Tonight on the ride Spencer was the stiffest she’d yet seen him. “How do you feel the Cherub Band has developed,” Spencer said, but it was clear he was seeking no answer, just looking out into the crowd. Then his arm was around her, pulling her across his lap to look at a whole slew of bell-bottomed kids waiting to get into the Fillmore. “Just get a couple drinks in you and I know you’ll be fine,” Spencer said, and as ever when he said “you,” he always meant “me.”
Backstage she watched as Spencer had a drink and then another and this was how he transformed, how his shoulders dropped and a spliff hit his lips and suddenly five minutes till showtime and it was like the Nudie Suit was wearing him. The band was called out by its full name for the first time onstage there when Bill Graham announced them.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we have a special treat here at the Fillmore West,” Graham said, his thick Slavic lips and basso-deep voice carrying up to the second deck of the Carousel Ballroom. Julia could only see the shimmer of his thick brown hair under the sodium lights, and she was clutching the frog of her bow like she might choke it to death, like the abalone-inlaid ebony might give way beneath her clutch, all those kids in their nimbus of smoke writhing out there before them. Spence had his Captain America–jacketed back to the audience like he was Miles Davis, hitting a tater over and over, sliding up the D string of his nacre-crackling D-45, and he turned his Elvis head over to Julia, gave her a nod, his transformation complete, and she started tatering a G on her fiddle, too.
“On behalf of the band, it is my distinct pleasure to welcome to the Fillmore stage for the first time, Mr. Spencer Willmont and his Band of Cherubs.” TR thumped hard on the G on his bass and Spence spun around, Nudie Suit jacket sparkling like a dwarf star in the Fillmore lights overhead, the Dead’s huge tube amps blaring acoustic instruments at a level that might never be replicated in human history as he sang high and hard the opening lyrics to the Louvin Brothers’ “You’re Running Wild,” a song he’d adapted as if it was his own. They played one long, cosmic, spaced-out set, forty-five minutes to the bounding heads out across the ballroom as they were picked out like individual motes by the lights above. They were opening for Moby Grape, who were opening for the Dead, who were the main act for the night, but Julia never even said hello to that other Spence, the Grape’s lead singer, as by now she could do nothing but look at Spencer Willmont.
After the set he hadn’t said much more to her than, “Nice solo on that last one,” but she knew all his covers and all his own songs from listening to his record, and he had her singing tenor harmonies over him on half their set. She’d heard that Dylan rehearsed and recorded this way, too—just some charts up on a stand someone else had drawn up, one sketched-out run-through of each song on a guitar or piano so the musicians had an idea of what he was after, and the band was expected to get in there and sing and play as tight as a polished group. She was happy to do it all on the fiddle but she truly didn’t know if she had the vocals to go there, too—there was no hiding behind a flat note three steps above a singer like Spence, no matter how blazing stoned they or their crowd were. You could make your voice all forceful and strident like Joan Baez or Donna Jean Godchaux, who had sung a couple steps above Dylan and Elvis, or you could get right in there and hit the note like you were doing a session in Motown. But song after song, rehearsal after rehearsal at that big, empty, echoey house in Pacific Heights, she nailed it. So while Spence seemed a lot more interested in the spliff he and Skip Spence were sharing in their backstage room there, Julia sat back and just continued to saw out double stops on her fiddle while all the rest jabbered and sang a chorus or two. At one point she felt certain Jerry was looking over at her, his big black beard roiling in the half-lights backstage like some wiry hirsute sea, but he was wearing a big old pair of aviators and there was no real way to know if he was looking at her without being able to see his eyes. He didn’t say a word to her. For years later it was the story she didn’t tell anyone because what story was there to tell? What was the beginning, what the middle, and how could there ever be an end? What was the story? Once when she’d almost become a famous musician she’d almost talked to Jerry Garcia after a show but in the end she was too shy so she didn’t? It was like another image in and of itself, a nanosecond and an eternity, an event never begun and never finished and nothing to tell. It was like she’d have to take a story all the way back to the day of her birth to try to track what story she’d be telling—I was born and I played music and then I didn’t and then I spent weeks cleaning out my basement so my one-day-to-be-a-domestic-terrorist son could move back, the end.
