Glimpses

by Lewis Shiner

  We made our narrow and winding way toward the top of the Hollywood Hills. Finally we came to a cul de sac lined with houses that face back toward the city. Graham pulled over and parked in front of the first house on the right. “This is it,” he said.

  It’s a white stucco box, flat-roofed, built into the side of the hill, so the level that faces the street is the second floor in back. I could see the garage and the front door but the rest was submerged in junipers, palms, bamboo, and ivy.

  “You want to get out?” I asked him.

  “I’m okay here. You go on.”

  I walked out into the middle of the circle. The rear of the house faces downtown L.A. and the view has to be pretty spectacular at night. I could see the skyline from where I stood. There was no other traffic, no other sound but birds and a distant lawn mower.

  I wanted more. I wanted to knock on the door and see if they’d let me look around. Sure they would. Me smelling like beer and wearing the kind of clothes they wouldn’t wear to work in the garden. If they ever worked in their own gardens.

  I got back in the car. Graham held up his hand and said, “Listen.” He closed his eyes, so I did too. “Can you hear it?”

  “Hear what?”

  “The music. All that music. He sat at a grand piano in that house and wrote all the songs for Pet Sounds, everything on Smile, right there.”

  “With his feet in a sandbox.”

  “Forget the sandbox. Just listen.”

  I listened. I could hear it. Brian playing the grand piano and singing “Surf’s Up,” like he had on the CBS Inside Pop special in the summer of 1966.

  “I hear it,” I said. “Do you hear it?”

  “I hear it.”

  “What is it? What are you hearing?” I opened my eyes.

  Graham tilted his head. “It’s…”

  “Yeah?” I could still hear “Surf’s Up,” plain as day, as if it was coming out of the car radio, just Brian and the piano.

  “It’s…‘Good Vibrations.’ The high part near the end, before the theremin and the fade-out.”

  I felt totally let down. “C’mon, let’s get out of here.”

  We took a case of Raffo to Graham’s house and he nuked some frozen lasagnas for dinner. Afterward I couldn’t sit down. I looked out Graham’s front window at the row of streetlights that trailed off into the sunset.

  “What was your family like?” I asked him. “You said something before about how you didn’t get along.”

  “That was kind of an understatement.”

  “Is your dad still alive?”

  “Yeah, he and my stepmother moved out here five years ago. I wish they hadn’t. I came out here to get away from the sons of bitches in the first place.”

  “But at Christmas…”

  “I was here by myself. I know. I told them I was having people over just so they wouldn’t hang around, making things worse than they already were.”

  “That bad?”

  “Hell, if you want to hear the story I can put up with telling it.”

  “If you can put up with telling it, I want to hear it.”

  “I told you about my mother dying and all, when I was three. Well, her parents were just grief-stricken. I guess they wanted to hold on to something of her, and they tried to get me away from my dad. Of course they didn’t have any case at all, he got a lawyer and won me back, and turned me over to his own mother. She lived near Hot Springs, and, man, I loved it there. I would get up every day and go over to the nearest kid’s house, which was a mile away, and then we would go miles out into the Hot Springs National Forest, playing all day long by ourselves, no supervision, coming home and eating, and nobody ever thinking a thing about it.

  “It was two weeks before first grade when my dad showed up with my new mother, my stepmother, and took me back to Pine Bluff. Now, up to then I hadn’t seen much of religion. This woman was Church of Christ, which means she wasn’t just a fire-breathing fundamentalist, she went to a church that hasn’t even got music in it.

  “I remember the first day I was in Pine Bluff. I saw some kids playing down the street and I started to run off and play with them. My stepmother leaned out the kitchen window and yelled at me, ‘Stay in your own yard!’ That was so crazy, with me having been out in the National Forest every day up to then, well, it didn’t even register. I just kept on going. She came out of that house like a cavalry division and dragged me back in the house. That started a war that lasted until the day I finished high school and went into the Navy.”

  “Did she make you go to church too?”

  “Three times a week until I got out of high school.”

  “I can’t feature you in church. Were you into it?”

