VALPARAÍSO (9)

13. 

What happens to acts unaccounted for? Where do they go? Do they seep into the soil of the unconscious like contaminated groundwater? Does loss have an expiration date? 

After my visit to Alex in New York, things seemed to fall deeper into silence, mystery, invisibility. At one point I heard from my father that the little recording studio had been shut down, further sealing over the tragedy of that night. Nor was there a trace or a rumor of the whereabouts of Dryden or his family. Beyond our shattered perimeters, the decade’s brute, benumbing events unfurled: Contras battling Nicaraguan troops, disappearances mounting in Argentina’s Dirty War, Pinochet tightening his icy grip on Chile. Saigon fell, Watergate defendants headed off to jail, the Khmer Rouge annihilated its own people. 

That June, far from those troubled waters, Gina “Devi” Garnett and organic foods entrepreneur Ron Hirsch married in Boulder in a field of wildflowers, a Buddhist monk presiding, My mother was swathed in silk tie-die and a crown of daisies, Ron sporting a white Nehru jacket, ponytail and Birkenstocks. His owlish relatives flown in from Ossining looked like goofs from Mars. Representing our family was just me, accompanied by Leticia Glass. The fortress of my room was relocated into a larger redwood A-frame higher up the slope, with a view of Ron’s new fleet of three white VW minivans parked in the gravel driveway. 

After the wedding, I flew to LA for my summer visit, eager to see Alex. But he was hitchhiking through Europe, announced Dad, reasoning that it was too painful for him to come back to LA just yet. “He isn’t reacting,” Dad said. “That bothers me.” 

Hardly the case with my father, burrowing into his new avocation as amateur sleuth. Now training his scholarly perspective upon shards of recondite intelligence, shuffling his tarot pack of arcane fact, Ray Garnett had begun cataloging leads on file cards, requesting Freedom of Information Act documents, his researches taking on a life of their own. Dad’s conspiratorial take on reality probably made as much sense as any other by then, considering what was going on in the world around us, but the only remotely concrete data he’d unearthed was that a man with State Department affiliations who might have been Russell Poe had allegedly been in Chile at the time of Allende’s overthrow. Now he was laboring to track this same shadowy figure on a vile march across the misbegotten canvas of recent Cold War history, sheltering his blood-stained son from justice. Dad, fast-graying and unkempt, his ashtrays thronged with unfiltered Sherman butts, could barely pull himself together Monday mornings to go teach. 

“Dad, you really need to see a dentist.”

“No health lectures, please, Garth. I’m busy.”

I knew that if I were to make it through the summer I’d have to counter Dad’s claustrophobic new obsessions and Alex’s disappointing absence with something of my own. There was no way I was going back early to Devi and Ron’s new love nest in Boulder. Leticia Glass was in Texas with her psychedelic, brain-blasted father, which would mean no sex and no poetry. So armed with Rexroth’s credo, I appointed writing and music to save me once again. If Alex in his grief was going to renounce art, I wasn’t. 

Alex’s Ford sat unused in the driveway, the keys hung tantalizingly on a hook in the kitchen, and though I was still a few months shy of sixteen with only a learner’s permit, I began to tool myself around the city. Dad, in his distraction, put up with it. I drove to old record shops and book bins along Melrose, picking up used Becketts and Joyces, vintage bebop Bud Powells and Fats Navarros. I drifted among the beachfront jetsam in Venice, stalked the green swards of UCLA imagining I was already enrolled there. One night in a converted Venice jailhouse I heard grizzled, pitted Charles Bukowski read his soused prose. I started to plan a solo drive up the coast to Big Sur and San Francisco, tracing the Beat legacy, but Dad stuck his head up from his researches just long enough to scotch that idea. 

One morning in late July or early August - during a heat wave, I remember - I was alone in the room above the garage reading Malone Dies when I looked out the window and saw a skinny Asian kid standing in the driveway in a “Never Mind the Bollocks, Here Come the Sex Pistols” teeshirt.

