knew what she was doing, that she was a fiddler with the solid up-the-middle chops of Kenny Baker and the blue notes thrown in like she was Vassar Clements or Stéphane Grappelli, she was the right choice. She saw Spencer look up at TR and TR look down at his fingers and everyone else look down at their toes, bangs willowing into their faces, a coy smile playing across Spence’s lips as he stood in the half-light filtering in through the bay windows behind him.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THREE WEEKS LATER JULIA was taking that same solo onstage at the Fillmore. Back in her and Cal’s home in suburban Baltimore, the only evidence of her ever having done so was the fiddle itself. There was no iconic photo of Julia onstage to hang in their basement and she didn’t know if she would’ve wanted it hung if there was one—not a nanosecond of image that was meant somehow to capture what it was like, the thirteen milliseconds of an infinite and infinitely life-defining night. No one but her, Julia, knew what it was like—she was emperor of her memory palace and not even her son or husband was invited to join her. Moving her old fiddle from basement to guest room along with all her vintage instruments was enough for her now. She remembered as she carted that fiddle up two flights of stairs now how she rode up Market to the venue in an old Volvo station wagon with TR behind the wheel and she and Spencer in the backseat together. No one sat shotgun—Spence put the jacket from his Nudie Suit up there like it was another member of the band, which in a very real way it was. It was more identifiably a part of Spencer Willmont’s act than she would ever be and it had been with him longer, too. This was his Captain America suit—he’d met with Nudie Cohn himself after he saw Easy Rider for the first time (he saw it more than a dozen, he said) and told him he wanted his closet stocked with jackets and pants like Peter Fonda and Jack Nicholson wore in the movie. He had a real and easy friendship with Nudie, who’d come to the States just before the war from Ukraine with his real name—Nuta Kotlyarenko—still emblazoned on his papers and who by two years after the war was already putting together some of the loudest embroidered rhinestone-laden suits ever to come into shimmering existence in the American South, just another immigrant whose audacious original aesthetic was straight up the middle of what we come to think of as our country. He was working on a Captain America Chevy convertible for Spence to drive around in.

  “There’s a kind of sartorial self-mythologizing that’s maybe my favorite part of all of this,” Spencer said as they climbed their way up Market Street. He said “all” like it was the tool. Despite his light Southern drawl, he spoke in grammatical, specific sentences like he was, after all, teaching Julia Latin now that he spoke to her at all. Awl. “One puts on a suit and puts on a show and the rest just goes.”

  “Why wo
uld you leave your opportunity at good schooling after coming out here?” he’d asked Julia after their second rehearsal. She’d just looked at him and said, “Why did you?” And he broke out in a big smile and said, “Touché, sweetie, touché.”

  Now in the car the awning of the Fillmore jutted out from the building up before them. Maybe three thousand kids filled the sidewalk and poured down into the street in front of them, maybe four—Spence was big, but this crowd was there to see the Dead, who they would be opening for. Julia would be lying if she said she didn’t wonder who was paying for all those suits and cars, and it wasn’t until she’d gotten free of those days of her late teens that she read about Spencer—about how his father had been a war profiteer in Raleigh, North Carolina, who’d helped lead the way for the arming of the USAF as they joined up with the Brits and Canucks as they began bombing Nazi Germany in 1944. His parents had sent Spence north to attend Yale, hoping a dose of Northeastern snow might help wet him down, but Spencer Willmont burned hot as a white phosphorus incendiary, and Julia should have realized he would stay in one place for about as long.