  “My first memory of it was resentment. Because my stepmother had this thing where I had to go home in the afternoons, instead of playing, like the other kids, I had to go home and memorize Bible verses. It was bad enough to miss play, but then to have to do something I hated doing, memorizing those verses. Then I caught on to the fact that she never did any memorizing herself, she just sat there with the Bible open, reading, while I was the one that was doing the memorization. When I realized that, I ran away from home. That was the first time I ran away. I was in the fourth grade. I decided I was going to be a cowboy.”

  “How far did you get?”

  “About ten miles out of town. It got dark and some country people took me in, and slowly but surely they got the story out of me and called my parents and they came and picked me up. It was not very well organized. I was pretty stupid.”

  “Hey, man, you were just a kid.”

  “I got better. I don’t remember when the third time was, but I was gone for three or four days and I had them really worried.”

  I said, “I ran away twice, senior year. Never got far. My mom promised she was going to make things better and all she did was end up taking up for my dad.”

  “That sounds familiar. I’ve told people this before and they couldn’t believe I would run away from home. They said it was incomprehensible.”

  “I comprehend it all right. Sometimes I wonder why it took me so long. My father never let up, you know? No matter how good I was.”

  “Well, I wasn’t perfect, but I wasn’t, you know, a criminal or anything. It was just horseplay. What got me was the punishment for accidental stuff. Like reaching for something on the table and knocking over a glass of milk and getting your ass beaten for that. My father kept this three foot tree branch. He called it ‘The Stick’ and it sat on top of the refrigerator for no other reason than to beat my ass. I got so used to it that I thought it was normal. Then one time I was over at a friend’s house, and his little sister got up on this cabinet and pulled an entire cabinet full of glass over on top of her. And her mother screamed and ran over and grabbed her up and I thought she was going to pop the hell out of her, which is what my dad or my stepmother would have done, and she started shaking her, to get the broken glass off, and saying, ‘Are you all right? Are you all right?’ and I almost started crying. I was so amazed that she wasn’t mad…”

  It was quiet for a long time. I watched a couple of cars drive by in the darkness, shadowy figures behind the wheel. “You did some college on the GI Bill, right? Did you ever think about going straight to school instead of the Navy? You’re smart. You could maybe have gotten a scholarship or something.”

  “I took the SATs and did real good. I had a teacher at the high school that was going to do what he could for me. But my father said no. He said, ‘You’re not smart enough to go to college.’ And that was that.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Fuck no, I’m not kidding. He never could find a good word to say to me. Or to anybody. Love is the one word you never heard in our house.”

  “Sounds like Brian’s dad.”

  “Or Morrison’s. Morrison’s dad was Navy, same as mine.”

  “Was your dad the one made you join up?”

  “No, that was my idea. If I wasn’
t going to college I had to do something.”

  “Or maybe…maybe you thought by going in the Navy he would finally be proud of you.”

  After a minute Graham said, “Maybe so. Pretty stupid, huh?”

  I came up behind him and put my hands on his shoulders. “No. Just human.”

  He held onto one wrist for a couple of seconds, then he reached for his beer again.

  I slept in Graham’s guest room, on a foldout bed that was too short for me. He gave me a scrapbook he’d put together on Pacific Ocean Park and I sat up for a while reading it. I can see why it has such a hold on him. It wasn’t just a lot of rides, it was an entire magical world you could escape to, a world where all the restaurants served hot dogs and pizza, where kids could drive miniature freeways or pretend to live under water.

  I couldn’t calm down enough to sleep. I kept hearing music in my head, “Surf’s Up” and this other Smile song called “Child Is Father of the Man.” The title is the only lyric, repeated over and over against a simple melody. One of Mike Autrey’s books pointed out that it’s the Bicycle Rider theme backwards, ascending instead of descending. I couldn’t make it stop. It made me think of a cartoon from when I was a kid, a guy kneeling in front of a chopping block, saying to the headsman, “Ever have a song going around in your head and you can’t get rid of it?”

