Ada straightened up and leaned across the table toward me. “You think his music is, uh, not good?”
“I do not think his music is not good, or what we sometimes call bad. I think, with as much certainty as I can bring to these kind of judgments, that Nik’s music is really, really good.” I had never said that in quite that way before. It took on more certainty as I heard myself say the words.
“Me, too. It’s great. Totally great, c’mon,” Ada said.
“And we are so objective, aren’t we?” I said. I started to laugh, and then I felt sad about laughing. I didn’t need to throw up all these cynical equivocations any time I said something important. Not even equivocations, but little sarcastic tics. It didn’t feel good, or even particularly true. We sat there without talking for a few moments. The lights started to come up from all the houses in the surrounding hills. When I first moved to Santa Clarita, the hills behind my house were empty. I used to be able to hear coyotes howling at night. I wasn’t supposed to feel this way, but I didn’t entirely mind all the development—at night, seeing the lights of the houses reassured me.
“I think Rob is seeing someone else,” Ada said.
“No, seriously.”
“Of course he is. He’s married,” I said. “No, I mean someone else, not his wife, not me.”
I sighed. (I actually made some of those mouth-clicking or sucking sounds, usually written as a tsk or a tut, but that doesn’t look right to me.) I liked Rob. I had never met him and probably never would meet him. But from what Ada had told me, he was very funny and smart. He didn’t lie to her. This was clearly another instance of my poor parental guidance. I know I should have disapproved, but she appeared to be so in love, so happy. Ada’s father, I was sure, had no idea of the existence of Rob. Only I got to be her trustworthy confidante.
Ada started to cry.
“Oh, honey, come on.”
Ada sniffed, then she smiled and wiped under her eyes with her knuckle, pushing back mascara and tears. “I’m okay,” she said. I put an arm across the back of her shoulders and squeezed her toward me a little. It was more of a buck-up gesture than an actual hug. She would be fine.
But I should have realized how the movie would complicate things.
FEBRUARY 17 AND 18
Nik called to tell me his old bandmate Tommy Skate was dead. Congestive heart failure, which was expected.
Nik had made me come with him to visit Tommy a few months ago. I hadn’t seen Tommy in years. He was the original lead guitar player in the Demonics. He used to wear plaid pants and creeper shoes with a wifebeater T-shirt. Tommy smoked menthol Marlboros because they made his breath smell good. He asked me out about fifty times from 1977 to 1990. Tommy played in punk bands, new wave bands, power pop bands, grunge bands, and so on, then he stopped playing. Later he became a Buddhist (he still indulged his every desire, but he would lecture you about “letting things go”), he developed a leather fetish, he defended Ronald Reagan, and he knew everything about martial arts movies. He worked lots of bad jobs, but mostly I remember he worked at a hospital switchboard, because he would tell stories about the crazy calls he would get at three a.m. Oh, and I guess Tommy was married once to a woman I never met and then quickly divorced. He never had any kids.
Tommy moved back in with his mother when he got sick. They shared a two-bedroom house in the Valley. It was an aging 1950s ranch, with sunflower wallpaper in the kitchen and mossy wall-to-wall carpeting in the living room. We found Tommy encamped on the sectional couch near a large TV.
Nik hadn’t said a word the whole ride over. He drove, smoking and holding the wheel with one hand. The CD playing on his stereo was one of his own productions—I never understood how someone could listen to his own CDs. Isn’t that just unimaginable, or at least indicative of a malignant solipsism? But Nik, going back a long while, listened to his own music if he listened to anything. The older he got, the less he wanted to hear any music at all. It seemed to irk him or bore him, but less so when it was one of his albums. I can imagine no equivalence to this in my own life—again, we have veered so far from each other. Except I also listened to Nik’s music, so we had that in common.
An ancient air conditioner hummed overchilled but under-circulated air into Tommy’s house. A stale sweet smell barely covered the acrid and unmistakable yellow stink of a lifetime of cigarettes. I didn’t ever tell Nik how much it bothered me, that same sad undersmell in his apartment—he was used to it, after all. Tommy sat with his feet up on a pillow. His ankles and feet looked swollen to the point of formal uselessness. His wrists and fingers appeared puffy and immobile. He explained he could no longer play his guitar, but he still could play the keyboard. He explained further—just the sound of those words, pulmonary edema, whispered our future to us. Myopathy, necrosis, infarction—the serious words I would put into search engines late at night and then watch them multiply.
