VALPARAÍSO (6)

7.

Gina Garnett, alias Devi, alias my mother, was waiting at the arrivals gate in Denver, her ample, smothering embrace strangely welcome. She was alone, to my relief, as I wasn’t ready for boyfriend Ron’s patchouli-smeared bear hug, his burnished grin of wellbeing, his soulful gaze into my depths, which in reality extended no further than the surface of my pimpled skin. 

“You’re taller, Garth,” Devi remarked on the escalator to the shuttle train. “And thinner.” 

In the terminal parking structure we found the old gray Volvo, identifiable by the FREE TIBET bumper sticker she’d pasted over Dad’s witty, cerebral OBVIATE NUANCE after they split up. I tossed my backpack and duffel into the trunk and we headed north up I-25, a Buddhist infinity symbol swinging gaily from the Volvo’s rearview, the wide, simple blue Colorado skies seeming, after LA’s smoggy brew, a kind of benediction, a welcome home, or home enough. 

It was Sunday of the long Labor Day weekend, and that morning Dad had bid me a tearful goodbye in the kitchen, heading off to a teachers’ volunteer softball game in Watts. Alex and Harry had driven me to the airport, and outside the United terminal, Harry had gifted me a scuffed hardbound copy of W.H. Hudson’s Green Mansions, inscribed with the words “To Romance,” leaving me to infer what I might from that. Then Alex had slipped me a cassette of the new songs he and Maddie were working on for the demo sessions set to begin the following weekend. 

For the duration of the flight, I’d huddled in a window seat, a blanket pulled up to my chin in a kind of stupor, still resonating with all that had happened in LA, grieving for summer’s end, dreading the start of high school in Boulder on Tuesday, and wishing I could be at those demo sessions instead.

Devi sped us northwest on the 36 Turnpike, an open package of Ron’s salt-free RMH (code word for “Rocky Mountain High” also Ron’s initials, a coincidence he liked to belabor) Soy Bites open on the seat between us. Organic fare hadn’t prevented Mom from filling out more of her flowing, saffron-toned cotton dress over the summer we’d been apart. She’d spent three weeks at a meditation center outside Portland, “doing some meaningful work,” as she put it. She’d met a boy avatar from Seattle identified by Tibetan monks as an incarnated lama – an “amazing,” experience – and back in Boulder, she and Ron had taken a course in Ayurvedic medicine, dashing any hopes that his absence at the airport might have signaled their break-up. Then they’d flown to the Yucatan for a week of snorkeling, ruin-viewing and margarita-guzzling, which sounded pretty secular and hedonistic to me, though I’m sure Ron would have found a way to put a spiritual spin on it. Devi, as if sensing my surprise, looked over at me and said, “Pleasure is okay, Garth. Pleasure is okay.” 

Mom’s quest always touched me. It bore the hope that I, too, would one day become an adept, a devotee (pronounced by Ron as “deVOtee”), if not an avatar like the Seattle wonder boy. The beatific smile affixed to Devi’s face was like the FREE TIBET bumper sticker - a demand, a hope or prayer for peace and enlightenment, a world beyond rage or tragedy. Buddhism impressed me, such as I could grasp of it then (it was in the air in Boulder, alongside extreme sports), and I’d even squirmed through a weekend retreat with Devi outside Colorado Springs, enough to appreciate the rigor of meditation and sense the truth that the mind, if properly directed, could untie its own knots. I liked the Dalai Lama’s gravelly voice on his Four Pillars of Wisdom lectures, and if I didn’t quite know what he was saying, I had no doubt that suffering was indeed the problem. I felt affection for the smiling, unpretentious, shavenheaded monks in their rust robes padding about downtown Boulder in socks and sandals in the snow, blowing on their great conch horns beneath ornate headdresses, chanting in gurgling grotto voices, promising release from the fraught world of desire and calamity. 

“So how’s your father, Garth?” 

“Fine.” 

“And Alex?” 

“Great.” 

“Oh, Garth, you’ll tell me more when we get home, okay?” 

