by Jim Shepard
“This isn’t the greatest time anyway,” I’d say. “What about around Thanksgiving? What’re you doing around Thanksgiving?”
Knowing full well that the tiniest lack of enthusiasm would destroy whatever chance there was that he’d work up the courage to visit.
DONNIE WAS SIXTEEN when we went through family counseling. He’d been out of high school two months, and had had three jobs: landscaping, freight handling for UPS, and working construction. The construction work was for an uncle who owned a company. We’d had our first incident involving the police. That was how my father referred to it. I was twelve. I had relatively little to do during the sessions. I conceived of the time as an opportunity to prove to this psychiatrist that it wasn’t all my parents’ fault, what had happened. I acted normal.
Donnie called my father the Mediator. The shrink asked what he meant by that. Donnie said, “Mediator. You know. Zookeeper. What the fuck.” It was the “What the fuck” that broke my heart.
EVEN THEN I had a mouth on me, as my mother would say. Christmas Eve we watched the Roddy McDowall/David Hartman version of Miracle on 34th Street, a version my brother hadn’t seen but insisted was the best one. It was on for four minutes before it was clear to everyone in the room that it was terrible. Which made my brother all the more adamant in his position. The holidays were hard on him. We’d given up on the family counseling a few weeks before, as if to get ready for Christmas.
In the movie Sebastian Cabot did a lot of eye-twinkle stuff, whatever the situation. I made relentless fun of it. I mimicked Cabot’s accent and asked if Santa came from England, stuff like that. I was rolling. Even my father was snickering. Roddy McDowall launched into something on the Spirit of Christmas and I said it sounded like he was more interested in getting to know some of the elves. Donnie took the footstool in front of him and smashed the TV tube. That was the second time we had to call the police.
They took him to the Bridgeport bus station, 8:30 at night on Christmas Eve. The two cops who came to the house wanted to leave him with us, but he wouldn’t calm down. One cop told him, “If you don’t lighten up we’re gonna have to get you out of here and keep you out of here,” so Donnie started in on what he was going to do to each one of us as soon as the cop took off: “First I’m gonna break his fucking neck, and then her fucking neck, and then his fucking neck.” Stuff like that. It was raining, and when they led him out, he had on a New York Jets windbreaker and no hat.
My father drove down to the bus station a half hour later to see if he was still there. The roads were frozen and it took him an hour to get back. My mother vacuumed up the glass from the picture tube. Then she sat in her bedroom with the little TV, flipping back and forth from A Christmas Carol to the Mass at St. Peter’s.
When my father got back he made some tea and wandered the house. I remembered the nuns talking about the capacities of Christ’s love and thought, What kind of reptile are you? I was filled with wonder at myself.
I finally went to midnight Mass, alone. My mother just waved me off when I asked if she wanted to go. I found myself once I got there running through a fractured catechism, over and over:—Who loves us?—We love us.—Who does this to us?—We do this to ourselves.—Whose victims are we?—We are our own victims.
THE NEXT MORNING I was supposed to come downstairs and open presents.
Around noon we gathered in front of the tree with our coffee. I suppose we were hoping Donnie was going to come back. I opened the smallest present in my pile, a Minnesota Viking coffee mug, and said, “That’s great, thanks,” and my parents’ faces were so desolate that we quit right there.
He called from the bus station on the twenty-seventh. He opened one or two of his presents a week after that. The rest stayed where they were even after the tree came down. Some of them my mother gave, the next year, to our cousins. We never put tags on our presents; we just told each other who they belonged to.
THE THIRD TIME they had to call the police I was fourteen thousand miles away, fulfilling my dream, standing on what was left of Krakatau. I brought back pieces of pumice for everybody. Donnie had called my mother’s sisters whores, and she’d slapped him, and he’d knocked her to the kitchen floor. When he was going full tilt he tried everything verbally until something clicked. He was thirty-four then and she was sixty. My father left his eggs frying at the stove and started wrestling with him. He was sixty-three. My brother let him wrestle.
