“It wasn’t as simple as it sounded,” he said. “You can’t really understand what that was all about,” he said arranging his fingers on the ball to throw me a fade. “It wasn’t like the museum music that people think of it as now. It was wild and powerful, and it came with its own language and it was popular with the younger hip crowd. This was just after the war, you understand, and before rock ‘n’ roll. It was like a whole new thing with its own language and fashions and attitudes and shit, and part of that fashion or style was heroin, which up till then had been a black thing. But at the club—Billy Berg’s it was—all the hip, young white dudes were on hop, and the story was that was how Bird could play that way—so fast and powerful and light one moment and heavy and dark the next. Well, I was blown clean away. Sold my Matchless 500 the very next day and bought me a white gold Selmer alto. A week later, I bought my first two-dollar bag. The rest is history,” said Darrell, motioning me back and tossing me an Alley Oop that nearly carried me into the hedge. “The rest is pretty much what you see.”
In the kitchen, on the lawn, at the car washes we held to raise money for the program, in the station wagon en route to outside meetings and at the day trip we took to Goat Rock one Sunday, Darrell told me the rest—of how he was playing full scales in two months’ time, had his own four-piece combo in six, and was second alto in Stan Kenton’s big band in less than three years—a regular from scratch whiz at age twenty-one with a ten-dollar-a-day habit which was then a lot of money and a lot of dope to boot. And he told me that he had a wife named Carolyn and how after having their baby daughter she got hooked too and how she started hooking on the sly to support her habit and how it all ended up with crashed down doors and vice cops charging in. They sent Darrell to Chino for a deuce to a nickel and Carolyn got six months in Sybil Brand. The baby got put up for adoption when Carolyn’s parents wouldn’t take her. They were rich folks from Montecito and didn’t want any goddamn junkie baby to raise for a junkie whore daughter and her worthless junkie jazz-playing husband was what Darrell said they said. And when Darrell came out Carolyn was shacked up with Chet Baker’s drummer and up to the same bit and not long afterward, he was back in the bag himself.
He said it was maybe six months later when his parole officer and six uniforms broke down the door of the bungalow on Western which he was sharing with a stripper. And except for his regular gig with Art Pepper in the San Quentin prison band, it had been downhill for Darrell ever since and changing locations from LA to the City, except for that one year in the Haight in ’66, didn’t make much difference. And neither did the general slide from junk to scripts to wine. And so for the past six years or so, he had been wining on the street and dumpster-diving and staying in missions, or sometimes when it got really bad, to a rehab like this—to clean up again and then come out and live in a cheap hotel and work in a warehouse or a gas station or a St. Vincent de Paul, and that no matter what some might have written about a life like this there wasn’t any romance to it, and there was nothing remotely spiritual about it—“just stupid losers working at stupid jobs for stupid bosses who’d fire your ass for one false step in a New York minute,” Darrell said. And eventually the boredom and stupidity of it all would get to him and he’d take off on lunch break one day and never come back, winding up somewhere in a Kelvinator box. And he told me how the one pure thing he hung on to in those first bad years after getting paroled—his horn playing—had ended for him one night in the early seventies when two City narcs who thought he’d be holding were pissed off when he wasn’t and drove him down to the Vets cemetery in Colma and kicked in his front teeth and then broke his jaw with a flashlight and finished off by stomping him into the dirt and breaking two of his vertebrae doing it. “That ended my jazz career, such as it was,” Darrell said.
It was on the way back from the Franklin Street Center just across from the pioneer graveyard that Darrell told me that and whether it was the glow from the candlelight Serenity Meeting and the heartfulness of the sharing or the fact that the cemetery brought back the memory and got him to open up about what I’d always wondered—why he didn’t go back to his music—I can only guess. And though only heaven knows if all of it was true—because people, and especially cons, tend to exaggerate—something in his face and voice told me that if anything Darrell was minimizing it.
