VALPARAÍSO (11)

17.

We sat on the shag carpet in Alex’s old music room, among his keyboards and amps and pedals and cords now usurped by Dad’s overflowing cartons of research. This was the room into which, at fourteen, I’d gazed at that immortal erotic tableau. Dust motes stirred in the flat filtered afternoon sun as I watched Alex unfold a crumpled handwritten note in black pen on a page of typing paper: 

MEET ME AT THE HOTEL ISABEL IN MEXICO CITY. JUNE 20^TH. 7 PM. I HAVE THE TAPES. DRYDEN.

“It came to the radio station in May,” he said. “It’s weird. I’d sometimes imagined Cool Earth as a lure to draw Dryden out, but I didn’t think it would really happen.”

Alex had set out to earn money for a plane ticket to Mexico, picking up such ancillary work as falls to an esoteric late-night music host in New York: deejaying a fashion show, programming a bar mitzvah, assembling a soundtrack for an independent film. The morning after his last class let out, he boarded a five-hour flight to Mexico City. 

A taxi reeled him into the clotted, smog-stung centro, where he found a room at a small hotel on a busy street, not far from where he was to meet Dryden that night. The room had two single beds, peeling walls, and an open window facing the church next door where pigeons fluttered in nooks. 

“I’d thought about bringing a weapon but I wouldn’t have been able to take it on the plane. I’d decided If Dryden gave me the master tapes I’d settle for that.” 

A little before seven, he’d headed down a street called Isabel la Católica, and in deepening twilight came to the Hotel Isabel, a Spanish colonial edifice with ancient walls. 

“Dryden was registered in a room on the third floor. I took the stairway up. The hotel seemed near-deserted. As I climbed, I began to shake with hatred, with rage. I wished then I’d brought a gun, a knife. At the same time I was terrified by what I might do with it. I hadn’t forgiven Dryden. I couldn’t.” 

He found the room halfway down the corridor and knocked. When nobody answered he knocked again. He waited, then put his ear to the door. He thought he heard sounds inside. After a minute, he tried the handle. 

“The door opened onto a tall, balconied room facing the street. There was a double bed, still made, with an open suitcase on it, spilling clothes, as if it had been hastily unpacked. The shutters were open and I could hear traffic sounds. I saw four cardboard boxes on the bed - the two-inch master tapes of the sessions. From the door I could read the stamped logos from the demo studio: Red Light Productions. 

“I stepped inside. Then I heard water running. The bathroom door was partly open, and I saw Dryden, lying naked in a claw-footed white enamel bathtub, his head lolling to one side, his eyes swollen shut, his hair wet and matted. One arm was draped over the rim, completely still. 

“I called out his name and started to move forward. Then arms grabbed me from behind. A voice said something like, ‘Esperete. You wait.’ 

“Another man closed the door behind me. He pointed to the bathroom and said, ‘Where is his father?’ I said I didn’t know. He took my wallet out and read aloud my name and the address on my driver’s license. He asked me what I wanted. When I said, ‘Those tapes,’ he walked to the bed and gathered the boxes and started to carry them to the bathroom. I shouted ‘No!’ and tried to break away. The one holding me smashed the butt of a pistol into my eye. As my legs buckled I heard the splash…”

 Alex was on his knees, cupping his eye, blood dripping through his fingers. The two men lifted him to his feet and dragged him to the door. ‘They stuck his wallet back in his pocket and shoved him out into the hallway. ‘You disappear, entiendes?’ one said. They shut the door.

Alex stumbled along the Hotel Isabel corridor, hand over his eye, trailing blood down the stairs and through the lobby. There was nobody at the reception desk. Outside in the early evening street, traffic streamed past. He stood against the hotel wall, his face in his hands, reeling with pain, until he felt himself sliding helplessly to the pavement. 

“I woke up with a light shining in my eye. I was in a room. A woman was standing over me, bathing the other eye that had swollen shut. Her name was Lorena Jimínez, a doctor who had been passing by where a crowd had gathered around me on the street. She got me to her clinic on Calle Uruguay nearby. She shot me with something for the pain, gave me an antibiotic, and let me sleep that night on the couch in her office, which was the front room of her apartment. The next morning she asked me if I wanted to contact my embassy and I said no. An ophthalmologist arrived, probed the wound. I asked him if I’d lost the eye. He said my brow had taken the brunt of the blow, the cornea was undamaged, it should heal. He covered my eye with cotton and gauze and put a black patch over it.”