FROM PAGE FIVE of my thesis: “Early theories explaining the size of the Krakatau explosion held that millions of tons of rock had unfortunately formed a kind of plug, so that pressure-relieving venting was not allowed, making the final detonations all the more cataclysmic. But in fact the opposite might also have been true: gas fluxing of the conduits and the release of pressure through massive cracks may have hastened the catastrophe, since once the vents were opened, the eruption might have grown, as deeper and hotter layers of magma were tapped, leading to the exhaustion of the reservoir, and following that, the collapse of its roof.”
My adviser had written in the margin: “Anything new here?”
I HAD THREE REASONS for my own passivity: selfishness, cowardice, and resentment.
AS DONNIE GOT OLDER the anger inside him was not decreasing but increasing. His rage was driven by humiliation, and year by year he felt his situation—forty-one and living at home, unemployed, forty-two and living at home, unemployed—to be more and more humiliating. The friends-and-family question, “So what are you up to?”—fraught when he was eighteen—was, when he was forty, suffused with subtextual insult. His violence was more serious. His threats were more pointed. He defined himself more and more as a misfit, and more and more he seemed to think that the gesture that was going to be necessary to redeem such a life, with each passing day, needed to be grander, more radical.
HE WAS FORTY-TWO. I was thirty-eight, two hours away, mostly out of contact, and all of my failures with him were focused in one weekend that summer, when, despite everything, he visited. We spent two days circling each other, watching sports and old movies and making fun of what we saw. His last night there he told me about some of his fantasies. One of them ended with, “They’d think they knew what happened, but how could they prove it? How could they prove anything?” My stomach dropped out.
It was late. I’d turned off the TV. I could see his eyes in the dark. “Listen,” I said. “You’ve gotta see somebody.”
“Don’t you think I know that?” he said.
AFTER TWO LATE MOVIES he fell asleep facedown on the sofa. I went to my office and called Psychological Services at the university. The guy on call gave me a referral number.
“I don’t think you understand,” I told him. “This isn’t a kind of wait-and-see situation.”
“Are you saying he should be picked up, for his own good?” the guy said. There was a buzzing on the line while he waited for my answer.
“No,” I said.
THE NEXT MORNING my brother was leaving. I stood by my parents’ car while he settled into the driver’s seat. I told him I had the name of a guy he should talk to. “Thanks,” he said.
“You want the name?” I said.
“Sure,” he said. I could see his eyes, see a blowup coming on again. This was excruciating for him.
I fumbled around in my pockets. “I don’t have a pencil,” I said. “You gonna remember?”
“Sure,” he said. I told him the name. He nodded, put the car in gear, said good-bye, and backed out of the driveway.
I WARNED MY PARENTS. Which, I thought to myself, would help my conscience later.
WHY DIDN’T I HELP? Why did I stand aside, peering down the rails toward the future site of the train wreck? Because even if he didn’t know it, all along, he was the lucky one. Because he was the black sheep, he was the squeaky wheel, he was the engine that generated love from my parents.
I KEPT HOPING that my worst feelings had been left behind in childhood, and that only analysis, diagnosis, remained.
The first record of explosions came months early, May 20 at 10:55 A.M., when the director of the Observatory at Batavia, now Jakarta, noticed vibrations and the banging of loose windows in his house. Explosions brought lighter articles down from the shelves at Anjer. There was this homey little description from the captain of the German warship Elisabeth, in the Sunda Strait: “We saw from the island a white cumulus cloud rising fast. After half an hour, it reached a height of 11,000 m. and started to spread, like an umbrella.” Or this, from the same ship’s Marine chaplain, now seventeen nautical miles away: “It was convoluted like a giant coral stock, resembling a club or cauliflower head, except that everything was in imposing gigantic internal motion, driven by enormous pressure from beneath. Slowly it became clear that the top of the entire continuously growing phenomenon was beginning to lean towards us.”
