VALPARAÍSO (10)

15.

“So here comes our Alex,” said Harry Winter that night on Alex’s Berkeley patio, “wafting into Thatcher’s London like some gypsy charm merchant. Pale and feverish, rail-thin, his rucksack bulging with obscure cassettes he’d collected on his journey across the Continent.” 

A near-full moon had risen behind us over Tilden Park, re-lighting the scene. Harry made a mournful moue, squeezed the handle of his cane.

“I’d suggested we meet in the lobby of the Mayfair Hotel. Me in my new London tweeds, expensive shoes, preening, to be sure. The young artiste in flower, Garth. No more LA closeted high school dweeb reeking of borscht.” 

I’d met Harry’s father once, a bald little man in a short-sleeved shirt and cheap brown slacks, a second violinist among the army of European refugees toiling under the great Hollywood studio conductors in a weird new dreamland of palm trees, sand and gelt. He’d been sitting on a bench at the La Brea Tar Pits, slacks rolled up revealing his white legs, reading weeks-old Russian and Yiddish newspapers. Harry had lived with him in a small apartment, his mother lost somewhere in the diaspora and never spoken of. 

“Alex arrived during what was probably the best year of my life. I was playing with the Moscow art ensemble. And I’d come out that year, with a bang, believe me. The ensemble was on a break, and I was staying at a flat my handsome, brilliant, rich Swiss lover Gerard kept in South Kensington. Alex didn’t have a place to sleep so I brought him there. There was a lovely Bosendorfer concert grand which I invited him to play. He didn’t show the slightest interest but instead opened his bags and began arraying all these tapes he’d collected on his journey, plying me with questions about contemporary composers - Mahler, Shostakovich, Berg, Kodaly. Musically voracious, as always, but now almost predatory. It was no longer about playing or composing, just collecting. Not a word about Maddie, or Dryden Poe, or what had happened at those recording sessions. By then I was discovering the glories of the substances that would undo me. Gerard always kept generous canisters of white powder and weed around along with the liquors, and so I offered Alex some while imbibing a bit myself. Alex, who I recall used to smoke quite a bit of pot, declined.” 

Harry shifted in his chair as if looking for a position that didn’t hurt. I eased him with a couple of deck pillows. 

“There was only one bed in Gerard’s flat, a large, sumptuous one, and I invited Alex to share it. I’d always adored your brother, and now I was the more worldly one, and bolder. I knew Alex was straight but I suppose I dreamed of having him at last, if only that once. A farewell fuck, as it were, to mark the separate roads we were embarking upon. And your brother seemed so lost, in need of comfort just then...”

Harry’s eyebrows knitted in distress. He inhaled noisily, reached for his flask. 

“It went badly. We almost did it, which often makes it worse. Alex slept on the floor in the end, curled in a blanket, and the next morning when I woke up he was gone. A terribly stupid thing I’d done.” Harry tried to smile but it came forth as a wince. “After that I never knew what became of him. And I began my slide down a very slippery slope. The next year the Moscow ensemble decided not to renew my contract. Gerard became disinterested, then cruel, finally kicking me out of his chalet, literally into the Swiss snow. There was a solo concert in Bremen at twenty-three, some string quartets, a few recordings. Then cancelled engagements, firings. By twenty-six, it was pretty much over. The first time I busked in the Paris metro, I thought, ‘Never again.’ 

“I became a wanderer, Garth. Drink, I discovered, was the best travel companion, sex the best souvenir. And a good cellist can always survive. I can set up on a street corner in downtown Manhattan, at a crossroads in Bangkok, in more South American plazas than I care to count, stroke out the Prelude from the First Cello Suite in G Major, and the coins will come. Pearls before swine, some might say. But I think of myself as more in the spirit of Neruda, an artist of the people...

“Last month I arrived in San Francisco. I came for the clinics, you see. Then one morning by chance the friend I was staying with turned on the radio and there was Alex…” 

While Alex was visiting Harry in London that summer, I was running around LA with Yoshi in Alex’s Ford, taking in samurai films at the Toho Theater, poring through Japanese manga comics in the Kinokuniya bookstore, sampling exotic sushis in cramped, curtained dives. “Rima” was now the reigning underground hit in Tokyo, according to Yoshi, and there was a growing clamor for more information about the band. Somehow he’d identified all the band members by then, including the drummer and bass player, whom I didn’t even know. 