Tommy turned the knob on his old stereo until Richard Hell and the Voidoids poured out of the speakers in the high volume requirement of both 1978 punk rock and damaged old ears. Hell’s sneery vocal instantly grated on me. At first I thought Tommy chose it for the horrible ironic effect of punk vitality. But then, as I watched his hands weakly chug along to the contrary guitar, I could see that Tommy really loved the noise, the refusal and the stubborn assault of it. It wasn’t an ironic gesture, it was a sad and nostalgic gesture.
“I hate this album,” Nik said.
“Yeah, but the guitars,” Tommy said.
“The guitars,” Nik said, a concession lurking in a nod and pursed lips. Nik wore his sunglasses, but from where I sat at his side, I could see him dart glances at the room, at Tommy’s swollen white feet, at the array of pills on the side table.
Tommy’s face—his nose in particular—had grown doughy over the years. I tried my best to conjure how he used to look in the old days. Without moving my head, my eyes looked up and back, as if that would somehow help me see the past better. Maybe people do that with their eyes because looking at the present is too distracting. I could glimpse him standing at Nik’s bar maybe fifteen years back. It was horrible to contemplate how much the past fifteen years had worn on him, or, really, on all of us. He was truly unrecognizable, just a damp, congested distortion of his younger face.
I didn’t say anything to Tommy as we sat there, I just listened—how could I not, at this volume?—to the music. We all felt relief when the “hit” came on, “Blank Generation.”
I belong to the blank generation and
I can take it or leave it each time
The nihilism of the lyrics came with a bright up-hop to the guitar riff and some nice sloppy oohs that made us all feel momentarily happier, though it couldn’t have been lost on any of us how young the music sounded, how ridiculous.
“It’s just the—” Tommy started, then paused. We looked at him. “Shit, I can’t get the word I was about to say. It is the strangest sensation, knowing something but not being able to remember it. How can you not remember it if you know you forgot it, you know?”
“It’s called aphasia. That sensation—you remember the thing but not the word,” I said. “Nominal aphasia is when you can’t recall names.” They stared at me. “I have it, too, all the time.”
“Oh, fuck, everyone gets that,” Nik said. Although Nik had an excellent memory for an unrepentant alcoholic. He never forgot anything.
“It doesn’t matter,” Tommy said, but I could tell he was still trying to think of it. Nik took out his gifts: his latest CD in a Collector’s Limited Edition case and a liter bottle of handsome-looking scotch.
“I figure if you can’t drink much, it should be the best, right?” Nik said.
“Thanks, man.” Tommy looked at it. “I can’t drink at all anymore, it interferes with all these meds. I can’t tolerate it at all. But it sure is nice to look at the bottle. You want a shot?”
I was so irritated by this. I just hated, deeply, the idea of Nik taking a shot. Right here, in front of b
loated Tommy, in the morning. And I hated that Nik spent a lot of money on an expensive bottle of scotch when he had no money. And then, through my anger, I figured it out—he knew that Tommy couldn’t drink. He knew that he would end up drinking it himself.
Nik uncorked the top and poured some in a water glass. He threw back his head and slammed it down.
“Is that the way you’re supposed to drink that kind of scotch?” I shouted over the music, and I heard the pointless harsh scold in my weary rhetorical inflection. They didn’t even look at me, and who was I to rain my judgment on them, now, after all? This was a special occasion; I was a prig. Except there would be another shot, surely, and another, and then we would drive home, me terrified not that Nik would crash—he seemed unaffected by drink—but that he would be pulled over and get a DUI. Which wouldn’t be his first. And maybe he would lose his license and then wouldn’t be able to get to work. At the very least it risked a big fine, not to mention the possible bench warrant that was no doubt outstanding from previously unpaid tickets. Fifteen years ago Nik actually had to spend a couple of weeks in jail. All due to years of ignored traffic tickets. He stamped handcuffs in the LA County Jail. And washed police cars. They let him leave the jail to sleep, I think. I don’t remember. He was pretty careful for a while after that, to pay or respond to tickets. He had become more careless the last couple of years. Careless or reckless? None of this appeared to concern Nik in the slightest as he downed another shot. Tommy dissolved into a hacking coughing fit, and then we watched as he worked to find his breath.