“You looking for somebody?” I called out.

“I am Yoshi,” he said. “You Alex Garnett?”

“No. I’m his brother.”

“Ah,” he said, lighting up. Then he said something I couldn’t understand at all that sounded like “Feitas Aingerews.”

“What?” I called.

“‘Rima.’ Best song. Wow.” 

Yoshi turned out to be pretty wow himself, this cool kid who looked to be about fifteen but was in fact twenty, a college dropout from Harajuku, the hip youth district in Tokyo. He was a record collector and scout for alternative labels in Japan, his father’s post as a diplomatic attaché in San Francisco allowing him frequent trips to California to troll for music.

It turned out a cassette of “Rima” had surfaced at a late-night Tokyo rock station, causing a sensation in the Japanese underground music scene. Yoshi, trying to hunt down the song’s origin, had somehow tracked Maddie all the way to Savannah only to learn she was dead. It was he who had left the flowers and the inscription Alex had seen by Maddie’s crypt. Now searching for Alex, he’d found me instead. 

In my disheveled room above the garage, among the Becketts and Blue Notes and dirty clothes, Yoshi fished a cassette from his backpack. I slipped the Herbie Hancock from my tape player and dropped in his. 

“I played in the car driving here,” he said. “You have to rewind.” 

While we waited for the rewind, Yoshi took out a pack of Japanese cigarettes called Hope. We sat on my bed, smoking in silence in the dead summer heat with only the whirring of the tape machine and faint traffic noise outside. 

“You really never heard before?” Yoshi said. 

“No.” 

Yoshi nodded gravely. 

When I heard the click of completion, I reached over and punched “Play.”

“Rima” began with a winding Alex motif on synth, resembling a pair of Hammond organs several octaves apart, oscillating in space. Then Harry Winter cut between them with a looping, sensuous cello line, reiterated. Tom-tom figures entered from the edges, incantatory and haunting, breathing a promise of some pagan offering. Then Maddie’s voice floated in, raw and querulous, singing those words I’d scrawled, or cribbed, in Boulder. The melody was startling, almost atonal, and instantly imprinting. “Rima” both pulled you back in time and beckoned you towards a future you hadn’t yet inhabited. It was utterly original, yet drew lines to Ravel’s Bolero, or maybe Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, or some Roy Orbison rock operetta, with Maria Callas and Billie Holliday and Yma Sumac thrown in. Fate’s Angels always had you reaching for analogies. Maddie could have stolen your heart singing a grocery list, but this was of another order, as if she were struggling to translate something from an unknown tongue. Repeats and elaborations surged in endless crescendo, Alex’s inventions etching a fresco you couldn’t escape. My words, or rather I should say the old English naturalist W.H. Hudson’s, flitted through the leaves and branches of the music in pulsing ascent: Rima/fly away/to paler days/In Venezuela/stay…

Then when it seemed Maddie couldn’t manage another phrase, the song froze, hung in a sustained instrumental shimmer, then fell in a final cry of agony or rapture, plummeting into a clear, still pool of silence, reverbed. 

I opened my half-closed eyes as Yoshi opened his. “I wrote those words,” I said, hoarsely. 

“You? Wow,” said Yoshi, reverently. 

It felt great telling somebody. It was a half-truth I’d always stand by. 

“Maddie is a genius. Alex genius. You too, Goth.” Yoshi said. 

Unable to manage the “R” in my name, he just called me “Goth.”

Who had leaked the tape Alex had said didn’t exist? It sounded grainy, like a cassette copy, but so densely textured I couldn’t be sure. Was it a rough mix, a listening dub made after the session, or had it been it mixed from the stolen two-inch master? Alex would know in a second. 

“Feitas Aingerews,” Yoshi said again in his chewy accent. Then I finally got that he was saying “Fate’s Angels.” So he knew the band’s name. 