“Goth,” Yoshi said one night at the sushi bar of the New Otani Hotel. “Fan club wants to contact your brother, bring the band to Tokyo for concerts, interviews.”

“But there was no band, Yoshi.” I stabbed with chopsticks at a shrimp I swore was still twitching. “Only Alex and Maddie.”

“In Japan, we order them still alive. Best fresh like that.”

I thought for a minute he was alluding to Fate’s Angels, but of course he meant the fish. The Japanese were rich now and could buy almost anything, I knew, but I was sure Alex wouldn’t have the least interest in going to Tokyo.

Yoshi looked up from his little tumbler of sake. “Alex was the lover of Maddie, yes?”

We were deep into the sake, which I’d never had before, and maybe I was a little drunk. I knew sooner or later Yoshi would find my brother and I needed to clue Alex in before that happened. I also knew I had a photo in my pocket Yoshi and the fan club would go mad over, possibly the only extant image of Maddie Haden and Alex Garnett. 

“Yes, they were in love,” I said, ceremoniously pulling out the photo. 

“Wow. That’s Alex and Maddie. And Harry Winter, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Who that guy holding a stick?”

“Maddie’s cousin. They were rehearsing at his house.” Yoshi seemed to know nothing of Dryden Poe and I wasn’t about to enlighten him. 

“How much do you want for this photo?” 

I’d come to believe that Alex and Maddie’s music deserved to be at least a little bit famous somewhere. There were too many secrets by then and it was making us all sick. Yoshi was probably the coolest guy I’d met after my brother and he’d been my friend that summer in lieu of Alex. Since I’d supplied the words to “Rima,” I felt I had some say in this. Then too, maybe I wanted to write myself into the growing occult legend of Fate’s Angels.

“Just take it,” I said. 

At Columbia that fall, a student in Alex’s building told a friend at WKCR, the university radio station, about a guy who had collected some amazing music in his travels. The program director offered Alex a one-hour show each Saturday at midnight. In a cramped, dim studio booth, its acoustical walls scored with graffiti, telephone numbers and old playlists, Alex arrayed across the turntables and tape decks samples of the omnivorous eclecticism he and Maddie had reveled in, salting his collection with LPs and cassettes from the station’s archives, weaving dream montages lofted into the city night. 

At first the show seemed just another college station miscellany, but after a few weeks listeners began to discern sequences, links, improbable connections, sketching a kind of narrative. Hunkered in a scuffed chair in his hooded sweatshirt, whispering between cuts into a ribbon mike in an intimate, unassuming voice, Alex spoke as if revealing rare finds to a companion. A minimum of commentary – a snippet of information gleaned from a liner note, another musician’s view, an insight of his own – suggested threads among the offerings. Some were thematic or cultural or linguistic, others subtler but just as keenly felt: key changes, tempi, rhythmic motifs, moods, common influences. A Zulu choir segued to a Maria Callas aria to a Japanese shakuhashi, then a Mose Allison. Had he really paired Hoagy Carmichael’s “Old Buttermilk Sky” with Eric Satie, then Balinese gamelan? Why did they seem to fit seamlessly, and what did that imply, and why did they seem to tell a story? Setting constellations spinning around each other, Alex drew a musical geography spanning earth but arriving single-pointedly between the listener’s ears. 

His show, called Cool Earth, anticipated both that later programming commodity known as “world music” and the live turntable collages of hiphop mixmasters to come. Cool Earth became, that winter of 1975, a campfire around which the city began to gather, slowly at first along Manhattan’s hipper corridors, then in the downtown clubs and restaurants, then boites and lounges and dives all across the city, in the boroughs, across the river in New Jersey. Fans began scheduling their Saturday nights around the show, even taping off the hour-long sequence in its entirety. Alex Garnett’s midnight revelations were picked up by cabbies idling in Times Square, lovers huddled abed in their flats, the swelling derelict communities clustered by garbage bins and subway grates with portable radios as the freezing nights set in. Cool Earth became a kind of secular midnight mass, offering up a musical vision as old as the bards and as new as tomorrow, a panorama of lost worlds redeemed. 