Maybe it was his age or a longer life full of regrets and loss that led Darrell to talk about his past more than I did or felt I needed to because he’d be going on like that for a while when he started, casting back with those pale gray eyes of his, searching for the scene to remember right while adjusting his hand on the laces to throw me another pass. Then he’d suddenly come to and remember that he’d been doing most of the talking while I’d only be asking questions like what happened next or what year was that? And then he’d stop and say, “No. Youngster, now it’s your turn,” and make me tell about my past and what I could remember of it and how things got so out there with Vera that I wound up setting her on fire alive. And though Darrell never probed me much about the actual act he wanted to know what it was that led me to it and why it was that I felt so pulled into it that it wound up like it did. And so one day I told Darrell as I had told Aragon—the long version of which the short version is this—that Vera needed and wanted me to burn her alive as much as if not more than I needed or wanted or felt I had to do it. That it was a long and drawn out dance we’d each been leading up to for all our lives and that finding one another was more or less a case of finding your perfect partner.
That was said and that was that—the past, the long gone part that was useless now, the other country where they or we did things differently. He’d said his and I’d said mine and so after that we talked more of the now but even more of the future that would be Walnut House and the freedom of passes—first two hours, then four, then eventually an overnight at the house of a program graduate and then finally here at Redwood House, so close to the real world that you could taste it. For me the future beyond Redwood meant a steady job with regular hours and regular pay and a house near the river in the redwood forests. But for Darrell, his future was also partly in the near past.
There had been a woman named Becky about a year or so back and she owned an apple farm not far from here in the west county hills. Darrell was fresh out of Rincon detox and working as the manager of a car wash down in Petaluma when he met her at a meeting at a Glen Ellen recovery ranch. One thing led to another and before too long he was living with her out on the farm. “I’d never fucking even been on a farm my whole life,” he told me, “and this wasn’t some yuppie bullshit, this was the real thing—chickens, a couple of goats, geese—mean bastards those geese. I felt like Doctor Dolittle,” Darrell said, laughing that whistling laugh of his and covering his mouth so his gums didn’t show. The chickens were not what he really took a shine to. It was the apple trees and some of them were over a hundred years old. “She had this little old Massey-Ferguson tractor that didn’t run so hot and so I made that my project,” he said. “Took the whole thing apart, ground all the valves, gave it a ring job and replaced all the seals and filters, and sonofabitch, if I didn’t have that little bastard running like brand new. I used to tool around the orchards in it from sunup to sundown, my command vehicle kinda. I hauled with it, sprayed with it, and used it as a ladder to trim from,” he said. “And as for Becky herself, she was quiet and shy, but only at first. She had a real fire to her, and was a great little lover too,” he said. “But mostly, it was that she believed in me and trusted me and was happy to see me happy.” One day, Darrell took the truck to Asti, got drunk at a Mexican bar, and drove her truck into a ditch. He cut himself all to hell and had to walk five miles back to the farm, he said. And when he got there, Becky already knew what had happened—news travels fast with those apple farmers out in that west county, Darrell said—and though she took it calm enough, Darrell said, her trust in him had been broken and not being able to handle that he took off a few days later, and so
on enough found himself back on Sixth Street scrounging and diving and wining again. “She came down there once, looking for me,” he said, “but I saw her before she saw me and hid from her in the alley. Tommy told me she told him if he saw me to tell me to come back home when I was ready. A few days before I checked in here, I told her what I was doing. She told me the same thing she told Tommy. ‘Come home, Darrell,’ she said. I don’t know, I just couldn’t do it,” he said, shrugging and looking away. “Go deep,” he told me, and I did.
As the days wore on toward spring, Darrell grew more and more distant. He’d take first wake up so he could have his mornings to himself standing in front of the fireplace with a cup of coffee and looking into the flames as though the answer was there on the tongues of flames coming off the logs. And when we’d go out to throw the football he was more and more silent taking his time to adjust his hand on the laces and making me go long more often than not so he had more time to reflect. And then too, there was this melancholy song that was on the radio—“Still,” it was called—and when it came on, he was gone, totally lost in it and its sentiment and his memories of Becky and the farm and the apple blossoms that would soon be coming. And I’d try and shake him out of it, “C’mon, D, get in the here and now,” I’d say, and sometimes, if I was mad enough, I’d tell him to get his head out of his ass.