“What did you write at Maddie’s grave in Savannah?” I asked him.

“Maddie Haden, queen of heaven. Boddhisatva Kwannon. Something like that.” 

“How did you find out about her?” 

“I know a guy here who produces for Japanese labels sometimes. He told me she died. A Japanese magazine reporter found out she was from Savannah. I went.”

Hearing a car outside, I feared it was my father home early from teaching but it was just the neighbor pulling into her driveway.

 “Come on. I buy you lunch,” Yoshi said. 

We drove east down Wilshire in Alex’s Ford, the smoggy heat obscuring the view of the San Gabriels, listening to tapes of Tokyo punk bands. 

“So where’s your brother, Goth?” 

“Traveling in Europe.”

“I want to interview Alex for our Tokyo fan club.”

Apparently Fate’s Angels already had one, though nobody yet knew what Maddie or Alex looked like. There was a black teeshirt, Yoshi said, with a white silhouette representing Maddie’s head. And there were endless, near-religious replayings of “Rima.” 

“How did the tape get to Tokyo?” 

“Nobody knows. Came in an envelope to radio station. No name, no address.”

In a dim Japantown restaurant off East First Street, I sat across from Yoshi, eating eel and seaweed for the first time, thinking how Alex would have to be told about all this. But he was out of touch, and I was still angry at him for not showing up this vacation. Even worse was the thought of telling my father, who given his present state would immediately impute criminal dealings to Russell and Dryden Poe, then no doubt go burrowing for occult messages encoded backwards in the “Rima” tape. So I began to consider just sitting on this news for a while. 

“Sessions were three nights, a friend told me,” Yoshi said, slurping soba. “You have more tapes?” 

“They were stolen.”

“Ah.” Yoshi wolfed down a piece of rubbery raw fish. “Who stole them?”

I thought I’d better stop there. “Nobody knows.”

“You think Maddie Haden was murdered? Or accident?”

I sipped cold green tea, staring balefully down at my plate of eel. “That’s a hard one, Yoshi.”

14.

After Columbia let out that summer, Alex had boarded a cheap Yugoslavian freighter from Norfolk to Tangier, its dozen passengers a mix of returning Moroccan workers and American hipsters in search of North African dope. Alex lingered alone at the railing, watching the wake unfurl and gulls scavenge the ship’s waste, testing his relationship to the idea of jumping. By mid-passage, the gulls long vanished, he had arrived at a sort of desperate idea, and for the rest of the ten-day voyage lay on his upper berth staring into the bulkhead, coming to inhabit the notion that would occupy him for many years to come. 

Onshore, Alex drifted among Tangiers’ bazaars and souks, following the sinuous throb of Radio Cairo with its plangent ouds and insistent dumbeks, Egypt’s great diva Ofra Haza, the Lebanese songstress Fairouz. In the stalls off Tangier’s Socco Grande, he began picking up cassette copies of what he heard, adding to it joujouka trance music from the Rif mountains, Gnaoua drummers recorded live in Marrakech’s Djmaa el Fnaa square, kora music from across the desert in Mali. 

On his third day in Morocco, sipping mint tea at a café table in the Socco Chico, he saw a fair boy cross the square in the twilight and disappear into an alley. Alex jumped up and ran after him until he was lost in the stony maze of the medina. “Dryden!” he shouted. He came upon the boy at a parapet overlooking the harbor, the hills of Europe across the straits lit by the dying sun, talking to a girl in a Slavic language. Alex shrunk back into an alley, his face in his hands.

The next day he crossed to Europe on the Algeciras ferry, and in a Gibraltar record shop found tapes of Andalucian flamenco, early Paco de Lucia, hybrid Spanish-Arabic music from Tetuan later to surface as The Gypsy Kings. He hitchhiked north up the Costa del Sol, a tall, lean youth, lightly bearded now, lips moving slightly as if muttering to an invisible companion. In Barcelona, among the Nigerian cassette sellers on the Plaza Real, he filled his rucksack with Portugese fado, Algerian rai, more West African music. Standing before Anton Gaudi’s spiraling dripcastle church, La Sagrada Familia, Alex knew that he too had begun a mosaic, a junk altar, composed of found music, a sonic shrine to Maddie Haden. 