Alex was unable to account well for the next few days. He made it back to the Hotel Guardiola somehow and didn’t leave the room. Painkillers and sleep, the clanging of church bells, the reek of pigeon offal, the strains of the legless accordionist’s “Lady of Spain” in the church forecourt below, the medicinal uses of tequila. Doctora Jimínez stopped by daily to change the dressing. 

“I kept picturing Dryden in that bathtub,” he said. 

“Was he dead?” 

Alex fell quiet for a while. Then: “Yes. I’m sure he was.” 

“Who were the men?”

“I don’t know. I think I just happened to arrive at a bad moment. They didn’t care about me. They were frustrated I wasn’t Russell Poe. I didn’t feel they wanted to hurt me. If I hadn’t panicked about the tapes they probably would have just kicked me out.” 

“Why would they want to hurt Dryden?”

“Maybe Dryden was mixed up in his father’s work? Lying on that hotel bed, I began to think of all Dad’s crazy theories.” 

“Maybe they saved you from doing something bad to Dryden.”

“Or him to me.” Alex looked around the den at his abandoned instruments. “I kept seeing those boxes of master tapes, hearing the sound of the splash in the bathtub. Two-inch emulsion recording vinyl would never have survived that. Those soaked boxes of twisted tape are probably corroding in the sun atop some mountain of garbage on the city outskirts.”

No more bootleg cuts mixed off in secret, underground dance dubs, Tokyo cult discoveries. No more Maddie Haden serenades from the ashes. Why had Dryden summoned Alex? To bargain for the tapes? Propose releasing them in some form? Unburden himself of them before it was too late?

None of it mattered now.

The day after his bandages were removed, Alex had ventured outside for the first time. Pushing through downtown crowds, he came to the sprawling outdoor Tepito Market, where he heard music new to him: norteño, ranchera, huasteca, and the pulsing, Cubanesque danzón and son jarocho of the steamy Caribbean coast.. He riffled frenziedly through cassettes and CDs in the stalls, as if by some freakish luck he might come across a pirated version of Fate’s Angels, even the master tapes. It was an episode barely remembered when later in LA he’d open his backpack to find it crammed with music picked up that day for scant pesos, to be woven with time into his shows.

The following day he woke up at the hotel before dawn, soaked in sweat. You disappear, entiendes?, the men had said. He checked out of the hotel while it was still dark, took a taxi to the Terminal Norte, and boarded a bus to Tijuana. 

Now sitting across from me, Alex put his hand to his scarred eye. “I have no equipment for this, Garth. I have to get back to what I know.” 

We heard our father’s old Plymouth pulling into the driveway. Quickly we stood and left the room where all that had once come into being here had been shattered. 

18.

Dawn streaked the sky at the window of the Residenciál Valdivia. Sleepless, I lay beside Marimar, reliving a fantasy I used to have. 

In it, Fate’s Angels had survived, and after those demo sessions Alex and Maddie had taken their road trip across the country, playing in bars and clubs and roadhouses. They came through Denver and I took Devi and Ron to hear them. There was Alex, wizardly behind his Fender Rhodes, Maddie melting the Rockies with her sweet lilt and careless smile, crooning into a cordless mike the incantatory “Rima.” Devi, thrilled by her firstborn son’s genius, not to mention my own precocious contribution, ignored Soyburger Ron, who skulked in a corner, nervously fingered his power turquoise bracelet, struck dumb by true Garnett family soul unleashed. Dad was there too, upright and restored, released from his chimeras, arm around Mom, beating his other hand, out of rhythm, on his knee.

In my imagining, Alex and Maddie invite me to come along on the rest of the trip, a montage of Motel 6’s, our days and nights strewn with song. At dim bar tables I pen indelible words, apprenticing to my true career as author and lyricist Henry Orlowe. Then we are all in Japan, the full band with Harry Winter on cello, performing before candle-waving multitudes, recorded by record mogul Yoshiuki Sato for posterity: FATE’S ANGELS LIVE IN TOKYO, released as a two-album set. Once I even imagined myself in a split-level house in the San Fernando Valley, built on the ruins of the old porn studio, dandling Alex and Maddie’s little girl on my knee. 