By the following spring, as trees bloomed in the parks and the air warmed, Cool Earth had embedded itself into the city’s rhythms. Only Alex knew that these collected shards of sound were a private communion with a ghost, a soundtrack to an unfinished movie shot in black. 

16.

Across that memory-swept night in Valparaíso while Marimar slept, the Los Angeles of my teen summers kept reappearing as a sequence of flared illuminations, a city on fire, bathed in the noir chiaroscuro of my teen composite author Henry Orlowe. This was an LA far from that flattened nexus of embedded functions where later I, Garth Garnett, editor, reviewer, ghostwriter and script doctor, lent my voice to others, ever attendant upon my own, which after “Rima” never came again. There at the window of the Residenciál Valdivia, I thought how I’d always been waiting for my brother to go first, resume his playing and composing, but Alex chose instead to mask his voice in an ever-elaborating musical metaphor. Maddie’s death, and Dryden’s disappearance, had turned both Alex and my father into obsessives, but only Alex’s form was fruitful. 

A few years ago, I drove up that LA canyon to see if I could find the house we’d visited that night. Either I took a wrong turn or what I saw had truly come to pass: an entire hilltop sheared and leveled, and where once the Poe family’s mock-Tudor house had loomed among great eucalypti and shadowy magnolias at the summit of that fir-sentineled driveway, a featureless plain of new tract homes with white pebbled entry paths and floodlit Hawaiian palms stood flatly abreast. 

Back in Colorado, the year after my LA summer with Yoshi, Leticia Glass and I split up. We’d explored mysteries without clues, traded such as we knew of our minds and our flesh, and were ready now to cast each other upon some further shore, she to Antioch in Ohio the following year, me back to California. In LA, Ray Garnett had received the first rebuke in his long, distinguished teaching career for introducing inflammatory materials into the classroom. Sensing my father’s growing desperation, I opted in the end to enroll at UCLA. 

Intense dispatches issued regularly from Dad’s house in Westwood, his dossiers growing, his suppositions ever more strident and bizarre. Culling and triangulating, he was certain he was within days of closing in on Russell and Dryden Poe, whatever that might mean. He haunted Amnesty International’s office downtown on Shatto Place, became an occasional guest on the city’s only leftist radio station, holding forth on secret government programs. 

Dad’s files might have been seen as simply the unmaking of a fine liberal mind – an astrophysicist who’d spun out into UFO studies. None of it had brought Maddie Haden back or delivered up Dryden Poe. Alex had been dismissive of Dad’s quixotic exercises all along, and by now I could hardly disagree.

The crown jewel of Dad’s database was his dossier on Dryden’s father, Russell Poe. In this “toxic operative,” as he’d dubbed him, Ray Garnett had found an embodiment of both a personal grievance and a symptom of a world order gone wrong. Russell Poe was in many ways Dad’s opposite number – close in age, both academics by temperament: Poe Yale, Dad Columbia – across the great postwar divide. There was little doubt whose side had prevailed, Russell Poe presumably striding the wide ramparts of covert power, Garnett the graffitied halls of inner city high schools. Here was a nemesis as intimate as Dad could wish, a perfect protagonist in a titanic private war Russell Poe would never know he was in. 

From Ray Garnett’s file, in no particular order: Russell Poe was the blurry figure seen in a snapshot of Argentina’s generals running secret torture camps at the Naval Academy outside Buenos Aires. Dryden Poe was enrolled at the American University in Beirut under an assumed name, the rangy youth in Ray-Bans, black hair obviously dyed, in a class photo. Russell Poe had been spotted in Johannesburg at a banquet of apartheid security forces, photos and false monikers provided. The square-jawed man peering through binoculars in a Honduran Contra encampment south of Tegulcigalpa was none other than RP himself. Dad’s one credible claim may have been that Russell Poe was one of Kissinger and ITT’s point men in Chile at the time of Salvador Allende’s overthrow, the week after Maggie Haden had died. 

One night in Boulder, I called Alex in New York and blurted out my confession about Yoshi and “Rima.” 

“To my surprise, he said “I know. Yoshi came here last year, after he met you.” 

“But who sent the ‘Rima’ tape to Tokyo?”

“It’s a copy from the stolen master tape. It had to be Dryden.” 