As soon as we left Tommy’s door, Nik felt in the pocket of his jacket for a cigarette. In the walk down the driveway, he lit up and took a deep drag. He would chain-smoke all the way home. I knew Tommy upset Nik, and I knew that the scotch and the cigarettes calmed him down. I knew that. I also knew that he had coughing fits similar to Tommy’s. I had never bothered to ask Nik to quit smoking. Not once. I knew he never would. I had asked him about other things, drink and drugs, at various crisis points. He would not consider my concerns, my calculations, my projections in fear and the future. He would say, more or less, This is how I want to live and I won’t complain when it finally takes me out. Which was true, he did not complain. He wouldn’t curtail his life to protect against some theoretical consequence that might never come to pass. Unlike most normal people, he didn’t regret his habits and he never even pretended he would try to quit any of it.
By now I should have been used to his—what should I call it? Need? Requirement? Accommodation, maybe? He wouldn’t call it an addiction. He would call it his consolation. As far back as I can remember, Nik always used—the consoling part came later—whatever was at hand whenever he could. He just wanted and needed to get off his face, out of his head, expand, shut down, alter, spin, fly, sleep, wake up, float. When we were small kids, we would grab each other’s arms and swing in circles faster and faster until our brains’ equilibrium was nauseatingly off. We would walk in staggers and feel the earth come up to meet us in giant waves as we collapsed in breathless laughter. This odd feeling was a pleasure, and enjoying it is common, right? Nik also loved to wind the chains of a swing in creaking twists, pushing his leg off the support poles until the chains would twist to their very top, then he would push himself in the opposite direction, flying in tight fast circles as the chains unwound, throwing his head back to augment the spin. I read somewhere that the brain needs disorientation to properly develop. That childhood desire to feel dizzy has something to do with increasing the vestibular and cerebellar interaction in the young brain. Proprioception is the activity where the brain orients the inside world with the outside world. Spinning throws off your proprioception and the brain works and develops as it tries to get it back. The desire to spin around is healthy, I guess, because it teaches the brain how to get a stable fix on the world under any circumstances. But Nik got stuck there, somehow, and had to do these activities over and over. Getting dizzy-high was just the beginning. Swing sets were his gateway drug. Nik had an intense appetite, a special extra need, and as he grew older he grew more hungry for any and all alterations. I watched it; it was impossible to miss his difference, how he craved anything that undid his equilibrium.
He began drinking coffee in third grade. He would make it with instant coffee crystals and lots of sugar. He would mix it cold with tap water. He often stayed up all night (which is another childish and cheap way to get high—stay up all night and the fatigue alone will make you feel giddy). He drank OTC medicine, all kinds: decongestant to get speeded up, cough syrup to sleep. I swear he always smoked cigarettes, but of course that can’t be true, he started at maybe twelve. By junior high he was taking any drugs he could get his hands on, and he could get his hands on so many.
Like the most serious druggies, he lived by the PDR, the Physician’s Desk Reference, the well-thumbed paperback book that made his drug experimentations seem so rational and considered. He would root through his girlfriends’ mothers’ medicine cabinets. He would take a few of these, a few of those. The PDR would tell him what the drug would do, what the pill looked like, and it would tell him what it would interact with. He knew what he could mix or not mix. Nik became the guy you asked, How many should I take? Nik was the guy who helped the kid who turned blue or the girl throwing up in the bathroom at the party. And his gleeful hunger to alter his brain never abated and was never apologized for. In his youth he extolled theories of the need and even obligation to get high. He quoted the usual hallucinogenic pantheon of Huxley and so on. He didn’t miss any rationales for his enthusiasms: Huichol Indian peyote, Freud’s cocaine, Leary’s LSD, Richard Harris’s scotch.
As others of us (me, for instance) grew bored taking drugs, of “experimenting,” he never stopped. He wasn’t experimenting. But as he lived longer and longer into his aging, creaking habits, he stopped trying to extol them to everyone, or at least to me. If it came up at all between us, it was usually because I decided I wanted him to change his habits out of simple health or plain decency, or even economy (the cigarettes I never mentioned were now five dollars a pack). He would simply tell me that this was his consolation. And what could a sister say to answer that?