Before she knew it, Julia was calling her mother back in Philly to let her know she was going to be on the road all summer. In a phone booth outside of the one-ish-plus-star hotel where they were staying, she dumped dime after dime into the slim slot and pulled the slick plastic of the receiver close to her face. She didn’t even ask how her father was doing because she didn’t know what she would say if she learned the answer, any answer. The Cherubs were planning to hop on a bus and travel the southwest route, through New Mexico and Texas and across to Tennessee and North Carolina, playing shows at night and performing on radio stations in the afternoons, supporting Spencer Willmont in all his Nudie Suited peregrinations. She never even said a proper good-bye to Willie Schtodt—the afternoon she came back to their apartment he was still gone, though there was a fresh seed-and-stemmy quarter of weed in their top drawer, and she only saw his high school Bostonian friend, the same friend she’d walked in on with his girlfriend that week they first arrived on the West Coast. Looking at him now, it was like a year had passed instead of a month. She could hardly even remember the kid she’d been when she first got there.
“Going somewhere, sweetheart?” the kid said when she walked in. He was wearing a shirt for the first time she’d seen, but no pants, just a loose pair of tightie whities that hung around his hips like pachyderm skin. He looked like a boy, like a child, like some kid calling her sweetheart without knowing any better he was about to be grounded.
“I’m going everywhere, Yank,” she said, already out the door. “I’m going fucking everywhere.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
IT WAS LATE ONE NIGHT all the way across the country, in their only gig at the Fillmore East, of all places, that Spencer Willmont let them all know of his change of plans. He’d been absent at rehearsals in hotel rooms all the way across the country. He’d missed two radio shows in the past week, one in Columbus, Ohio, and the next in Morgantown, West Virginia—at each the whole band had showed up in the studio and waited around for hours for him to arrive before the DJs had to tell them they could perform with him or without him and regardless of their talents together they had to admit they couldn’t go on without him—they were a totalitarian nation absent the Great Leader.
“I know we have all these shows scheduled,” Spence said to TR. Julia was sitting on the sidelines, as ever, not saying anything. “But they’re recording in the South of France and they need my vocals.” Though she didn’t know it, the winter before she started playing with them, Spencer had opened for the Violent Blossoms, and the Blossoms had just rented out a whole house east of Grenoble to record what they were certain would be their groundbreaking, big-sound record. Whoever could afford to pay for travel out there would have a place to sleep and they could come play on the next record and who knew what else after? Who knew. Julia thought that between that night and when he left Spence would come to her room, as he had been doing for the past two months, after every show. That night, she didn’t see him at all. After the show he didn’t stick around backstage. He didn’t come to her. The next afternoon she saw TR in the lobby. Somehow she knew just from looking at TR’s sycophantic face Spence was already gone. The heat of the summer day blazed in Midtown Manhattan. Julia took an hour to walk from the Plaza up Fifth Avenue, toward the Met. She decided to go into the museum. Somewhere in the statuary, amid the white Roman alabasters of kings and gene
rals, Julia slumped onto the floor and cried for almost half an hour before a guard came along to tell her she had to go.
She had to go.
Julia couldn’t even bring herself to find the rest of the band in the big apartment down on Houston and Attorney Street where they’d holed up before the show they were supposed to play at the Fillmore East. Spencer Willmont was on a plane for the Alps to the far east of the French countryside, headed for some little town called Bourg d’Oisans, where he would go record with the loudest, most flamboyant rock band any of them had ever heard. A decade later the Rolling Stones wouldn’t even be old yet, but the Blossoms would be all but forgotten, one record reissued by Rhino Discs in the eighties to modest sales, a vinyl copy of which Julia also moved up to the guest room. The Cherubs were to scatter to the winds. With some luck Spence hadn’t known about a couple thousand dollars TR had socked away knowing that a day like this would come for the band. When Julia snuck in later that day to grab her stuff and find some cheap way back to her parents’ house in Mt. Airy—she had nine dollars and thirty-seven cents in her pocket, which on the day her son moved back into her house four decades later would buy her a copy of The New Yorker or a cup of coffee but not both—the rest of the band was sleeping off the damage they’d done the night before, but TR was up scrambling eggs in the kitchenette in the place.