I heard the ice in my brother’s voice, the haunted, vengeful Alex. 

“I played it once on my show,” he said. “I got calls. About Maddie, and the music, of course. And about your words.”

This news filled me with inordinate happiness. 

Alex told me Yoshi was starting an alternative record company in Japan, Lotus Records, with his father’s backing, around “Rima.” 

By that June, while I readied to graduate from high school and leave Boulder, Devi had all but forsaken her watercolors and meditations to run their new retail health food outlet downtown, embracing with a happy shrug what she and Ron liked to call “the material plane.” The blonde-beamed wood store, blessed by Tibetan priests during a grand opening bash, was well stocked with tamari and tofu, incense and wind chimes, blended spirulina smoothies at the counter and bookshelves crammed with guides to immortality through health, the body as temple of the spirit. 

More abundance was in store for Devi and Ron. Mom had learned the winter before that, at thirty-nine, she was pregnant. Amnio tests had gone well, ultrasound disclosed a girl, and in a few weeks’ time my old room would belong to the new arrival, a little half-sister whose name had already been chosen: Karma. 

Devi, billowing huge with child, watched me load my luggage into the Audi trunk. She backed us out of the driveway, the tan leatherette seat smell still fresh, the God’s eye from the old gray Volvo dangling from the rearview mirror. I felt my departure barely stirred the air here, and that Mom’s life with Ron, and the coming birth, would quickly close around my absence.

We wound down the wooded mountain road in a silence not unlike the hours we’d once spent together at the meditation retreat outside Colorado Springs. As we hit I-36 and the Denver flats spread below, Devi said, “There’s magic in each beginning, Garth.”

I didn’t know whether she was referring to herself or to me with her Herman Hesse quote. But I was more than ready for some different magic, to feel city walls of anonymity close around me, to partake of the unsettled mortal world. I wanted classical learning, twilight beach walks with new girls, even Dad’s agitated presence and whatever he might expect of me, staying in my old room above the garage until I could afford my own place. 

“Alex is in a good place now, I think,” Mom said as the airport tower appeared on the flat horizon. “Is that fair?”

She seemed to want to strike a tone of resolution, invite concurrence that the terrible thing that had happened to Alex was over. I only heard yawning distance among us all, a family of strangers now. “He’s okay,” I said, watching a plane lowering in the distance, wondering if it was mine.

“Garth, I know your father is not well. If you need money, you know, or…” 

I could hear the barely disguised triumph, the reek of the virtuous path, while Ray Garnett orbited helplessly in his grievous labyrinth of information. 

“And please tell Alex to come visit,” she said. “It’s time.”

A plea masked as a demand. Devi missed her firstborn more than she’d ever admit, but a visit from Alex wasn’t going to happen, not for a long time. My brother, heading off for a summer trip to Mexico to troll for music, he’d said, was far more gone than I was. 

The great brushed skies, the wide desolate sweep of highway to the airport turnoff, the green signage sweeping by overhead: ARRIVALS. DEPARTURES. PARKING. RETURN LANE ONLY. At the terminal curb, my mother said, “I feel our years together here have been an illumination, Garth.”

Unloading the trunk, I inhaled a few last gulps of mile-high air. A radio somewhere played Olivia Newton-John’s “I Honestly Love You.” Mom clambered out and waddled back, so big was she with child.  Brushing away true tears, hers and mine, with her Kashmiri scarf, she embraced me. 

Gone with the wind, childhood, all of it, swept away on the jetstream.

A month later, I arrived back at the house in Westwood one afternoon from summer courses at UCLA. Parking the Ford in the driveway, I headed for my room in back when I heard sounds from the kitchen. It was a teaching day for Dad and his car wasn’t there. The screen door was open, the kitchen door unlocked. Gingerly I opened it, bracing for an intruder. 

“Alex.”

My brother was standing by the sink, drinking coffee, smoking a Mexican cigarette. He looked dusky, dark, thin, dressed in a sweatshirt, black chinos, huaraches. A fresh scar ran along the ridge above his right eye.

He stepped forward. His embrace smelled of dried sweat. Then he withdrew to the sink, smoking his Faro, looking off. 

“What, Alex? What is it?”

“I found Dryden.”