On the drive home from Tommy’s house, we didn’t say anything to each other until he idled his car in my driveway. Before I got out, he said, “Thanks for coming with me.”
“It’s real bad,” I said. He nodded. I climbed out and then I leaned into the open window to kiss him goodbye.
“At least it can’t get much worse,” he said with a broad smile. “It really can’t.”
Three months later, Tommy finally died. The day after Nik called me about Tommy, I opened my mail and found a copy of the obituary Nik had composed for his Chronicles:
New York Times, February 18, 2004
Tommy Skate, 49, Dies;
Guitarist for the Demonics
Tommy (Skate) Lester, the original guitarist for seminal garage rock band the Demonics, was found dead at his home in Van Nuys, California, on February 16, 2004.
Dr. Sam Wills of the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office certified that the cause of death was heart failure. Dr. Wills said no autopsy would be performed. Lester had a long history of drug abuse and alcoholism.
“The Demonics came out of nowhere to totally transform the 1979 scene in LA, working a unique sound counter to both commercial progressive rock and punk rock,” said Robert Hilburn, music critic for the Los Angeles Times. Lester played on the Demonics’ first two albums: 1979’s Waiting for the Game and 1980’s Sound Fantastique. Despite its dark lyrics and art-rock dissonance, Sound Fantastique’s fatal hooks and crafted melodies made it one of the best-selling records of 1980 as well as one of the most critically acclaimed. Nic Worth, lead singer and songwriter for the Demonics, remarked once that “Tommy Skate’s undulating leads really gave the Demonics their unique, intense sound.” A legendary band that broke up even before their second record was released, their influence long outlived their brief years t
ogether. The oft-repeated rock’n’roll cliché about them is that although the Demonics didn’t play very many shows, every person who did see them live seemed to have formed a band of their own.
Thomas Lester was born in 1954 in Los Angeles. His father worked for the postal service and his mother taught piano. His mother bought Lester his first guitar for his 8th birthday. He attended Fairfax High School, where he met the other members of what would later become the Demonics. His first group was the short-lived proto-glam band Sticky Baby, which had a sixteen-year-old Nik Worth as lead singer. They played a simple heavy blues boogie in semi-drag that was later taken up by other bands as “raunch” rock. When Worth and Lester quit Sticky Baby to form the Demonics, they vowed to abandon blues-based rock forever.
After the glory of the Demonics, Tommy Skate was in a number of much less interesting and successful bands. He embraced a harder, faster, and more generic style; he abandoned his eccentric edge (against the advisement of his mentor, Nik Worth) for what he thought was a more commercial sound and eventually he stopped playing in bands altogether. The money he made from publishing royalties from the songs he coauthored on the Demonics’ records helped support him over the lean years, but throughout the eighties and nineties he also worked periodically in fisheries in Alaska, at a hospital, as a gravedigger, and as a garbageman.
He is survived by his mother, Glenda Lester, and his brother, Jim Lester, both of Los Angeles.*
*Correction 2/19/2004:
The obituary for Tommy Skate on February 18 misidentified the high school where the band the Demonics was founded. The Demonics were started at Hollywood High School by Nik Worth, not Fairfax High School. Only after Worth transferred to Fairfax High School did Tommy Skate join the already formed Demonics.
Nik couldn’t help getting his licks in, but he still nailed the odd tone of the rock and roll obituary, the way it would leaven even the most sordid life with comforting obitual formality. I knew this because I was a regular reader of obituaries. Before I read anything else, I scanned the obituaries. I wasn’t always like this, it was a habit of my morbid middle years. I just found myself drawn to them every day. Why? I don’t think it is hard to guess. I first looked for the age of the dead person. If they were under sixty, I looked at the cause of death, usually discreetly rendered in the second or third paragraph. (Nik’s obit for Tommy was less discreet than was typical; usually the drug use isn’t mentioned but just screams between the lines of the rock star found dead of “heart failure.”) Very young people mostly die in accidents. Most have not lived long enough to accomplish anything notable, and they rarely get full obituaries. So the saddest obituaries are the premature but not uncommon middle-aged “young” people, say between thirty-five and fifty. These folks do indeed die and I always took note:
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