The Ballad of West Tenth Street

by Marjorie Kernan

  The pad was a large block of Manila paper. It had hairs on its surface that clutched at the pastels she kept in a paper coffee cup by her side. She preferred colored pencils but was not allowed to have anything sharp. She was very careful not to get any pastel marks on her bathrobe, bad things happened if you did. When she moved her mouth up and down fast, like she was talking bat talk, she was thinking bad things. Like how she wanted to color everything over like mad, scream the colors over her face, her clothes, the walls. But bad things happened if you did.

  Her drawing, the only drawing she’d made since bad things had started happening, had to be very carefully done. One thing out of kilter and, well, she didn’t like to think about that. In the exact center of the page, at the bottom, feet planted along the edge of the paper, stood a dog. A shaggy, brownish, blondish dog. It had long fringed ears and its arms were raised, its paws held out flat. On each paw stood a smaller version of the same dog. On each of their four paws eight more, smaller dogs sprang forth, and so on until she reached the edges of the page. When she did she would cry helplessly. But because Gretchen didn’t talk she didn’t cry like a speaking person does, she only made a faint, keening buzz.

  3

  Sadie had bought the house on West Tenth Street with money her father had left her. The sudden appearance of a large sum of cash in her life had caused her to sit down and think. She thought for a long while and with care, deciding a surprising number of things. The first was that she was tired of living in England. She’d been living in London since she was eighteen, when she’d met Ree. Her father had given her a trip to Paris and London for the summer before she was to go to Sarah Lawrence. Suitably chaperoned by a school friend and her mother, of course. The mother, it turned out, was given to migraines, and as a result was a good deal of the time no threat to Sadie’s freedom. And the friend turned out to be a bit of a pill, afraid of cities, foreigners, and the many things she constantly deemed “icky.” So Sadie left them at the hotel, blithely exploring the two cities and growing up quite a bit in the process. It was 1968 and if you were young, or had any go in you at all, there were many new experiences to be had. She met Ree just before she was due to fly home, and as a result was the cause of many and more severe migraines, as she refused point-blank to quit London, leaving her friend’s mother with the task of relating this news to her parents.

  The woman’s tears and moans and her friend’s shrieks caused her not even the slightest twinge as she picked out some clothes and crammed them into a single suitcase. A thoroughly bad, willful, snot-nosed, evil, uncaring girl by then, proclaimed such in high-pitched American accents, she got on the elevator. The uniformed operator gave her a worried, fatherly glance. He had a postcard of JFK peeking out of his pocket. “A great man, and a poor, terrible martyr,” he said, touching it reverently. “Now who’s to lead us all to peace and brotherhood? You’ll be after a taxi then, Miss?”

  “To hell with taxis,” Sadie said, picking up her bag and marching through the lobby. “And to hell with Sarah Lawrence!” she cried as she reached the street, where Ree was waiting for her.

  They lived in seedy flats in sordid London neighborhoods, dodging angry landladies and never knowing who was crashed on the sofa, or sometimes whose sofa they were crashed on. Or quite where they were on the continent, on bleary mornings in hotel rooms littered with empty bottles. Her mother wrote tearful letters, pleading with her to come home, her father sighed and sent her a check each month. He had to send them care of the American Express office in London, because she and Ree moved so often. Or, rather, were asked to leave.

  So when Sadie sat down to think her long think, she decided that after all those rackety years she wanted a house. She strung her thoughts carefully, knotting each to the next. Because Ree had to be in New York often and she now wanted to live in the States, she would buy a house there. The idea grew in her mind until it could not be stopped.

  Ree hadn’t wanted Sadie to buy the house. He argued that it was too expensive, too much responsibility. Sadie had nodded and not said much, but her mind was made up. She’d decided to have another child, possibly two more, and knew that Ree didn’t have the instinct to make a permanent home, so she would have to. She’d let him go off on the tour alone, resigning herself to the probability that he’d sleep with other women but also knowing that Brian would be there to make sure things didn’t get out of hand.

