Valparaíso (2)

2.

Starting the year I was eleven, I’d spent summer vacations with Alex and my father in Los Angeles. We’d grown up in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania where my parents taught high school, but those years were as if they hadn’t really happened. My life began, in every important sense, when our parents, Raymond and Gina Garnett, split up and Alex went to California with my father, me to Colorado with Mom. Alex was twelve then, I was nine. 

As spring snows melted and windflowers burst along the Rockies slopes, I’d begin to daydream the summer ahead. I loved my mother, whom I’d picked to live with over Dad when the choice had been offered, but that Boulder blend of oxygen and incense, spiritual and sportif - Tibetan gurus, Naropa poets, and ski instructors spreading beneficence among fresh-faced devotees - could oppress, and I welcomed the chance to trade saffron, herbal teas and North Face for black coffee and black garb, John Denver for The Doors.  

My fourteenth summer, as soon as school was out, I took the two-hour United flight to sea level. Alex picked me up at LAX in Dad’s car and as we shot the 405 freeway home I gazed out with fresh amazement at the vast sprawl and pall of bad air. Alex, at seventeen, was taller and really handsome now, I thought, and I could sense he’d mutated in other ways I couldn’t yet grasp. 

“So how’s it going?” he asked. 

“Okay,” I muttered in reply. 

This was the extent of the conversation. I never doubted Alex’s affection for me, but it must have been a burden to suffer this mute, unformed dweeb down from the mountains with stringy hair and a backpack full of books. His solution had been either to leave me to my own devices or include me from time to time among his emergent, occult circle of musical friends. 

Alex pulled into the driveway of Dad’s house and switched off the engine. I grabbed my gear and followed him inside. 

“Garth!” Dad called out, hearing the front door open, rushing to suffocate me in hugs. Ray Garnett was nothing if not sentimental, his feelings borne on the sleeve of his tweed jacket, salt replacing pepper in his unruly beard. “God how I’ve missed you, boy.” Ruffling my head, clutching it in his hands, me croaking shyly in my new baritone. 

Raymond Garnett’s Spanish duplex in Westwood south of Wilshire Boulevard was the great domain of take-out: kung pao chicken, pizza, discarded cartons of Haagen Dazs and packs of Marlboros. Both Dad and Alex smoked, a heresy in Boulder. Nary a soy product could be found on those scrambled shelves, nobody meditated, and the word “spiritual” was seldom heard, let along “energy” or “vibrations”. It was Bill Evans, Lou Reed, Camus and Bitches’ Brew, a heady descent into a secular mire. 

The thing that struck me when I first got to Chile, decades later, was how in Santiago the snowy Andes and the sea were jammed right up next to each other, as if Colorado had been transposed to the West Coast, my two worlds of puberty conflated.

I hauled my things through the den in back, past the old upright and Alex’s snarl of instruments and recording equipment, to the room over the converted one-car garage at the end of the driveway, ready to shut down my lungs and open my sensibilities, eager to scope out what Alex was into. 

The next morning I slept in, then I read in bed for a while, surely something grabbed off Dad’s shelves the night before. That was my Henry Miller summer, I recall, so it would have been Black Spring or one of the Tropics, or other of Dad’s old Grove Press erotica: Frank Harris’ My Life and Loves, The Story of O, Terry Sothern’s Candy. Finally around noon hunger got the better of me and I got up and headed to the main house. 

The den door latch was on, and I saw, through the sliding glass door, Alex standing intently over his Fender Rhodes electric piano, headphones on, his eyes flicking back and forth between the dials of his Nagra reel-to-reel recorder and the girl. 

She was swaying slightly, eyes closed, one hand to her ear, the other open hand beating lightly against her thigh, singing into a microphone to an inaudible track in the headphone on her other ear. Delicate face, long willowy arms, skinny frame. She had on a black tank top, tight jeans, jet-black hair cut tight to her head like those boyish gamines in fifties French films - Leslie Caron, or the way Audrey Hepburn sometimes did it, or Jean Seberg in Godard’s Breathless, which Dad had taken me to see at a revival house the year before. One bare foot, toenails painted blue, tapped the beige shag carpet. 

Alex had soundproofed the room, but I could hear her, if not what she was singing to. Her voice, light yet old and smoky, belied her age, which couldn’t have been much more than Alex’s. It was some early jazz standard or sounded like one, with an easy lift to it. A joint burned in an ashtray. The scene had that odd, disembodied recording ambience - a musical fragment crooned to sound unheard, a duet with a phantom.

I took the driveway around and entered the kitchen through the side door. It must have been a weekday, Dad off teaching, because while our father never openly condemned pot, Alex wouldn’t have smoked in the house while he was there. I was in the kitchen frying eggs and bacon (banned in Boulder) when Alex and the girl came in. Fat Lansing headphones hung around her neck, a cigarette dangled from her fingers. 

“Maddie, this is my brother, Garth,” Alex said. “Garth, Maddie Haden.” 

“Hi, Garth,” she said, smiling sweetly. Her eyes were pale green, almost translucent, and she spoke in the same soft, husky voice she sang in. They’d left the den door open to hear the playback while they made coffee. Wolfing my bacon and eggs, I snuck looks at Alex and Maddie slumped against the kitchen counter, smoking and drinking coffee, heads bowed, listening and trading glances. 