We both knew that wouldn’t happen. There was no news from that roiling sector, good or bad, that could please or interest Devi. She’d never quite gotten over the fact that her firstborn had chosen his father over her, Alex having sensed correctly, even at thirteen, that his mushrooming musical gifts risked suffocation with our mother. So anything I might tell her about LA – Alex’s affair with Maddie, the exhilarating inception of Fate’s Angels, Dad’s semi-girlfriend Jeanette, the strange interior erotics of Henry Orlowe, the disturbing night at Dryden Poe’s house - would only irritate her, stirring counter-energies she no longer had room to process. 

Ron’s VW van was parked in the driveway of the wood frame house a few blocks off Arapahoe, its owner off jogging the late, light-filtered, pine needle-strewn sidewalks. Mom and I climbed the wide porch stairs and entered the beamed living room where I let my bags slump to the floor, sloughed off my sneakers for Chinese slippers. A large new Devi watercolor hung over the couch - “Spirits Ascending over Eldorado Springs” - and on the hatchcover coffee table, brochures promoted her wispy paintscapes. There was a new course catalogue for The Naropa Institute’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, which might have stirred in Ray Garnett the vague hope that this woman who had once parsed Sappho and written a tough, credible thesis on Virginia Woolf might be coming back to her senses. But the presence of Soyburger Ron obviated that nuance.

“Tomorrow’s your birthday, Garth. Don’t think we forgot. What would you like to do?”

“Nothing, actually.” 

“Anybody you want to invite over?”

“No.”

“We’ll make a cake.” 

“Chocolate,” I said. “And a tub of Vanilla Swiss Almond Haagen Dazs. Oh, and a pack of Marlboros.”

“Very funny,” my mother said, lighting a stick of sandalwood joss. Tibetan doorbells jangled, and Devi whisked to the door to greet a huffing Ron, in designer sweats, still running in place. 

“Hey, it’s Garth,” he panted. “Welcome home, dude.”

8.

Almost two weeks ago, two days before I’d leave for Valparaíso, I received a call from my father. Dad, a shadow of the firebrand teacher of our youth, was struggling back from a fall and a broken hip in the Westwood house where he still lived alone. “Garth, something’s wrong. Alex hasn’t answered his phone in five days.” 

The next day I caught an afternoon flight to Oakland and took a cab to Alex’s house in the Berkeley hills. I found the kitchen door unlocked, the curtains drawn, a television on, and a figure curled on the living room couch beneath a blanket. “Alex?” I called. A grizzled head emerged, owlish eyes blinking in the sudden light. 

“Is that you, young Garth?”

Harry Winter coughed, struggled to rise. I hadn’t seen him in all these years, since that day at the airport when he’d given me Green Mansions. The lantern jaw, the freckles, the ineffably sweet smile.

When I asked him where Alex was, he said, “On his way to Chile, if I had to guess.”

 “Chile? Why?” 

Harry struggled up, his crabbed hand gripping a carved wood cane. We made our way to Alex’s porch and sat at a metal table looking out over the city as dusk gathered around us. Harry, as if to answer my question, began to tell me about those recording sessions I’d missed years ago. 

“It was this beat-up cracker-box studio in the San Fernando Valley, Garth, set in a cement bunker owned by some porn flick operation. Alex had booked three nights at off-hours rates with Dryden Poe footing the bill. You remember him, Maddie’s cousin, the spy’s son. There was a little control booth with a 16-track mixing board, a worn leather couch for the clients. Stained acoustic tile walls, the usual strew of broken music stands and booms. A sleepy-eyed zombie engineer in shirtsleeves and a toupee bent over his console like a vulture. Cheap carpets stinking of beer and one shudders to think what else, my dear, considering the porn people used it too…” 

Harry passed to nip at a silver whiskey flask, peered over to see if I was with him. I’d always burned to know about those demo session Alex had never been able to bring himself to speak of.