  I slept for a while. In the dream I’m in bed with Alex, we’re both naked, we both want each other, only my father keeps coming in the room for stuff. He doesn’t really look at us, he just comes in and gets a stamp album or a clay pot or a box of Kleenex.

  I woke up horny and sad and still drunk. What I wanted was to feel clean and fit and sober and rested. Outside, the sky had started to turn pink. A dog barked down the street. I wanted to look forward to a brand-new day, not pray for a few more hours of sleep.

  I didn’t need Estrella the gypsy lady to tell me that sleep was not in my future. I put on last night’s clothes and washed my face and brushed my teeth, then I looked in on Graham. He was sprawled out on his stomach, one arm hanging off the bed. Go, man. Saw that wood.

  I left him a note and called a taxi and went outside to wait for it. I had my little cassette recorder with me, and a couple of tapes that I wasn’t ready to listen to yet. The day was coming up raw and bloody, like I felt. A salt breeze rattled in the palms and sea gulls fought over a torn bag of garbage down the street.

  I felt like the last human being alive on the planet. Everybody else had died in their sleep—Elizabeth and all her smug friends, my mother and her memories of a saintly father I’d never known. Died, all of them, and left me here in this damp red morning.

  I wondered what Brian would make of all this. What music he would find that exactly conveyed the color of the sunrise, the hollowness in my chest. I could see him at his grand piano, eyes out of focus, bare-chested, feet in his sandbox, playing it.

  The taxi finally arrived, driven by some kid with thick glasses, acne, and greasy hair. He didn’t say anything, just nodded when I told him I wanted the nearest place I could rent a car. After that I stopped at Jim’s Do-Nuts for a half dozen glazed and two cups of coffee. It left me wide-eyed and eggshell-thin all over.

  I got in the car and drove. With Glimpses Volume One in the tape player I slipped into a caffeine and sugar fugue state, wired, edgy, and at the same time barely tuned into the real world. I sat at a green light staring at a beautiful blonde in a string bikini top and cutoffs until the cars behind me started to honk. Then I missed the shift to second and ground the gears loud enough to hear a mile away.

  I’d devolved to some pre-Alex high school mentality where beautiful women were my enemies. They had what I needed to be happy, and they wouldn’t give it to me. I hated them for it. It was my lizard brain talking. Worse yet, it was the Lizard King himself.

  The Doors were on and I hadn’t noticed, a B-side called “Who Scared You?” It’s snake music, sinuous, cocky, threatening. Once I saw what was happening to me I felt a desperate need to cool out. I pointed the car toward the ocean, waiting for the Doors to finish, and finally they did. I found my way onto the Promenade as the next song came on, “Beat the Clock” by the McCoys. I had to pull up at the curb and let it all roll over me, May of 1967, the end of my junior year. The song would still be on the charts when my father had his first heart attack. Suddenly I thought I was about to break into a million pieces, that all the different people inside of me were going to crawl out and walk away in a million different directions. They were all so real that I could feel them crowding me, bouncing off the walls inside me.

  “Beat the Clock” is the next to last song on the tape. I knew what was next and I wasn’t ready for it yet, so I switched the player off as the refrain started to fade. I put the car in gear again and drove to Brian’s house. I knew exactly how to get there. Traffic seemed to part for me. When I turned onto the last stretch of Laurel Way I started the tape again and turned it up.

  It was the title track for the series, an obscure Yardbirds cut called “Glimpses.” A hypnotic bass line, washes of guitar noise, finally the band singing harmony with no words, just ahhhh ah ah ahhhh. The first time I heard it it scared the shit out of me, it was so otherworldly. Lost-sounding, somehow.

  I drove around the circle and parked across the street from Brian’s house.

  After a while this voice comes on. Some old British guy, sounds like a physics professor, voice distorted like it’s coming out of a radio tuned between stations. He talks about energy radiating from a source, some other stuff that is too distorted for me to make out. The last thing he says always makes my blood run cold, with the eerie chanting and the distorted guitars all around it: “Time is just a cumular image—which but one glimpse—can overcome.” The last two words repeat over and over. “Can overcome. Can overcome.”