“I’m okay, youngster,” he’d say. “I’m here enough.” It was O’Neill who sensed it and warned me what was coming. As I said, I was his special-once-every-couple-a-years-projects, and so it made sense he would be paying attention to what was happening with me. One day after morning meeting, he pulled me aside and asked me to take a walk with him in the field out back of Walnut House. He said, “You’re pretty tight with Darrell, right?” And I told him, “Yeah, that’s right.”
“Well, Ram, I’d advise you to back off a bit. He’s not long for here,” he said. He asked me if I knew that what he was saying was true and thought I maybe guessed it. I don’t think I really knew it or wanted to know about it until the moment that he said it. He asked me if Darrell had said anything to me about when he was planning to leave and I told him no which was the truth. Darrell wasn’t the kind of guy who’d take you into his confidence on something like that I said. “I give him a month,” said O’Neill. “You have to understand, Ram, that it’s tough for these older guys. The older you are, the harder it is to make changes. Darrell’s hitting the wall. He can’t do what we do here anymore and he’s looking for his way out. You know what his reason is, his excuse for leaving?”
“Not really,” I said. “Not really meaning you don’t really want to tell me, right?” he said. O’Neill was smiling when he asked that and that was his way—to treat everything light-hearted even though, at the same time he was seeing right through everything. I once saw him roll a guy up and send him back to Folsom without ever breaking that smile, even getting the guy to laugh with him while he was doing it. I knew I couldn’t lie to him and so I said nothing. “Just don’t you decide to hit the open road too, Ram,” he said. “I think Darrell’s about ten, fifteen years and three strikes too late,” he said. “But, Ram, you can make the changes,” he said, putting his arm around me and squeezing me. “You’re young, Ram. You’re lucky. Be grateful.”
It came during a House Meeting on someone else—one of Lenny the lawyer’s, I think. He had been a big criminal attorney in San Francisco until all the money he held in trust for his clients went up in a cloud of freebase smoke. They caught up with him in Sausalito, naked and covered with scabs and hiding in the shower of a houseboat. He was still buggy from it sometimes and he had come here after a 30-day stay in the lockdown ward at Oakmont and still thought everyone was conspiring against him—poisoning the toilet seat or sending secret messages were two of his most common theories—and he’d call meetings and accuse just about anyone of anything. He’d hardly got started on this one when Darrell got up and said, “I can’t do this anymore, I’m leaving.”
What it first did was shut Lenny up and that was a relief to everybody because his meetings would sometimes take a couple hours before he could be convinced that we weren’t doing what he suspected we were doing. Then it got silent for a minute before the familiar responses started coming from the residents. No matter who or for what reason nobody was ever encouraged to leave and not until now did I really find out why that was, but that was also how it was with Darrell—everybody tried to talk him out of it. He hadn’t got enough of the program, some said. He wasn’t connected enough to the outside community. He wasn’t showing gratitude in his attitude and this feeling he had it too shall pass, some said. And Darrell just stood there, head down and nodding and listening and taking in what they had to say but not really; I could see because like O’Neill had said he was already gone. And then the residents started waving boogeyman at him—he’d be wining and diving on Sixth Street, poking himself in the arm with a sharp stick, hanging in the Mission or South Park—“Out There” as it was called—and Darrell still nodding head down shrugged at that and finally said, “Maybe, but I’m still going.”