There was something weightless about Maddie Haden, as if she were barely here. Faded jeans hugged her small, flat hips. An inner smile played around her lips, her features splayed irregularly about her face. She could sing, I knew that. You didn’t need to be a musician like Alex to hear the clear cool tonalities, the languid intensity. She had insouciance, a careless allure, like those 30’s thrushes Alex favored – Mildred Bailey, Billie Holliday, Lee Wiley. Winsome, sassy, androgynous. The song was Easy Livin’, and Alex had sketched a music track with keyboards and synthesizers with voicings and cross-rhythms that made it sound both old and new. Alex said to me once that the great singers slow time down. They open up space inside the song, all the space in the world.

Alex was in love: my brother had found his muse. With his large, quiet brown eyes, his encyclopedic ears, his deliberate, almost scholarly way with music, he was moving out of range again just when I thought I might catch him. As they left the kitchen and wandered back towards the den studio, Maddie chimed over her shoulder, in an identifiably southern accent, “Nice to meet you, Garth.” Then the door closed. 

Feeling hurt and abandoned, I grabbed a lit cigarette from the ashtray and puffed, but it just made me woozy. I thought of smoking some pot, but the dumbest Zep-head kids in school in Boulder were already doing it and I’d leap over walls not to be like them. I hadn’t seen where drugs had done my mother much good either. 

Desolate, I wandered into the living room and began poking through Dad’s bookshelves. It was looking to be a long, lonely summer, and I thought I’d better stock up. The year before, I’d suddenly become a reader. Marshall McLuhan had published a book called Understanding Media, announcing the death of literature in the new electronic age. Perfect, I’d thought. A corner I can crawl into undisturbed, surrounded by the wealth of the Indies. 

Dad’s collection of hardbounds and paperbacks framed my early interests, indeed what I later became, I suppose, incurably tangled in text. My father must have kept every book from his own undergraduate days, and I can still see entire swatches of his shelves, title by title, conjure the aroma of opening one to enter some musty closet of the imagination. The American canon he taught held pride of place - Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Dickenson, Hem and Fitz and Zora Neal Hurston. The British classics, from Chaucer to Woolf, were richly represented. Other tastes seeped in around the edges, especially the continental existentialists of his postwar youth: Beckett, Camus, Satre, Fanon, Céline. Poetry was scant: Neruda’s Veinte Poemas de Amor, which Dad had effectively employed wooing our mother, he claimed. His early social idealism, lately coming under severe strain, obliged The Family of Man, David Reisman’s The Lonely Crowd, Michael Harrington’s The Other America, books on Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement. A stacked assortment of scuffed LPs anchored a bottom shelf: Woody Guthrie, Burl Ives, Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs, Joan Baez, early Dylan. Alex liked to poke fun at our earnest, tin-eared, lyric-driven, folkie father, even as we’d both drunk deeply of his Alan Lomax and Harry Smith American folklore collections, the Ella Fitzgerald songbooks, the Nonesuch and Folkways ethnic recordings from around the world. Dad’s slightly irritating Francophilia - Edith Piaf, Maurice Chevalier, Jacques Brel, The Swingle Singers - had been shunted to the rear of the pile in favor of Lenny Bruce and the great proto-rapper and hipster prophet Lord Buckley, which I included in my summer selections that day. 

Hauling my stash of books and records back down the driveway to my room, I saw that the den blinds had been drawn. I walked over and, sensing I shouldn’t, peered through a crack. 

It was silent in there, and I saw Alex standing beside his Fender Rhodes, his black chinos down around his thighs, head thrown back, one hand steadying himself on the piano top, the other gripping Maddie’s head. She knelt before him, eyes closed, head dowsing rhythmically, as when she’d been singing into the microphone, her right hand feeding Alex into her mouth, her left splayed on the floor for balance. One side of her black tank top had come down, revealing a tattoo of a small bird on her shoulder blade, and a compact, jiggling breast as she plied him. 

In Boulder, I’d looked through my mother’s edition of The Kama Sutra and Alex Comfort’s illustrated The Joy of Sex. Tantric variations, athletic options. I hadn’t been with a girl yet, nor so much as touched one, though I certainly yearned, a lonely fourteen-year-old stalking the corridors of my delirious imagination. Now I stood paralyzed, watching Maddie Haden go down on my brother.

Before I could wrench my gaze away, Alex glanced over, eyes half-shut, mouth open in a rictus of pleasure. He looked worried, as if engaged in some terrible struggle. I was certain he saw me, peeking through the blinds, and I didn’t dare move. For a second I had the odd feeling that he needed me there, to keep watching. Ecstasy, I saw, was serious business.

Then his head swiveled and I slid away out of view. Shaky-legged, I bore my load of records and books up the stairs to my room above the garage, slipped off my jeans, and went at it. And before long, again. I’d stain Dad’s belabored bedsheets ceaselessly that summer, and then Mom’s back in Boulder, to that primordial scene, imbued with its inexhaustible charge. 

Sometimes, in imagination, I was watching them through the blinds. In other tableaus, it was me at the Fender Rhodes Maddie was fellating. Sometimes I was my brother Alex. Because I wanted Maddie Haden to do that to me. And for that to happen I’d have to become Alex, who I wanted to be anyway. 

Until later, when I didn’t want to be Alex at all.