Valparaíso (3)

3.

“Henry Miller?” Dad said. “He lives in Pacific Palisades. Let’s drive over and see if we can spot him. He likes to ride his bicycle around up there.” 

It was a late Saturday morning, and Alex had disappeared with Maddie in the used Ford compact Dad had bought him on his seventeenth birthday. Off to a rehearsal, he’d said. 

“I thought Henry Miller lives in Big Sur,” I said to Dad as we wended west along broad San Vicente Boulevard in the warming, leafy air. 

“No, he left there after the war years.” 

I didn’t feel any great need to track down some bald old satyr on a bike. It was enough to be with his books. In fact, the whole thing with books, it seemed to me, was that the author was a disembodied friend you didn’t actually have to meet. Writers probably didn’t relish meeting you either. They just sent their pages to an office in New York or London or Paris and stayed in their rooms, and you stayed in yours. It was an occult deal, a medium for shy people, where you got into things together through the book, not out in life. 

But the trip was about spending time with Dad too. He knew I was reading a lot, and I suppose he considered this a way to encourage my new literary interests while prying me out of my room. Surely he’d noted the swelling erotica collecting up there, and maybe he wanted to cut me off at the pornographic pass by liberal inclusion - a visit to Henry Miller in lieu of a father-and-son heart-to-heart. That would be like him. And he probably sensed I felt neglected by Alex. Maybe he did too. 

The summer before, Alex had been eager to share the city opening to him. We’d hopped busses east to Hollywood to pore through record bins and music stores along Melrose Avenue, unearthing obscure North Indian or African or Blue Note LP’s; or west to the beach to commune with strumming buskers along the boardwalk, poke around the crumbling Venice canals Jim Morrison had stalked, gaze at bronzed girls in bikinis. I’d helped haul Alex’s keyboards to a smoky jazz gig in a South LA club, a rockabilly recording session in a little egg-crate studio off Vine Street. We’d visited Alex’s cellist friend Harry Winter and hunkered with his father’s émigré cronies at Canter’s Deli on Fairfax, listening to them kvetch in German, Russian and Yiddish. Our father still seemed youthful then, practically one of us, and he’d sometimes come along. 

Dad continued driving west towards the ocean, low June fog lifting to reveal an enameled blue sky above a corridor of elephant palms and oleanders. “Berthold Brecht lived around here,” he said. “Christopher Isherwood still does.” Hunched over the wheel of his old swaying Lincoln in a drip-dry shirt, his face lit with a boyish sense of wonder, he said, “There’s more culture out here than meets the eye, Garth.” Like so many Eastern transplants, Dad had become an LA booster, and a little bit starstruck.

When he’d moved here with Alex, he’d quickly gotten a job teaching high school in the city system. An overqualified enthusiast with a Master’s Degree from Columbia, his specialty was English but he could also do American history when called upon, or calculus for that matter. Immensely popular with students, something of a polymath, he worked as a substitute, a hired gun, mostly around the affluent west side but also the inner city, for he insisted upon that. His employment provided us with a health plan, which meant that if braces or flu shots were called for, I got them in LA. 

A deep-dyed humanist and fervent believer in education’s power to liberate, Ray Garnett remained convinced that the American democratic system still represented a great opening, that social ills could be addressed and corrected. He’d come by this idealism honestly, his father an IWW Wobbly, his mother a proto-feminist social worker - old Pennsylvania lefties who’d skirted communism. When we were small, he and Granddad had driven us to Mexico to see the great murals, told us about John Reed and Zapata. They wanted us to understand difference and celebrate it. The civil rights movement had touched Dad deeply. When Dylan went electric, so did Ray Garnett. As Vietnam worsened, Dad was right there with the protestors. Incorrigibly East Coast in demeanor and dress and utterly unaware of it, he was an anomalous figure in coastal California but the more beloved for it. It probably never occurred to him that it was warm in Los Angeles, and he could take off the tweed jacket and tie and gabardine slacks. He was too busy zooming his students off to good universities or to work summers with Cesar Chavez’ farmworkers. 

Dad had hit California at the beginning of a new wave of Third World immigration, and gradually he’d spend more time teaching students how to speak and read English and less how to read its great works. The Watts riots would shake him, and Charles Manson, and the country’s general rightward tilt with Nixon and Reagan. The canon he taught would come under attack, and when black students began standing up and shouting at him, it would take something off his step. Then there was what happened with Alex. Later, the depressions and delusions would set in. But at the beginning of the 70’s he still felt he’d entered a brave new world out here on the Coast.