“Want some?” he said. “Got some of that good chorizo from the market down on Second Ave. It’s spicy. Spicy might be just the thing right now. Burn your mouth like the memory of fire.”
“What the fuck kind of person,” Julia said. She was standing with her back pressed to the cold plaster wall next to the range TR cooked on. There was a high-pitched ringing in her ears from all the shows they’d played in the last month, a literal sound in her head that would never subside. Like the tinfoil and images of her father, it wasn’t a memory, it wasn’t over, it would never end. She didn’t even know what she was wearing—a pair of bell-bottoms she’d never seen before, a thin halter top though it was November, and a big old Sherpa sheepskin coat that might have been Spence’s, or might have been someone else Spence had slept with’s. She tried to picture herself party to the thousand-year-old statues she’d just been crying amid at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan, stone and silence—what was it that Rilke had called music, the breathing of statues, the quiet of images—what someone would have seen if they’d seen her then, but she couldn’t get above it. The sharp smell of Mexican sausage leaking out into sizzling eggs brought her right back.
“So here’s the thing,” TR said. “I socked a whole bunch of money away knowing this was going to happen. I mean … not knowing knowing, but you know—knowing. Knowing character is destiny, that kind of knowledge.” Without taking his hand off the spatula or his eyes away from the eggs on the stovetop, TR reached into a brown paper bag on the counter. “Your share,” he said.
TR pulled out a thin stack of bills. It had a rubber band around it, which made the edges curl up. He handed it to her. In Julia’s fingers it was hard to describe how thin it felt, like the absence of substance you felt when you had filo dough in your mouth. Her hand told her she was holding a paltry sum and TR could see it in her face.
“Count it,” he said. It was two thousand dollars. It was hard to believe that two thousand dollars, enough to live on for months, as debt enough to break you, amounted to so insignificant a stack of hundreds. It was the objective correlative of that whole period—enough to live on but in your hand so thin you almost couldn’t feel it. “He’s in a little town called Bourg d’Oisans. It’s easy to find. France is lousy with ex-pats these days. You can get there no problem. I’ll write it all down for you if you decide you wanna go. You could. Easily. Or you could keep that and start what comes next here in the States. Free of Spence. Character, destiny. The good ol’ United States aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. The Cherubs, they dead.”
Julia took the bills and shoved them into her pocket, their fibrous paper crumpling against her hand. She went back to her room. She had a decision to make, should I stay or should I go. For years she’d wanted change and now she was the agent of her own change. It occurred to her as she sat in that room that she never had made a decision of this size before. Never actively made it, anyway. She bolted her father’s hospital after seeing that blood on the floor. She left her home in Philadelphia for Syracuse University because she was accepted to Syracuse University with a scholarship and that was what she should do. Even the thin wild mercury decision to head west to the coast with Willie, then back plinko-circuitiously across the country east with Spencer’s band, had felt less like decisions than non-decisions: If Spencer Willmont asked you to join his band, you joined his band! If Willie Schtodt asked you to travel to San Francisco, you traveled to San Francisco. Now she had a choice to make, to head back home to the land she knew, or to thrust east across the ocean, back to the very country where her father had left his sanity behind him, along with any real prospects of his family’s happiness, and of course she should’ve known then she couldn’t and wouldn’t do it.