  So she’d parked Gretchen with a friend and began determinedly walking the streets of the Village, looking for her house. On the second day, exploring farther west, she found it. The gods favored her choice—it had just that day come on the market. She didn’t have to see the inside to be quite certain that it was her house—the house had a face, one that seemed to say Oh Sadie, I’ve been waiting for you. She stood and smiled at it from across the street. Its sandstone steps were worn and its windows dull with grime. A crack in the wooden gate to the garden showed a tangle of greenery beyond. She was thirty-one, bounding with energy, and she was going to put everything she’d learned into making this house beautiful. She noted the agent’s address and walked there as quickly as she could without breaking into a run, which she felt would be undignified, and besides, she didn’t want to go into the office red and gasping—that was hardly the best way to negotiate a price. Two hours later, she wrote a check for the deposit.

  When Ree’s tour ended he looked around, shrugged, and set his guitars down. The house was draped in canvas drop cloths and filled with building materials. Sadie and Gretchen were camping out upstairs while the work was being done, sleeping on bare mattresses on the floor.

  “Got its uses,” he said. “Right nice room this is. You going make it a bit posh, I suppose? Well, first thing to do is christen it.”

  As she bought sofas and rugs for it, he insisted they christen each in turn. In his way of thinking, a sofa, a rug, and sometimes even an armchair weren’t properly owned by a couple until they’d made love on it. As a result she only bought pieces a full-grown man could recline comfortably on, with fabrics of a soft but durable texture. And she didn’t fuss about cleaning off the marks of their congress, believing that any self-respecting velvet sofa should bear the signs of its history. Ree further marked his new territory by doing drugs off every surface in it.

  The house had needed quite a lot of work, so she hired a builder with a small crew. They began with the basement. A warren of pokey rooms took up the back half and a dingy kitchen the front. Not fully below street level, it had windows looking onto a sunken area in front and to the garden in back. She had every interior wall taken down and made a large kitchen modeled after the English country kitchens she admired. It had a herringbone brick floor, two wide step-back cupboards, and a pine table that sat twelve at the end nearest the street. She’d laid and grouted the red Mexican tiles for the countertops herself. At the garden end was a laundry area with basket chairs by the window and a washroom, a small defeat in the battle for open space, but one she’d had to concede. The kitchen had been wonderful in its day and still exuded a certain hippie luxe, though now rather worn and stained by accidents with bottles of red wine.

  Upstairs the sitting room also ran the length of the house. It had ten-foot ceilings and rather grand moldings. A pair of tall French doors led out to a narrow balcony over the garden and a pair of fine windows overlooked the street. Double doors led into it from either end of the hall. A fireplace with a handsome Adam chimneypiece sat in the center of the opposite wall. Sadie had put everything she’d learned in the seventies about English decoration into it. Its walls were painted a deep, toasted persimmon glazed with paraffin, its woodwork picked out in gloss white. A large seventeenth-century Flemish curio cabinet of ebony and ivory on barley-turned legs stood on one wall by the fireplace and a tall Dutch secretary on the other, painted black, with scarlet and green parrots among fringed tulips. A pair of boxy modern sofas with deep down cushions sat facing each other in the center, a Parsons table lacquered in white between them. A stra
w-colored wool rug, rather worn now, covered the floor. Italian painted consoles and black lacquered chests of drawers with rococo mirrors above them stood along the walls, and scattered around them were groups of French fauteuils painted gloss white and upholstered in tobacco brown velvet. A grand piano sat in an island between the French doors to the balcony and the sofas. Large prints by Stella, Motherwell, and Johns in white frames hung on the walls, with skillfully arranged clusters of sketches and photographs of Ree, Sadie, their children and friends, in antique frames between. Richly colored Chinese jars, mercilessly drilled and turned into lamps, were dotted about, with white silk drum shades.

  Sadie still felt a swell of contentment whenever she went into the room. She’d thought it a wheeze to create a room like this, one like that of some old doyenne’s, but for one still young. And it was so very unlike her mother’s, with its chintzes, pastel walls, and timid displays of Minton china.