We wound along Sunset Boulevard into Pacific Palisades, a sparse, low-slung community of featureless stucco houses and trimmed lawns perched above the sea. We didn’t spot anybody on a bicycle. In fact the streets and sidewalks were all but deserted. Turning into a neighborhood of grander houses and taller trees, Dad said, “Thomas Mann lived here. And you know who else? Vernon Duke.” I asked him who that was. “Vladimir Dukelsky. The composer of April in Paris. Autumn in New York. Alex can tell you.”

We drove aimlessly around a while longer until finally Dad said, “Well, no luck today, Garth.” As if we’d gone fishing and hadn’t bagged anything. That was fine with me. I figured Henry Miller was probably still at home in his bathrobe with one of his mistresses - Anais Nin, probably – doing with her what I’d seen Alex doing with Maddie Haden. 

Dad kept driving west along Sunset, as if drawn magnetically towards land’s end. As we came in view of the Pacific from above, I saw an onion-domed white temple through the foliage. I asked Dad what it was. “An all-faiths retreat,” he said, “built by a Hindu swami named Yogananda who came here in the ‘20’s.” 

I realized too late I shouldn’t have asked because I knew what was coming next. 

Divorced kids quickly learn the art of the monosyllable. How’s your mother? Fine. How’s your father? Fine. Even high-minded parents will enlist the child as conspirator and informant in their lingering curiosities about the disaffected other. The Hindu temple provided Dad with an irresistible segue. 

“So how’s your mom?” he asked, as we swept towards the shimmering line of the Pacific. 

I still hadn’t figured out how to tell Dad that his ex-wife was no longer Gina Garnett but simply Devi. As it was, he liked to attribute her transmutation from Bryn Mawr, Sylvia Plath, and responsible motherhood to Colorado, spiritual watercolors, and a Tibetan master to a bad acid trip in Taos one spring, leaving her disoriented and vague. True enough, drugs probably first opened the doors of perception for Gina Garnett, revealing a world beyond Wilkes Barre. First came the George Harrison albums and the Maharishi, then chanting in malls with the Hare Krishnas, then the commune in North Carolina that had brought the marriage to an end. She’d ended up in Boulder among an emergent community of Tibetans, in particular an alcoholic lama with a bad arm, selling what she called her “Ascensions” at Sunday street fairs – gouaches of diaphanous, floating, alabaster figures, with titles like “Chakra Dawn” and “Cosmic Prairie Spirit Dance.” 

Post-Pennsylvania life for me, then, was tofu, tamari and shaved carrots, and school with kids named Shanti and Aura (alongside Tiffanys, Tammies, Dylans, and that peculiar generational eruption of male J’s - Jared Jason Justin Jeremy Joshua.) I was just Garth, and I didn’t fit in, for there really was little to fit into among all that helter-skelter eclecticism. Mom’s bookshelves, once crammed with poetry and fiction, had been cleared of secular matter to house prayer beads and wheels and flags, incense burners, charts of Buddhist cosmology, framed photos of various garlanded gurus, Jung and yoga manuals, zabutons, newsletters from Dharamsala, and a fingered copy of Food is Your Best Medicine. 

Dad was loyal and didn’t give up on people easily, so Gina Garnett remained something of a suppressed guffaw nobody would quite utter. But Mom’s excoriation of Dad was fierce: she found his faith in literature and social change retrograde, poisonous, another chimera obscuring the only true task: the search for enlightenment. She was convinced Ray Garnett was terminally mired in the wrong hemisphere of his brain. If he would have liked to jolt Gina Garnett back into reason, she would have stripped him of his tweeds and sent his pale, underexposed frame wheeling freely across an empty green field behind some liberating psychoactive substance. 

Each of my parents’ dynamic was so replete – his cultural and social idealism, her spiritual idealism – that Alex and I would sometimes wonder what had ever linked them. But then we knew few kids whose original parents were still together. Mom and Dad did share one thing in common: earnestness. Both were bent upon improving themselves and everyone around them. It was Henry Miller, in fact, who used to wonder at this human compulsion towards uplift, figuring that if we could just let things be, we’d be in a lot less trouble. All the room, he wrote somewhere, is at the bottom.

Then there was Devi’s new partner, Ron, with his startup health food store in downtown Boulder. Ron had loaned Mom his zafu and parka at some chilly mountain retreat, a sacramental psilocybin trip together in the woods had ensued, and now sanctimonious, loathsome Ron, interloper and budding entrepreneur, was shacking up at our house. Cloying haze of incense, gunny sacks of organic rice, syrupy stench of strawberry attar. What was it, anyway, with Mom’s readiness to unsheathe her ample blond locks, roomy breasts, shapely pale legs, and hike up her tie-dyed skirts to accommodate every spiritual hustler to come down the pike? 

