“Town,” she had said. So the woman drove her to town.
The whole way Memory hid a rising panic, reaching out thought-fingers to find a complete and terrifying emptiness. The town turned out to be a college town, where another woman, a wonderful, knowing young woman named Dawn, discovered her in front of a Mexican restaurant, crying, and took her home to where she lived with a bunch of hippies. They named Memory “Memory” and helped her explore things like Being Useful—to clean things and wash clothes and cook a little—and important cautions like Don’t Burn Yourself and Don’t Walk in the Street. She learned things she Liked, like music, and Didn’t Like, like coconut and yellow cheeses. This guy with a beard taught her to strum a guitar well enough that the people in the house encouraged her to play, until the day someone got her to sing, and she cast a spell on them. Her voice haunted itself from far away. And the bearded guy taught her that she liked making love, too, and dancing. She didn’t like weeding Dawn’s vegetable garden, particularly, but they all took turns. She learned about Helping and Work and Doing Your Share.
One day Dawn took her to the hospital to see if there was something they could do about her memory, but the doctors wanted to keep her under observation behind locked doors, and the two women barely escaped the hospital without getting snatched. Later that same week, some loud, happy men and women in a rusty Microbus stayed at the house for a couple of nights on their way to San Francisco, and when they left, Memory went with them. She watched the country unroll beyond the windshield until it frightened her, then made herself watch until it didn’t.
San Francisco was like a fair for people like Memory, living in the present, unfettered by their past. One day she was singing along with a street band, and some older cat with a beard and sunglasses turned around and listened, and talked to her when she was done, and that cat was Dan Paul Overfield.
There was a year where they traveled and recorded songs, and, between Dan Paul and Memory, their band started getting famous. And it wasn’t long before the band and the singing were all she knew, and she found herself wishing hard for real fame to come, because it might fill that twenty-year hole.
Now, of course, fame had risen like a spinning sun. But it did nothing to fill the hole, because you can’t feed a soul-hunger. Feeding it just makes it hungrier. You have to feed whatever causes the hunger, and of course she couldn’t.
“I can’t!” she gurgled, opening her throat like Pig had taught her so the wine would just pour straight down.
The door opened. Cool air rolled in, making whirlpools in the steam. Pig peered at her (the band was cool with nudity. They didn’t really have a choice).
“You all right?” he gruffed.
The tenderness in his voice—it was there, if you knew Pig—was the only real thing in her world, for just a second. It almost made her cry.
“Yeah, Pig,” she said. “Piggy Pig.”
The door closed.
The mist swirled and settled.
Fame was a surprising thing. It was and was not what she’d expected.
On one hand, it held her like a pink cloud. If she closed her eyes now, in the warm water and bubbles and steam, with blue pills and wine softening everything, she could feel them out there. A sea of blurred faces, listening, loving her. Floating her up. Filling her blank spaces. Sometimes, just for a moment, like right now, it was enough. It was like the music itself, and she was happy without having to think about it.
But it never lasted.
Because fame was like an animal, too. It was like having a lion on a silver chain. It impressed people that you had it. It brought you good things, but it made demands, too. It had to be fed. It was phones that never stopped ringing. It was deadlines and miles to be traveled and hard work to be done. It didn’t float around like a happy cloud. It stared at you with green animal eyes, and roared questions at you, and interrupted your sleep and made you over in its own image until it seemed the You that was famous hardly resembled the You that was You. It was something most people would never understand or believe: being famous was hard work, and it was scary. It could swallow you. Or, worst of all, it could just walk away.
Memory opened her eyes, breathing hard.
Damn. One second she’d been so happy. The next, full of fear. That’s what she got for stopping to think.
Little girl lost, she thought, and threw up in the bathwater.
Her discomfort and revulsion were momentary. She hadn’t eaten all day. It was just wine.
“Bathing in my own wine …!” she sang.
The echo seemed to last forever. Like a studio reverb.
She fell asleep listening to it.