  I sat there in the rented Sunbird with bright sunshine all around me, shaking, crying, all sense of time and place destroyed. I got out of the car. I could still hear the song. It speeds up at the end and McCarty is hammering this bolero kind of thing on drums and Page is playing ascending chords faster and faster.

  The music was inside me, pushing, it was pushing at right angles to any kind of direction there is. I staggered into the street. I had tears in my eyes and everything was blurred, a wash of color, and I heard something that might be a car and I tried to run and suddenly I was falling, reaching out for something to take my weight.

  When I opened my eyes it was nighttime and I was crouched on the sidewalk in front of Brian’s house and it wasn’t 1989 anymore.

  c h a p t e r 4

  BRIAN

  Music came out of the house, and over that, voices and splashing from the pool in back. The rest of the block was dark and quiet. It was cool enough to bring up goose bumps on my arms. The garage was open and well-lit; inside were a Stingray, a Jaguar XKE, and a Rolls. What really did it to me were the license plates, black with orange letters instead of blue on white.

  I sat on the curb and waited for the hallucination to pass. Except I knew I wasn’t hallucinating and it wasn’t going anywhere. If I was where I thought I was, I was a hundred feet away from Brian and the Smile tapes. It was the chance of a lifetime.

  I got carefully to my feet. I felt lightheaded but apparently I wasn’t going to float away. I was wearing the same clothes I’d put on that morning: slightly faded blue jeans, a green polo shirt, black All-Stars. Except for my hair, I could have passed for a Californian from any time since the fifties. All I needed was a story.

  I walked up to the gray double front doors and rang the bell. I felt like I was in a movie, that I wasn’t responsible for anything I did. The door opened on a good-looking guy in his twenties, with short, neatly combed dark hair, dark slacks, and a white shirt.

  I took a chance. “David Anderle?”

  “That’s right. Do I know you?”

  “Ray Shackleford,” I said. “RCA records.” I held out my hand. “This is really a pleasure. I understand we might not ha
ve gotten to hear ‘Good Vibrations’ if it wasn’t for you.” Brian had been on the verge of selling the song to an R&B group when Anderle heard it and went crazy for it. His enthusiasm got Brian fired up enough to finish it and release it. If this was the winter of 1966, as I was sure it was, Anderle didn’t have any official status with the Beach Boys yet. He was just one of Brian’s friends. Within a few months, though, they would start Brother Records and Anderle would be named president.

  “Where in the world did you hear that?” He seemed more flattered than alarmed.

  “It’s my job to keep my ear to the ground. Um…I was hoping to talk to Brian. Can I come in?”

  “I was just leaving…but sure, why not, come on. Brian’s back in the pool.”

  Then I was inside. I had to tell myself it was really happening, I was really in the house on Laurel Way. Exactly where I most wanted to be, doing exactly what I most wanted to do in all the world. There was the den, there was the jukebox full of Phil Spector singles and acetates of the new songs. Down at the end of the hall was Brian’s office, with the grand piano and the sandbox. There were new-looking magazines on the coffee table, and I sneaked a look at the dates. Time for December 2, 1966, Newsweek for December 5.

  Things hadn’t yet gone too far. Not yet.

  Brian’s beagle, one of the dogs that barks at the end of “Caroline, No,” clicked across the kitchen linoleum to check me out. I bent down and he waddled over to be petted. “This one’s Banana, right?”

  Anderle said, “You’ve really done your homework.”

  “I’m interested in Brian. I might be able to help him.”

  “Are you talking about the Capitol thing?” At this point Anderle had sued Capitol for $275,000 worth of producer’s royalties that Brian had supposedly never been paid. Things had turned ugly and the Beach Boys were threatening to break their contract and go elsewhere.

  I was about to make a pitch on behalf of RCA when my conscience kicked in. I’d made it inside the house, no point in lying any more than I had to. “I can’t offer you a record deal on the spot or anything. But there’s lots of different kinds of help.”