The fantasy always included the banishment of Dryden Poe, incinerated in the cauterizing blaze of Rexroth’s great defense of the creative act.

All but for that one overdose. 

Lives extinguished, scribbled in the margins of the lost text of Fate’s Angels…

The Chilean morning offered its own defense against such dreams spun of time and grief. Rain had swept the sky clear, and beyond the dancing curtains of the pensión, gulls wheeled and barked. The window had blown open in the night, filling the room with salt sea smell and harbor sounds, Marimar warm against me, blowing sleep’s breath across the lyre of my ribs. She stirred, half-awake, then murmured something I strained to hear, hoping it was my name and not another’s, then fell back into slumber, our breaths rising and falling in accord, like the tango on the bandoneon. The day held the promise of her - and soon, I hoped, Alex’s return to Valparaíso. 

After Alex’s return from Mexico, things seemed to speed up. I recall a Labor Day backyard barbecue in Westwood, Dad wearing a cook’s apron dating all the way back to Wilkes-Barre that said “Ray’s Ribjoint.” A Lakers game played silently in the house, and Alex had put some early Ray Charles on the stereo. Dad’s semi-girlfriend Jeanette arrived with homemade potato salad in plastic containers. Yoshi, passing through LA, stopped by with boxes of mouthwatering sushi and a sixpacks of Kirin beer. There were glimmers of the old Ray Garnett that night - festive, funny, sharp. Pointing a spatula at Alex then me, he said, “This is some kind of treat, having you two monkeys around at the same time.” 

Alex’s harrowing report of his visit to Mexico City had becalmed Dad somewhat, bringing us all a wary sense of reprieve. An accounting of sorts had been rendered; we were all to go ahead with our lives now. What choice was there? “They get the son and miss the main guy. Typical of these operations,” was Dad’s verdict. 

 “Goth,” Yoshi said, clinking bottles of Kirin. 

“Kampai. Cheers.”

That night, Alex told us that WBAI, New York’s biggest alternative station, had hired him to do a two-hour Saturday night version of Cool Earth from their midtown studios. Returning to Columbia for his senior year, a fresh scar bedecking his brow, he was about to ride the crest of a wave, as across the country National Public Radio stations began to bloom, bearing new music, new voices. 

Alex, effortlessly curating his shows, a kind of one-handed art form for him, wove musical cloth from worlds past and present: Tangerine Dream, Madre Deus, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Burmese piano music, Keith Jarrett, Ravi Shankar. Cool Earth became an island of refuge in a tossing sea of late-70’s Dolby sense-assault, coked-out discos, hedonistic steam baths hurtling towards oblivion, scandal rumbling out of Washington. Musicians revered the show and often stopped by to share album cuts and chat, and Alex recorded their conversations. He still lived in the same building on 110^th Street, his quarters little improved, only stacked with more music and books, ever more frequented by girls and fans who came and went. 

At UCLA, I delved into Chaucer, Donne and Woolf, keeping an eye on my father from my old room above the garage. Dad continued to dabble in his off hours at his great excitable avocation, the architecture of political crime, but his vehemence had tailed off. He came more to resemble our passionate, beloved father of old - “that dear man,” as his companion Jeanette described him. Still the post-Watergate world offered little to persuade him the world still wasn’t going to hell in a handbasket. “Why aren’t the young people out there on the barricades, Garth? My students, they’re blanked out on TV, drugs. Zombies.”  Meanwhile his rhetorical excesses had been duly noted by some members of a school board of review, and Ray Garnett was gently invited to take the Los Angeles City School System’s version of early retirement. He wouldn’t hear of it. 

My senior year, I moved into a one-room flat in the beachfront building where Alex had first met Maddie, the old Hotel Monica converted by then into rent-controlled units and renamed The Sea Castle. That same year, Alex moved to San Francisco to host a three-hour morning drive-time version of Cool Earth for a Bay Area startup NPR station. Broadcasting out of the station’s Berkeley studios, Alex culled music new and old from every corner of the globe, his playlists swelled with releases from still-arcane labels like Putamayo, Nonesuch, Rhino and Harmonium Mundi. Built upon the ruins of a record-grubbing youth among used LP bins, through his early life as keyboardist, composer and arranger, his brief flowering with Maggie Haden, then the numbing tragedy that had aborted it, Cool Earth soon became a fixture in the liberal, increasingly well-furnished world of boomers, a carrier wave of the new zeitgeist. 