OR THIS, from a telegraph master on the Java Coast: “I remained at the office the whole morning and then went for a meal, intending to return at two. I met another man near the beach, and we remained there for a few minutes. Krakatau was already in eruption, and we plainly heard the rumbling in the distance. I observed an alternate rising and falling of the sea, and asked my companion whether the tide was ebbing or flowing. He remarked that it seemed to be getting unusually dark.”
OR THIS, from the captain of the Irish steamer Charles Bal: “At 2:30 we noticed some agitation about the point of Krakatau, clouds or something being propelled from the NE point with great velocity. At 3:00 we heard all around and above us the sounds of a mighty artillery barrage, getting evermore furious and alarming; and the matter, whatever it was, was being propelled with even more velocity to the NE. It looked like a blinding rain, a furious moiling squall. By 4:00 the explosions had joined to form a continuous roar, and darkness had spread across the sky.”
AND HERE’S what I imagine, from the eyewitnesses who spent those last minutes standing around with their hands in their pockets on the Java Coast and Sumatra, from Lampong Bay to Sebesi and all the other islands in the strait:
Some made out an enormous wave in the distance like a mountain rushing onward, followed by others that seemed greater still.
Some made out a dark black object rising through the gloom, traveling toward the shore like a low range of hills, but they knew there were no hills in that part of the strait.
Some made out a dark line swelling the curve of the horizon, thickening as they watched.
Some heard the roar of the first wave, and the cry, “A flood is coming.”
Some heard the rushing wind driven before the immense dark wall.
Some heard a whipsawing noise and saw the great black thing a long way off, a cliff of water, trees and houses disappearing beneath it. They felt it through the earth as they ran for sloping ground. They made for the steepest ravines. There was a great crush. Those below climbed the backs of those above. The marks where this took place are still visible. Some of those who washed off must have dragged others down with them. Some must have felt those above giving way, and let go.
But this is the only account hand-copied and tacked to my bulletin board, the testimony of a Dutch pilot caught on shore near Anjer, a city now gone: “The moment of greatest anguish was not the actual destruction of the wave. The worst part by far was afterwards, when I knew I was saved, and the receding flood carried back past me the bodies of friends and neighbors and family. And I remembered clawing past other arms and legs as you might fight through a bramble. And I thought, ‘The world is our relentless adversary, rarely outwitted, never tiring.’ And I thought, ‘I would give all these people’s lives, once more, to see something so beautiful again.’”
WON’T GET FOOLED AGAIN
We were the great group for things going wrong. Cancellations, electrical failures, bad weather, broken-down vans, missed dates, slashed thumbs, broken noses, sprained knees, bugger-all equipment, beggary, rookery, penury, and out-and-out thuggery: all just a part of that tag-along high-speed death march that called itself The Detours/The High Numbers/The Who.
We’d come on with sticking plasters, bleeding. We had fistfights onstage. Every five minutes someone was quitting the band.
For the first fifteen years we owed money because of everything we smashed up, and everything we needed. From the beginning we traveled with a small bungalow’s worth of Marshall cabinets and amps, and four or five Rickenbackers for Pete, and always a triple kit of red sparkle Premier drums with a big crate of spare skins and sticks besides, because our drummer was the most physically destructive mild-mannered middle-class boy in the Western Hemisphere.
By 1965 we had the world’s loudest gear onstage, and we’d scream like victims of the Inquisition and not hear our voices. Staying in key was an act of faith. It was like when you listened to something with earphones and sang along out of tune because there was no way to tell. We always had someone in the house who could signal us visually as to how we were doing. More than once Keith and I got a few bars into one song and realized that Pete and Roger were having a go at another.