“The first session began just after midnight - Alex, his regular bassist and drummer, a studio guitarist, and me laying down instrumental tracks. Everything was still reel-to-reel back then, whirr of rewinds and fast-forwards, razor-blade edits directly on two-inch tape. Alex was very focused, guiding us through his charts. He had all this shamanistic knowledge gathered from his precocious listening, you see. And in Maddie he’d found his perfect instrument. I would have jumped through hoops for your brother, you know. He was my only friend back then…” 

Harry hunched forward, staring down a tunnel of remembering. “Alex in love with Maddie, me in love with Alex. I didn’t understand it any more than they did. Well, it must have been around one when Maddie sailed in, trailing her cousin Dryden. She’d dyed her hair yellow, painted her fingernails green, the big cuffs of her hip-hugging jeans rolled up to show pink Day-glo socks. Concocted a little piece of theater to shore herself up. She was in pain, you see. The leg…”

Harry, with a bad leg himself now, paused and looked off across the bay as evening shrouded the deck. A helicopter hovered like a thought over the Berkeley flats below. 

“Maddie put on headphones and tried overdubbing a track we’d already recorded. Her pitch was wavery, popping her p’s and s’s into the mike. Alex tried to calm her, the engineer adjusted a few things. Then Maddie went into the control booth, where her cousin had installed himself on the couch. They had a little confab, then she disappeared down the hallway. After she came back from wherever she’d gone, we started recording live and things just took off. Maddie lit up that demo studio like a sparkler…” 

Harry set his flask on the patio table, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Across the darkened bay, the Golden Gate hung lit like a diadem.

“And here was cousin Dryden, tan and tailored as if he just walked off a tennis court. Gorgeous in his way, yet so stiff, a kind of disembodied marble statue, with those ice-blue eyes. Not a musical bone in his body, just a hungry ghost at our esthetic feast. But Alex knew that Dryden needed to be there if we were to have Maddie, to minister to her, monitor her little restorative trips. When Maddie would tire or complain, she’d turn first to Alex and they’d commune, go over a few bars. Then she’d limp into the control booth and have a whisper with Dryden, and off she’d go down the hall to the john again.,,

“All this shuttling between Alex and Dryden. Either Alex was oblivious or he just didn’t have any suspicion in him. Love is blind, I suppose. Ditto youth. Or was Alex complicit in some tacit way? Dryden Poe, cupping our wounded bird girl in his hands. And if one squeezed too hard…” 

Harry Winter fell silent. We were in full darkness now. I heard his wood cane clatter to the deck floor. As he fumbled for it, I was back in that house in the LA canyon, wandering its cold rooms, staring at the photo of Russell Poe and his family. 

While Alex and Maddie had been setting the San Fernando Valley on fire with their music, I’d been marking my fifteenth birthday in Boulder with carrot cake and distilled apple cider, contemplating the bleak prospect of starting public high school. Dug deep into the bunker of my room, I’d watched through a drawn curtain the silhouette of effervescent Ron, bounding up and down a ladder with a can of sealant, prepping the house for winter. Across that long Labor Day weekend, I’d listened over and over to the cassette of Alex and Maddie’s new songs, wondering what that swirling, prophetic music was trying to say, where lyrics came from, how words could fit to music at all. Then one night, in despair, I’d burrowed into the book Harry had given me.

Green Mansions had marked the retreat from my gritty Henry Orlowe phase into a New Romanticism, you could say. Reading the 1904 tale of the Venezuelan political refugee Abel who comes upon a half-bird, half-woman in the jungle and pursues her to his near-oblivion, I began to feel I was being offered a hint, if not an instruction, from Harry, Alex and Maddie. The next day, slumped against a schoolyard chain link fence among a sullen klatch of tenth-graders, I’d begun to scribble, on the inside cover of a new algebra textbook, a lyric. 

“Sometimes when you’re young,” said Harry Winter, in the dark bloom of his recall, “you get something for free - a sampler, as it were, of what you’ll struggle again to attain later. Just that once, you don’t have to know how to do something to do it. Do you follow me, Garth?” 

I did, because it had happened to me just then and never since - though Harry wasn’t thinking of me, I was sure, but of Maddie and Alex and those demo sessions. We could just see each other’s silhouettes by such light as the stars provided. 