By the time I graduated, UCLA’s literature department had turned into something of a depopulated heresy in the era of Coppola, Lucas and Spielberg, “writer” now signifying essentially “screenwriter.” The once-precocious writer of “Rima” entered “the business” alongside nearly everyone else I knew, writing treatments on spec, scuffling for ghostwriting gigs. One evening after a Truffaut screening at the County Museum, I met Lara Tree - sensitive, literary, bruised - and with her income as Getty researcher and my freelancing gigs, we were able to move into a two-bedroom apartment on The Sea Castle’s fourth floor with an ocean view. 

While I tunneled deeper into words, Alex into music, and Dad into political malfeasance, up in the Rockies Devi and Ron’s health empire flourished. To their flagship store they added others in the region, starting a line of vitamins, another of herbal essences, and opened a spa. Servicing every attribute of the good life, RMH Enterprises regularly attained eight-figures grosses. Mom’s copious, draped form and Ron’s graying moustache, Hawaiian shirts and broad smile became staples at New Age conventions. There were frequent trips to Dharamsala, while little Karma took up skiing early, winning competitions in spite of an anorexia “issue” that neither meditation nor Ron’s bestselling potions could seem to resolve. 

I visited Alex in Berkeley on occasion but seldom stayed long. We never talked any more about Maddie or Dryden or Fate’s Angels. In fact, my brother became ever more opaque and unreachable even as he became something of a public figure in a Bay Area scene that still called itself “alternative.” If he had a girlfriend for more than a brief while I never met her, and he never married. With time he bought a little house up on Panoramic Avenue in the hills with a view of the bay, presiding over his vast record collection. 

Sometimes, driving to Santa Monica, I’d pass the RAND Corporation building. Little changed on the outside, for a long time it continued to invoke the shades of Maddie and Dryden and Russell Poe, but slowly even those ominous associations faded. 

Yet in the way that art can provide a parallel narrative, the lone song to survive that distant night of recording continued its underground life. Any self-respecting record aficionado knew “Rima,” with its brooding exoticism and trance-like reiterations. Countless bands to follow would allude to Fate’s Angels as “seminal.” So in her small way Maddie Haden had managed, as Alex said all the great singers did, to arrest time. 

In 1985, A British literary scholar at the University of East Anglia excavated the W.H. Hudson allusions tucked into “Rima” and wrote a critical exegesis on it. I keep a copy of it in the same drawer with my Fate’s Angels teeshirt and the original of the photo taken that night at Dryden Poe’s house, which Yoshi had returned to me. Some years ago I wrote the liner notes for Yoshi’s Lotus Records reissue of “Rima,” and on more than one occasion I’ve been approached by hardcore fans seeking information on Maddie and the band. But with the destruction of the master tapes, there was really no place else for the cult to go. No footage, no video, only the one song. The fan club disbanded, interest moved on, and Fate’s Angels became a footnote to an era, Maggie Haden another fading tale of damage and promise unfulfilled, inscribed in the culture’s marginalia.

Once Yoshi wrote and asked if I could help him find Harry Winter, who seemed to have vanished. This was long before the advent of search engines. When a visit to a couple of libraries turned up no mention of him, I drove to the apartment where Harry and his father, the émigré violinist, had once lived. An old lady on a walker answered the door and told me Isaac Winter had died years ago and she had no idea what had happened to the son. 

Time swept us forward, distancing us from the landscapes of half-remembered youths and the events we quietly conspired to put behind us, We all came to know each other less well. “Rima” remained the creative high water mark of my writing life. As co-author, I still receive royalty checks from ASCAP twice a year, the most recent one totaling $11 and change, mainly from Japanese sales and airplay. When the name Fate’s Angels comes up among the cognoscenti, the verdict is always the same: they would have been the band. Hearing this, bitter feelings of loss would still assail me. 

Once on a sunset beach walk from the Sea Castle to the Santa Monica Pier, Lara Tree said, “You’ve never let all that go, Garth. Alex managed to, and it was his tragedy, not yours.” 

Lara was probably right. There at land’s end, in the refurbished husk of the old Hotel Monica where in the Jack’s Bar downstairs Alex had once met Maddie, I lived among shades and ghosts. 

This was probably as much as anything why Lara decided to leave me. 

Two nights later, I got the call from Dad that Alex was missing.