In pubs and rooming houses we were the Little Hooligans’ Circus, because there all we had was each other, and we hated each other. With Moonie it was always, “A bottle of brandy!” and when it came along, “Fuck me, I’ve fucking knocked it over! Let’s have another, all right, hey? Fucking brandy, eh?” and he’d pour some on Roger and Roger’d knock him on his Middlesex behind. One night Roger went for some of his chips and Keith stuck a fork in his hand.
ALL SCHEDULES disintegrated. All alliances were temporary. Eventually our manager, who was equal parts long-suffering and insufferable, negotiated a truce. A certain amount of pride had to be swallowed on each side. We promised to behave and Roger promised not to hit us.
FIGHTS WITH the paying customers started from all sorts of things, usually after we came offstage. They didn’t last long. Roger only had to punch you once and that was it. A girl got knocked flat by a mike stand in one, and we were all hauled in front of a magistrate.
Keith would go up to anyone around the bandstand and say, “Have you got anything in the upward direction, hey?” At Reading he gulped down some poor sod’s purple hearts—twenty-four of them—at once. The guy complained to me afterward that he’d planned them to last three weeks.
We had this kid called Pill Brian who used to come down on his scooter to our shows. He’d come down and say, “I’ve got these today,” and we’d take all of what he had. “This one’s for rheumatism,” he’d finally say, and Keith’d say, “Yeah, I’ll have that.”
We played night in, night out for cellars full of kids out of their brains and getting off on R&B. The unstable fell over in various directions and you’d see clearings appear in the packed-in heads. Strangers traded hand jobs along the walls while keeping track of the show. It was like Imperial Rome. When the clubs were raided it sounded like hailstorms when everyone emptied the pills from their pockets onto the dance floor. The cops went round frisking people, and it was like they were walking on gravel: crunch crunch crunch.
POOR ROGER couldn’t do the pills because of his voice, and because he drove the van. So he’d be stuck stone sober driving this bunch of pilled-up louts about. He hated it.
WHEN PETE FIRST STARTED writing, his songs were other people’s songs badly remembered. He was knocked out by the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” when he first heard it, and went home and tried to remember it and couldn’t, and came up with “I Can’t Explain” instead.
Ours was a weird kind of enraged, what’s-the-use protest rock. “My Generation” was a song that said, “We don’t have to be shit because you say we’re shit. We can be shit because we say we’re shit.”
I WAS THE LEAST POPULAR one, the immobile one ons
tage, stolid Johnny. Fans called me The Ox. I had much to be quiet about. I was hopeless for Keith’s girlfriend, Kim. I’d met her ten minutes after he had. She was sweet to me, nothing more. I hung about and watched her cook. I rubbed myself against banisters and gateposts after she’d gone by.
“You’re a mate,” Keith’d say to me when I’d offer to phone her, let her know he’d be back late or not at all.
“Oh, shit,” she’d always say, and even that was worth hearing.
Pete and I knew about unrequited longing. As a boy I had nothing going for me, and Pete was a nose on a stick.
He grew up with parents who came out of the end of the war with big ideas and left him behind. We met in school, when we were eleven: I remember this willow switch with a wicked great hooter behind me in line sneering, “Entwhistle: what kind of posh name is that?”
We spent all our time ducking school at his house since no one was there. He didn’t have much music at home except his Dad honking away on a clarinet in the back room. They didn’t have much of a record player and they had Chiswick’s shittiest radio. He had a strange relationship with his mother. She was beautiful and his Dad was good-looking so who knew what they made of him. He always said, “I fail to interest them.” He was very self-pitying, even then.
His parents split and left him with his grandmother, who was insane. She walked naked in the streets and things like that. He said his first musical experience was in the Sea Scouts, on a boat ride. A brutal summer day and he was lying in the gunwale sweltering and dropping in and out of heatstroke while the outboard motor kept making these funny noises. The noises, he said, got inside his skull and took it over while he lay there in his swoon. By the time he’d gone up the river and back again, he’d had to be carried out of the boat. He’d been so transported by the sound.