“That first night,” Harry went on, “we lay down three master takes over the course of several hours. Maddie was incandescent, Alex dropping in these dazzling fills. I think of artists I’ve played with since, including some of the great concert soloists, and I still remember that session with awe. We ended near dawn, exhausted and happy, listening to playbacks, and even the droopy engineer didn’t quite believe what these kids had done and that he had it there on tape.”

From here, Harry’s reminiscence veered into territory better known to me. The next day the engineer messengered a rough mix to a veteran producer at a major label. It was 1973, a time of musical exhaustion, the sixties rock idols dead or retrenching, jazz run aground on experimentation, a lot of money chasing few prospects. Maddie and Alex’s boundary-smashing constructions seemed to suggest a new musical genetic code, pointing a way forward. 

“When the producer showed up the following night, Dryden seemed to slide into the role of representing Fate’s Angels,” Harry said. “I suppose that wasn’t so odd. He was the band’s emissary to reality, putting up the money for the sessions from his…ah, unreadable resources. That second night, Maddie seemed to have stabilized, fewer trips to the loo, and by the end we’d recorded every song we’d rehearsed. There remained just a few overdubs and mixes to do the next night. But the producer was pressing for more new material.”

That day in Boulder, I’d screwed up the nerve to call Alex’s phone at Dad’s house and blurt my agitated stream of doggerel into his answering machine. There were some rhymes and not-rhymes, a lot of dark jungle, bird girls, forest flowers, tangled vines and burning bushes, naked desire and florid beauty – a thicket of words by a frustrated virgin stranded in the New Age, a moan of desire for Maddie Haden, a shameless graft of Green Mansions, and a howl of misplaced rage at Alex and my father for having released me back into exile with Devi and Soyburger Ron. 

“By the third night,” said Harry, “it was shoulder room only in the control booth. The producer and his girlfriend, somebody else from Warner Brothers, an A&R man from the jazz label Blue Note, a music publisher. Word was out on Maddie Haden and her keyboard svengali. Even Dryden’s father, whom nobody had ever seen, popped in to see what his son and his niece were up to. Some of the porn stars were there too, or so somebody said, the groaning on the other side of the walls letting up as they stopped to get in on the real action, I suppose. Everybody was in love with Maddie, Alex was a genius, and all the ephemeral heat that gathers around something a little new was in the air… 

“Maddie warmed up with a couple of ballads, I remember – Dylan’s “Just Like a Woman,” then a very lazy “Things Ain’t What they Used to Be” - as much to settle herself as to get them on tape, wowing the visitors with that charcoal voice of hers. Then Alex passed around these scribbled-out lead sheets to your ‘Rima,’ young Garth.”

As if either of us were young any more. “I was just channeling W.H. Hudson,” I said. “Thanks to you.” 

“And your own ardent dreams.” 

That day, Alex and Maddie, desperate for more material for the next session, had transcribed my wild ramble onto the instrumental motif he’d given me on tape, and run through it before the session. 

“It was another rocky night for Maddie,” Harry said. “Lots of breaks, whispered confabs with Dryden, little trips to the john. By the time we began recording ‘Rima,’ her voice was querulous. We built much of the arrangement on the spot – tom toms, guitar tremolo, that buzzy, snaky organ sound Alex had worked up, some ominous bowings from me. The lousy studio quality gave it a garage-band grit, that ‘dark enigma’ touch they’d talk about later.”

Clouds had erased the stars on Alex’s porch. Harry Winter murmured on in his baritone, his great chin bobbing, head hung down. 

“It was just after we’d recorded a very long take of ‘Rima’ that Maddie started swaying, eyes closed, as if in some fever dream. Alex stood up and went to support her. ‘My leg,’ she said into the mike, the usual signal for a visit with cousin Dryden. She lurched into the crowded control booth, and she and Dryden disappeared through the padded door. We all waited awkwardly in that spooky, deadened recording studio silence for an eternity, it seemed, until finally Alex left the booth and went down the hallway after her… 

“A few more minutes passed. Then there was Alex, standing at the studio door, ghost-pale, looking at us as if we were figures in a frieze.”