  It was also wildly comfortable and well suited to parties, where people could gather in large groups or small. As a result there was a cigarette burn, a scuff, or a chip on everything in it.

  Upstairs the bedrooms, by contrast, were quite plain. Sadie, reverting to her New England roots, thought that children’s rooms should be left alone, for surely any child with an imagination would want to fill it with his or her own peculiar collection. She had, though, made a more attractive room for herself and Ree, knocking down a wall and making a long, French-gray bedroom overlooking the garden. After Ree died, she’d had the wall put back up to make a needed guest room and hadn’t cared anymore if her room was beautiful. In fact, it was now a mess, not at all like a proper grown-up’s, with clothes hanging everywhere and books piled in heaps on the floor. Gretchen’s room was at the front, dominated by a large drum kit now covered with dust.

  At the top of the house, on the attic floor, Deen and Hamish ruled. Deen, being older, got the room overlooking the garden, Hames the one on the street. Ree’s old music room was between them. He’d wanted it a shade of midnight blue, a night color, and as it was windowless it was a room of perpetual twilight. It had a blue leather sofa and chairs he’d chosen himself. Sadie hated to admit it, but he’d had dreadful taste. Still, she hadn’t changed it—it was a bit of a shrine and the children loved it. She’d moved his guitars down to her room, not trusting Hamish to leave them alone, and replaced his reel-to-reel with a TV set. Ree had never hung his gold records, but after he died she’d put them all up in there, covering the walls. She thought they would be a comfort to his children—a dead father was a decided handicap but a famous dead father somewhat less so.

  Ree. Ree Hollander, Ree for Henry. A working-class boy. Not many toffs became rockers. Was it because boys like Ree were brasher, or because they grew up in an age of revolt, and the downtrodden so often lead the charge? Whatever the reason, the deprivations of postwar England created a new warrior class of bluesmen who translated their love for that American vernacular into fierce new music.

  Into the vortex of the sixties they leaped, uncluttered by bourgeois values or awe of tradition. Raised in the class-bound, regimented England of the fifties they knew exactly what they were—rough louts who were expected to live lives in service to others, as repairmen, clerks, railway agents, farm laborers, deliverymen, or pipefitters.

  Henry Hollander finished school at seventeen. He hadn’t done well enough for any teacher to encourage him to try for O levels, but neither had he been at the bottom of the class. His father presented him with fifteen pounds and a gray suit jacket he’d outgrown. He went over and over the plan with his son. Henry would take the train to Sheffield, then a bus to his Uncle Tim’s, where his Aunt Cecily would be expecting him. Henry was to be polite and keep his gob shut, then go off with Tim in the morning to see the plant manager. And by God he’d say thanks to any job offered and no lagging about. At the end of this oft-repeated talk, his father offered a simple philosophy of life: See, it’s good work, a large printer like that, plenty of opportunities for a bright lad. Provided he keeps his eyes open and wants to learn, stays on the right side of his betters and does whatever he’s asked to cheerfully. Why, a lad like that would get on well, learn a skill like typesetting or become a pressman. Skilled men can always get work, even when times are hard.

  Henry took the fifteen pounds, the jacket, his cheap acoustic guitar, and a small cardboard suitcase and got on the train. He got off at the next stop, took a train back, then bought a second-class ticket for London.

  The next few months of young Henry’s life were difficult and very lonely. He had quite a rough time of it, in fact. He slept in cars, suffered insults, and was sometimes even hungry.

  Then things started to look up. He made some friends, acquired a nickname, and found work at an all-night café. Girls who had their own flats figured in his dreams but he was shy, pale, and thin, and girls ignored him.