In Paris, he took a little room on Rue de l’Ancienne Comédie and began scavenging among the sellers along the Seine, the weekend markets in immigrant neighborhoods, picking up Djangos and Grapellis, bandoneon tango from Buenos Aires, Piafs and Brazilian bossas. One night at a crepe stand in the quartier he ran into a percussionist from LA named Lalo who working in a cave on Rue de la Huchette with an Afro-jazz quintet who invited Alex to come play. The next night, his nineteenth birthday, Alex mounted the stand, hovered behind the piano for a minute or two, then fled the club. 

Back out on the streets, he resumed his ferreting and collecting. He knew the things she would have loved. 

One morning late that summer I heard Dad call up from the house below, “Garth! It’s Alex on the phone from Paris!”

I crawled out of bed - I’d been out late with Yoshi at a new downtown punk club called Madame Wong’s – and stumbled downstairs. Dad was standing in the living room, telephone to his ear, suffused with joy at the sound of his son’s voice. 

“It’s Alex,” he said again, covering the mouthpiece with his hand. 

Alex was calling from a public phone in Paris, broke and about to leave for London, hoping Dad could wire him a few hundred dollars. 

“Of course, son,” Dad said fervently. “I’ll send it off today. But tell me, are you okay?”

Alex’s answer didn’t seem to convince Dad, whose expression had turned from elation to concern. He handed me the receiver.

“Garth?”

“Hey, Alex.”

“How are you?”

“Okay.”

“What have you been doing?”

“Reading. Listening to Bud Powell. Running around a little in your car. Hope you don’t mind.”

“No.” Alex sounded planets away. 

“How’s Europe? You playing any?”

Either he didn’t answer or I couldn’t hear him. 

I knew it was the moment to mention the strange surfacing of the “Rima” tape in Tokyo but I couldn’t do it, not in front of Dad. And something else in me didn’t want to surrender it to Alex just yet, which made me feel ashamed. 

I handed the phone back to Dad, who looked fretful now, probably over the mounting cost of the collect call. “Swiss boarding school,” he said into the phone, “under an assumed name, you can be sure. But don’t worry about it, Alex. Your old dad’s working on it.” 

The call ended quickly after that.

“He’s going to see Harry Winter in London,” Dad said, shiny-eyed, fired up by the call. “Harry’s making a big success in Europe, you know.”

How Dad loves Alex, I thought. 

Climbing back to my room over the garage, I realized how much I missed Alex too. At the same time I sensed how deception had crept into our family, cleaving us from each other. Surely Alex wasn’t telling the truth of his summer travels. Dad was bluffing, pretending to know more than he did about the whereabouts of Dryden Poe. And I wasn’t telling what I knew about the “Rima” tape. Our family, once full of easy candor, festered now with secrets and evasions, attempts to combat the dark event that had impacted us. 

That afternoon, in a desk drawer in my room, I came across the little Instamatic I’d carried around the summer before. I snapped off the rest of the roll and took it in to get it developed. It came back a day later, and among its trivial contents - Alex at his keyboards, Dad and his friend Jeanette on the flagstone patio, me mugging solo into the lens - was the shot I’d taken that night by the swimming pool at Dryden’s house. 

There they were, gathered in front of an oleander in the silvery glare of the flash: Maddie in the summery skirt she’d pulled up to reveal the scar on her gimpy leg, Alex looking at her with all the force of his attraction, Harry Winter gazing at Alex with the same. Behind them, above and apart, stood our vanished host, Dryden Poe, the dangerous friend, smiling opaquely, gripping his tiki torch like a dark lance.