SOMETIMES, when he had inhaled a great deal of coke, the Devil found himself blurting that he loved her.
Not to Memory herself.
“I love her,” he would slur to Two-John, Pig, or some stranger.
But no one heard or else forgot, and the Devil himself forgot the second the slightest distraction came along, like having to pee or realizing he had peed himself.
Falling momentarily in love and peeing yourself were common hazards of this fast, weird life, he realized. So were music and good times and the sense that a whole new world was opening.
“Let there be light,” said the Devil, sprawled between naked women in a candlelit hotel room, stinking of pot and urine.
PURPLE AIRPLANE PLAYED Madison Square Garden, and stayed at the Chelsea Hotel.
Jason Livingston loved the Chelsea. He was a worshipper on a pilgrimage.
“The fucking Chelsea!” he gushed, slowly turning in the lobby, gazing at the upstairs balcony, watery eyes almost brimming over. This was where Dylan Thomas and Bob Dylan had lived, he told the rest of them, and Arthur Miller until not too long ago, and William Tell brushed past him and said he’d told them already, a hundred fucking times. Two-John paused long enough to agree it was “Nice.” Then he ashed on the carpet and headed for the bar.
An Austrian circus was staying at the Chelsea, too. The musicians and roadies of Purple Airplane and the circus performers kept passing one another in the lobby all afternoon. Memory got in the elevator once, and found it occupied by a clown and a dancing bear on a leash.
“Don’t be afraid,” said the clown, in an Austrian accent. “She can smell fear.”
The circus people were unusually beautiful. Every single one, it seemed. All during rehearsal at Madison Square Garden, they talked about how beautiful the circus people were.
After the show, they stayed up all night. The Devil drove them around in the Kennedy limo with a case of champagne, and they didn’t get back to the Chelsea until after sunrise.
Everyone slouched off to bed except Pig, who announced that he was going to keep right on drinking, and vanished into the bar. Memory fell asleep on a chair in her bathroom.
She awoke to the phone ringing, and someone telling her that the dancing bear had mauled its owner and was wandering the halls. The manager and his crew were feverishly dialing each room, one by one, telling the guests to stay behind doors.
Outside Memory’s door, something shuffled down the hall, and she croaked, “Oh, wow.”
It took forever for the cops and paramedics to arrive. In the meantime, the bear wobbled into the bar and stuck its nose in Pig’s drink.
Pig and the bartender gave the bear blank looks.
Then Pig slipped off his stool, took the bear’s leash in hand, and led her back upstairs to her cage.
PEOPLE DISCOVER NEW DRUGS and new lovers in the least likely of places.
Memory didn’t know she was discovering heroin. She was going on The Dick Cavett Show.
There were to be two guests; the studio made sure Memory was introduced second. She walked onstage in platform shoes, to wild applause, and Dick Cavett introduced her to Eliot Crump, the Rock Star of American Bird-Watching.
Dick Cavett asked her some smart questions about psychedelic music, and she gave some smart answers, but mostly her attention was drawn to Eliot.
He was a handsome fellow in his thirties, but man, was he shaggy! He had an unmanaged mop of heavy black curls, five o’clock shadow all over his face, and a mustache like a great black jungle caterpillar. He looked at her across Dick Cavett, and his eyes drowned her. Never had she seen such lucid eyes. If a rainstorm was a pair of eyes, it would be these eyes. Later, when she understood more about heroin, she would understand why his eyes looked like that. But here, in front of a studio audience, taping for a million viewers, she just thought he looked relaxed.
Dick Cavett asked Memory about her amnesia—part of the reason she had agreed to do the show was a hope that someone might recognize her. After eight million album covers, no one had come forward yet.
“I think I’m kind of relieved,” she said. “On one hand, it would be like a dream if some guy came out of nowhere one day and turned out to be my husband or something, but on the other hand, it would be more like a nightmare, you know?”
Dick Cavett sympathized, in a crisp kind of way.