And then, after everybody had had their turn at him, they all turned to me. Darrell sensed what was coming on in the room and finally looked up at me to hear what I was going to say. A number of the stock phrases I’d learned over the months came into my head but the sound of the soaking rain outside washed them out. It was coming down in buckets and it was pitch black out there on the country road we were on and all I could think of was of him out there walking in it on his way to who knows where, a bar, a meeting, a pay phone. Somewhere down the road. “You sure picked a shitty day to hook ’em up,” I finally said. Darrell stood there with his back to the wall looking at me all laced up tight and showing nothing. Tommy was looking away, picking his fingernails, and the other residents seemed to be in shock looking to staff to see what they would do. Then I looked back at Darrell and he was smiling a bit, and his gray eyes had a shine or a twinkle in them—I couldn’t tell.
“You know, youngster,” he said, looking outside at the soupy weather, “I was thinking the same fucking thing. But still, I’m gone. Thanks for all you’ve done,” he said to me directly, then reconsidered and scanned the other residents and staff. “All of you,” he said.
When they handed out job assignments after the next weekly evaluation meeting where staff told you how you were doing and what you needed to work on and what they liked and what they didn’t, they told me that I was being moved from inside maintenance to Acacia Night Guard. I wasn’t too surprised by it because although it was a position of responsibility second only to Head Honcho or Expediter, it was also a test they gave to people who they thought were going through what they called a Fight or Flight crisis and that’s what O’Neill told me after the meeting. “Indica and Jackie think you’re gonna rabbit because of Darrell. They want to see how you’re gonna handle it, Ram.” It changed everything, Night Guarding did. Where before I’d been surrounded by people—residents and staff and outside members—every waking hour now I was almost entirely alone, sleeping all day and just getting up in time to be driven over to Acacia where I’d have dinner and catch an outside meeting and a house meeting or two before lights out were called and I went to work, if that’s even the right name for what it was I did. First, I’d make sure that everyone was in their beds and then check all the locks from the outside and cruise once around the grounds with my flashlight looking to make sure everything was where it was supposed to be. But after that bit was done my time was my own and where it had once been so compressed and explosive and racing now it was open and defused and slow as the crawl of the stars I watched as they coursed through the night.
One night when I was bored I went through all the bookcases and in the back of one lying flat I found a planisphere that must have been left there years ago. It was covered with dust and without instructions of how to use it. But by experiment, I figured out how it worked and on clear nights was soon taking it out with me to name all the st
ars and the constellations—Cygnus and the Pleiades, Boötes and Arcturus, Orion and Deneb—and watching them roll overhead and parade around the pole star until dawn breaking away from it only occasionally to perform my duties as night watchman of the chemically dependent prisoners, snoring and farting and mumbling in their bunks. And the more I looked at the stars, the more contemptuous of them I became—not the stars but my peers which was maybe the whole point of them putting me there, to freeze me into the black and soundless and personless night, to lock me out in the freedom of my thoughts, to isolate me again. And as the month of my Night Guard assignment wore on, so did my connection to almost everything else wear thin, and maybe I might have hit the road had a new resident not come to Acacia.
His name was Doug, and they brought him in an ambulance because he was in a chair and couldn’t be carried in the wagon. He was younger than me—twenty-seven or so, I rightly guessed—and like me he had been a carpenter and like me too an accident had forced him to give it up. Well in his case it wasn’t an accident, not really. It was more a deliberate act. His neighbor shot him in the back.
He had piece-worked a condo project in Chico where he was from and because he was fast—one of those whippy little guys who can really torque it—he had made enough money to put a down payment on a two-bedroom fixer-upper in the mountains above the Rio de Las Plumas canyon just outside Paradise. When he moved up there he bought himself a yellow lab pup to keep him company and was intending to train him as a bird dog when the pup got old enough. But as the pup was only six weeks old, that would be a while, he thought. Anyway one day the pup wandered over to the neighbor’s yard and took a shit on his lawn. “The neighbor was one of those alky Birchers like you find up that way,” Doug said. He took offense and came over to complain about it and he kept complaining even after Doug cleaned up the mess and apologized. When he still kept at it Doug told him to go fuck himself. He went back across the yard, pulled a rifle out of his pickup gun rack, and shot Doug when his back was turned. The bullet cut his spine in two.
Windwhistle Bone Page 6