  When the band he formed with his best mate, Brian Brain, né Burker, also from the north, played their first gig at a pub in Pimlico, he thought he was finally on the way. But the crowd talked through their music and seemed to hardly notice they were playing at all. The band was called the Jesters. They played acoustic guitars and sang of fair maidens on gray palfreys. They were paid with a plate of hot food and two pints each. It was all very dispiriting, and as one gig after another in small clubs on the outskirts of London passed, no one noticing them much or minding them much, he and Brian worked on new songs. They spent every night holed up in the tiny kitchen of a flat owned by a girl Brian knew, working on the songs and a way to make their music and their voices more commanding. They took on extra shifts at the moving company where they both worked now, hoarding their money to buy electric guitars and amps, visiting shops that sold secondhand equipment, and talking all day about various guitars. Then a chap who knew a fellow named Luther said Luther needed to sell his ’58 Les Paul for quick cash. With a Bandmaster amp and a reverb unit. When Ree played it he felt like he’d been waiting for it his whole life. In his hands, it felt like a beautiful woman who suddenly, amazingly, turned to him and said, please take me. Brian insisted he buy it, even though it took all the money they’d saved.

  Often Ree felt guilty as he played it, seeing the hungry look Brian gave it when he thought Ree didn’t notice. And sometimes Ree woke in the smoky gray dawn of a London morning, willing himself to get up and go to work after only a few hours sleep, to see Brian already up, silently fingering their new songs on it. “Just getting practice for when I got my own,” Brian would say, looking embarrassed.

  A drunken housewife gave them a tenner one day for a tip, after they’d finished moving her goods. They ran all the way to a shop on the Brompton Road that had a secondhand two-tone Rickenbacker in the window that Brian had been lusting after for weeks. Luck often seems to come in waves: at the same time, the owner of the moving company gave them permission to hold band practice in the warehouse at night. Their bass player got his hands on a Fender bass, white with a black back and neck, and they met a drummer who said yeah, he’d give it a go, why not? He actually owned a drum set and suddenly they had a real band.

  They practiced every night in the shadowy warehouse, working out the new songs Ree and Brian had written in their kitchen sessions. They gave up beer and cigarettes to pool their money to buy a set of cymbals and a mike. Though they were often asked in later years, nobody could ever quite remember how it had come about, but one night they renamed the band the Royhatten Transference. Every evening they arrived at the warehouse around eight and played until after midnight, to hone their new sound. Gigs were discontinued until they had it right. Nobody had a pot to piss in, and they were all demented with the notion of making real music. Three months later they auditioned for a club in Soho and were given a one-time trial gig.

  Ree got his first taste of playing Jesus that night. There were lights at the club and he took to them, and they to him. He was transformed. His transformation looked back at him in the eyes of the people on the floor; they looked
at him as if he had something that only he could confer. It scared him slightly, then made him doubly ambitious, made him want to do extravagant moves with his guitar as he played, raise his arms, throw his hair back as he sang. The lights rained down on him, bathing him in their electric glory.

  The success of that night and others that followed lit a fire under Ree. He spent every conscious moment thinking the music he was writing. He and Brian grew bitter calluses on their hands, then broke them off playing with newer frenzy; the calluses grew back harder each time until they became permanent. They didn’t know how to write music, so they invented their own method of notation. They didn’t speak about it, but Randy, the drummer, had to go.

  Evan Moore, the bass player, was no worry at all. He was good and kept getting better. Bass players have the reputation of being the stupidest member of the band, and Evan lived up to this. He said he couldn’t understand their notation system but in any case didn’t need it, he had to just feel it, and they agreed. They could go into a jam and he’d plug right along, had a real feel for their moves. His hands were so big that Ree joked that he could wrap them around the neck twice.

  Randy was a perfectly sound drummer of standard beats but too fond of little riffles of snare and cymbals, a style of drumming more appropriate to older pop tunes. Randy eventually went, but only after Ree and Brian had found a new drummer, who they kept under wraps. Randy didn’t like being told he didn’t make the grade, and before they parted he made his views on their characters, their manhood, and their sexuality plain. But finally, with a last squawk, he was gone.

  Giff Loudon, the new drummer, was a kid. A long-haired, skinny, smelly kid. He had a foot that could bang down on the backbeat just in the upswing of expectation, a beat that went right up your ass and into your brain. He was sixteen and no more acclimated to human society than a feral cat. His normal state was so wired that Ree and Brian never let him get his hands on any drugs if they could help it.