He had already interviewed the Rock Star of American Bird-Watching, but he turned to Eliot again as they closed, saying, “What kind … Eliot, what kind of, ah, what kind of bird would you say Memory looked like?”
Apparently one of the cool things about Eliot was that he could instantly pair any human on Earth with whatever bird they most resembled, and his answers were always right on the money.
“An ibis, Dick,” said Eliot. No hesitation.
The audience gasped and applauded. An assistant somehow flashed a picture of an ibis on the studio wall, and the taping ended in a swell of smiling and clapping.
Then the Rock Star of American Bird-Watching asked Memory if he could take her someplace for a drink, and she said “Yes.”
And he said, “I’m your long-lost husband, by the way.”
They became friends very quickly.
He drove her to a bar way down in Brooklyn.
He had his own car, a red LeMans, which he had driven in from Vermont. It was the first time in a while that Memory had ridden in something that wasn’t a limo or a tour bus. She made the most of it, rolling down the window and turning up the radio.
“This is a treat,” she sighed, propping her bare feet up on the dashboard.
Eliot didn’t say anything. He just drove and listened to the music and looked relaxed.
MEMORY FOUND OUT why Eliot Crump was such a great bird-watcher.
Heroin.
The day after The Dick Cavett Show, he drove Memory up to his cabin in the Adirondacks, and the first thing he did was split a chocolate bar with Memory, and start smoothing out the foil with a wad of toilet paper.
“What the hell?” Memory wanted to know.
He asked if she’d ever chased the dragon.
“Is that a kind of bird?” she asked. When he laughed, his heavy black hair shook all over.
“Chasing the dragon is when you smoke smack instead of shooting up. It’s healthier.”
He explained that when you shot up, anything the heroin was cut with went straight into your bloodstream. If you smoked, the impurities burned away.
He made the foil perfectly flat, and dissolved a tiny caplet of Turkish smack in lemon juice. It turned almost instantly to liquid, rolling like oil around the foil.
Memory held a match beneath the foil, and Eliot inhaled through the glass tube.
White smoke spiraled up inside the pipe.
With one puff, his eyes got that bottomless depth. Another, and he switched with her, lighting a new match.
It was like nothing else she’d ever done. With one puff, it hit her like a golden train.
“Golden train,” she said, rolling her head around.
“Yeah,” said Eliot Crump, and they went out to his tree house.
At first, Memory couldn’t handle how the mountains seemed far away, and then close enough to hold in her hand. The tree-house ladder stretched away through green branches and vines, but the climb was over in a second. Then there was a hollow dark all around, and they were in the tree house Eliot had built. It was a wooden deck cantilevered out over the floor of a mountain valley.
The valley was golden. The sky turned.
Everything she focused on made Memory know things she hadn’t known before. She felt her lost memory hovering just beyond reach.
They sat in perfect calm and stillness this way.
Every once in a while, the Rock Star of American Bird-Watching would say, “There’s a Halberd’s speckled grackle,” (or something) and take notes, and take pictures.
And every once in a while, Memory would say “There’s a crow” or “There’s a robin,” and he dutifully took pictures and notes.
“Tomorrow,” he told her, “we’ll drive over to Fulker’s Hollow and have a look for the bird of paradise.”
“There’s no birds of paradise in Vermont,” Memory argued. She knew that much. “They’re tropical.”
Eliot nodded. “Except this one. It was a pet or something, and someone let it go. Did you know the bird of paradise is a perfect mimic?”
“Like a mockingbird?”
“Better. A mockingbird just imitates other birds. The bird of paradise can repeat any sound it hears. Even nonorganic sounds. This one must have lived in the city before it escaped; people will be out in the woods and all of a sudden they’ll hear a train up in the branches, or a garbage truck backing up. It would be far out if I could get a picture. It would be the only temperate bird of paradise on record.”
“You’re fucking with me,” she accused.
He shook his head. His hair bounced. Sparks of sunset flew.
“No,” he said. “But since you mention it …”
He gave her a golden look. The shadows in the trees grew long.