Of course, she knew even then she’d one day end up being the kind of Julia Sidler or Julia Steinberg or Julia Goldfarb or Julia Feinberg or Julia Steinsteenowitzowitzsky who would spend weeks cleaning out a basement of all her expensive vintage instruments she and her husband could now afford so that her thirty-year-old son could move back in to live with her, but first this, for the space of those moments in that life in those nanoseconds not captured on film and not able to be captured on film or video or selfie or even in words or images, she could imagine it, it was possible, it was present and it was real and it was who she was—is—would forever and always not be.
FUGUE
BOOMER MISSIVE #1
“BOOM BOOM,” ISAAC ABRAMSON SAID. He was sitting in front of the iSight in his parents’ basement, Jerry Garcia’s upside-down face over his left shoulder. It was late afternoon at the end of June.
“Today I punched a baby boomer in the face,” Abramson said. “Today he punched back.” Abramson motioned to his eye, touched his face. He felt the blood tacky against his finger. “Tomorrow he won’t. This is the first Boomer Missive. Today I will lay out what there is to lay out when we think about the baby boomers, as Boomer Boomers, in the years ahead. There will be much more to say in the days ahead. Today I want to do two things, having already punched a baby boomer. I want to tell you a story, and I want you to think about just where you fit in that story yourself. Here’s the story I want to tell you:
“Sixty years ago your grandparents went across an ocean to the continent of Europe to reap the material benefits of a singularly promising business opportunity. There was a war going on overseas. Your grandparents, not your parents, they helped. They helped us all. They had the noble intentions, the greatest generation’s greatest generational intentions, the ones you’ve heard about your whole life. They were liberators, they were the deus ex machina Europe needed. They liberated untold treasure. It wasn’t their fault—there it was before them, so they collected it up and brought it home. They came back with this treasure. Unfathomable treasure. Maybe even enough to send you to college, to buy you expensive sneakers when you were a kid. But your parents, who did not help and did not themselves even plunder that treasure—they grew up with more and more and more and more. They were not liberators. They were not the purveyors nor the architects nor the executors of the noble task nor the players in the great game. They were the recipients of the spoils, and they basked in it. They received the signifier but not the sign, they were the first generation to have fall in their lap all the lucre without exerting one iota of the toil. This was not their fault, nor was it their responsibility—just as it was not your fault, nor your responsibility, when it fell a generation further, to you, when there was no more draft and no active war to join even if you wanted to. When you were too young to know. Some of it they may have given on to you in part. My parents, for an example, gave me a lot. They sent me to
college. When I was a kid they bought me expensive Air Jordans and, later, Reebok Pumps. David Robinson’s Reebok Pumps. They live in big houses, our parents, the baby boomers. My parents, for example, allowed me to have a room in the basement of one of those houses. They cleaned out the basement for me, my old room, so I could move back in. Here I am, sitting in that house.
“Here I am.
“But now they are old. And we are young. And our grandparents are passing on. But our parents, they still have all that treasure their parents brought back from Europe. They live in big houses. They own the goods that all that resplendent treasure afforded them. They own tall, well-appointed brownstones in big cities. They have jobs. They own mansions and more mcmansions and mcbrownstones and mctwobedrooms. They have jobs.
“They have the jobs.
“They have all the jobs.
“They were meant to retire at the age of sixty-five, these parents of ours. They grew up amid a world in which they made a promise, signed an unwritten social compact: you worked until you were sixty-five and then you stepped aside. But not these baby boomers. That was the promise that was promised them—but more important, that was the promise that was promised us. And they have not retired. They have not. They have not.”
Abramson put his finger to his face again. He could feel it was flushed. For a couple of minutes he did not look at himself on-screen, but now he could see his red, red face. He barely recognized himself with his bulging eye, sweat-plastered hair—what remained of it—all over his forehead. He thought to pause the video, but he decided he would leave that long pause in. You could always edit later. Always. Then he continued.
“Now I want to tell you another story. A different story. I bet it’s not totally different from your story. It’s a story of failure. It’s the story of my own failure.
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