“She’s fine,” I said, in answer to Dad’s question. 

We ended up on the Santa Monica Pier, eating fishburgers at a white plastic table, an offshore breeze flapping the umbrella, the merry-go-round pumping Viennese waltzes. 

“So Alex’s new girlfriend,” Dad said, looked off at the bobbing steeds. Then he said her name, “Maddie,” as if by uttering it aloud he could get a grip on it, her, them. 

“She seems okay,” I said. 

“Fetching,” Dad said. “And a hell of a singer. Your brother’s head over heels. Quite beyond reason these days.” 

Dad tried to smile, almost made it, and then his face crumpled. He picked a piece of deep-fried mullet from his beard. It was the first time I’d ever seen him worried about Alex. My brother, heading into his senior year, was a quick, quiet student at a westside public high school where Dad sometimes taught. He played around the city weekends in bands, a facile keyboard player and arranger with big ears, as they say. There was talk of Julliard, Berklee, scholarships, even Dad’s beloved Columbia. Surely Alex, with his gifts, was headed for some sort of glory. What was eating Dad, then? The roaches in the ashtrays?

I’d gleaned a little more about Maddie Haden from Alex since that first encounter a few weeks earlier. She’d come out from Georgia, the only daughter of a venerable, damaged family, to stay the summer with her 18-year-old cousin, Dryden, whom I’d yet to meet. Maddie had grown up in Savannah studying music and listening to her grandmother’s Bessie Smith, Jo Stafford and Johnny Mercer records, and had begun singing in clubs at fifteen. The new band Alex was forming around her, writing new songs and reworking old ones, had quickly evolved into an edgy art-rock/jazz/global fusion affair, with cello and hand percussion and Maddie’s smoky, irresistible voice, so forward it was off the map, so retro it sounded pre-LP. In the vastly boring rock era of the early ‘70’s, Alex and Maddie could talk about John Cage, Elmore James, and Gregorian chants in the same breath. My brother’s ranging, record-bin-grubbing taste had found its corresponding instrument. Maddie’s cousin was putting up money for them to cut a demo tape at a little studio somewhere in the Valley, and their rehearsals shimmered with the excitement that gathers around something new. Nor was it just music Alex and Maddie were making behind those closed den blinds, as I’d discovered. 

Dad and I walked toward the end of the pier in the glare of bright afternoon, skee balls clattering in their troughs in the amusement arcade, gulls crying overhead. Dad’s hands were jammed ruminatively in his pockets, his head bent into the stiffening breeze. “I just hope Alex isn’t in over his head,” he said. 

I couldn’t read my father’s fears, only feel them. But then he and Alex were bound in ways I couldn’t know. Alex, having chosen our father to live with, had pride of place. Surely my recent interest in books was in part an unspoken apology to my father for having picked Mom, and a reach towards him too: something to show I wasn’t going to become vacuous just because I lived in Boulder with Devi, that I could love my mother without becoming her. Maybe words and books were also a rebuke to Alex, often unheeding of me back then, a way of planting a flag in another medium. That day on the pier, I sensed how much Dad missed Alex lately, and a little of what raising his older son meant to him. Ray Garnett was, after all, a displaced person in California too. There were a few passing colleagues and faculty meetings, Jeanette the frumpy teacher from Boston he took to movies and early bird specials, the itinerant life of a substitute teacher. Mostly, there was his son, Alex. 

We edged in among the fishermen at the end of the pier and stood, elbows on the railing, casting crumbs to the circling gulls, watching the spindrift swells surge beneath us. My shoulder pressed to Dad’s, I felt a sudden lurching in his chest and looked over. Maybe it was just the whipping breeze, but his eyes had clouded with tears. 

The world, the German poet Novalis once wrote, is a shattered paradise, our task to gather the glinting shards and reassemble them. I suppose I’d long ago surrendered that child’s urge to knit my broken family back together. Like Dad, I was ready to celebrate difference. Or as Devi might have put it, the journey was the goal. Wilkes Barre was a crater in scorched earth, the embers of the breakup kindling bonfires to come. Now centrifugal currents bore us all outward. 

Yet in years to come, I’d wish to deliver each of them – Dad, Alex, Devi - from the rack of time and sorrow, from hopes dashed. In my dreamless gaze, it was their innocence I’d long to restore, not mine. As if words could do such a thing. Maybe that’s what drove me to Valparaíso in the end. 

But that day at pier’s end, I knew we were both too old and too young, Dad and I. As we turned back to shore, the land suddenly looked far away, and it was not the sea but the earth that seemed to heave.