They undressed each other with long pauses and long, fascinated looks. Sometimes they forgot what they were doing.
It took five and a half hours.
WHEN THE TOUR ENDED and the band started writing new songs full-time at Bubble Records’ San Francisco studio or at Memory’s beach house, Memory found herself preoccupied. She started spending a lot of money chasing Eliot Crump’s golden dragon. She spent a lot of money, too, flying east to see the Rock Star himself.
The Devil didn’t go with her. He had a good thing going with acid and cocaine, and preferred to spend his days wandering the beach. The beach near Memory’s house was a rocky, misty strand, with pounding breakers and cold spray. He, and he alone, dared to swim its terrible rips, piercing the surf and floating way out to sea. He kept Memory in his mind’s eye, lazily watching over her as if through a kaleidoscope a thousand miles long. She seemed okay. She was doing what she was meant to do. Things were good.
In Vermont, Memory and Eliot hiked Fulker’s Hollow, all aglow and relaxed. They were watchers of atoms and molecules. No way a bird of paradise was getting past them.
They were deep in the woods. Eliot carried a tent on his back.
They spent the night, and through the mist the next morning, hiking between cliffs of moss and granite, green and gray, vibrating with the dragon in their veins, they heard a jackhammer.
“Jackhammer,” said Memory. “Far out.”
Eliot knew better. Quietly they climbed a hill of bald stone, where they relaxed and waited. It was Memory who saw it: bright plumage in a green Adirondack tree, nesting high above a forest floor of red pine needles. Feathered spikes crowned its head. Raising its wings like a cape, the creature shook its throat.
ACK-ACKA-DRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!
Pure jackhammer tones rang in the ancient valley.
Eliot let her take the photograph, and write down the notes, the day, the hour.
Temperate bird of paradise, she scrawled. The paper shined at her. Fulker’s Hollow, Green Mountains, Vermont. Nine o’clock in the morning, AD.
It was the happiest moment of her life.
Everybody has one. It’s a good thing they don’t know it when it happens.
THE SECOND ALBUM woul
d be called Oolong.
San Francisco, again. Working at Memory’s beach house, they wrote lyrics during the afternoon, tapping out music on a rented upright with half-melted candles all over it.
There were half-melted candles everywhere these days. The Devil, usually dressed in sunglasses and a silk bathrobe, seemed to have put himself in charge of making sure they had twenty-four-hour candlelight. It was nice and mellow, but left everything, including musical instruments, dripping with wax stalagmites. Finally, Two-John stole a spatula from a waterfront tortilla vendor and presented it to the Devil with a bow tied around it, saying he was now also in charge of scraping up all the wax.
The Devil complied. He made himself useful in other ways, too. Cooking, sometimes. Putting out kitchen fires. Repairing things in the kitchen. Common work, sure. But work, like drugs, was good for the soul, and it allowed him to keep an eye on the band, the project he had assigned himself for this particular and important stretch of history.
At sunset, the musicians and their bodyguards walked the rocky beach. They were recognized, but Frisco beach crowds were cool. They didn’t want a pound of flesh, the way crowds in other places seemed to. They just sometimes waved Hi. Until Two-John borrowed a guitar and they gathered around a bonfire. Someone boiled shrimp, nearby.
It was just the guitar, at first. But then someone brought William Tell a set of bongos.
They were a little high, except Memory and Two-John, who were very high indeed. Memory had taught Two-John how to chase the dragon, because he was better at getting Gus, Jerry, and Pig to talk to dealers. The two of them wore sunglasses.
Two-John played some massive, heavy chords.
Memory sang Indian chants. Her voice seemed to go out and come back, and come from different places around the fire, different parts of the crowd.
Jason Livingston, stuck without a bass, stood nodding his head in rhythm.
The crowd played its part on old bottles and cans and shells.
The fire brightened like a sun.
Everything was gold and night, except Memory felt a little sick, and her heart fluttered. Some anonymous beach hippie kept her from falling into the fire.
Up Jumps the Devil Page 14
