A search for “Potrero Sound Station” turned up a fan site, which had last been updated five years before. The site was devoted mostly to the lead singer, who went by the name Sound. Following the breakup of the band, Sound had embarked upon a lackluster solo career before opening a mechanic shop in Aurora, Colorado. His real name was Kevin Walsh. His first solo album in sixteen years, Engine Days, had been released in 2003 and had received a favorable review from an alternative Denver weekly, as well as Time Out Scotland. The writer lamented the fact that the album had been passed over by all of the major publications, save for a one-line mention in a trivia question in Paste magazine. According to the site, the other original band member, Drew Letheid, was living with his banker wife and two children in Greenwich, and he never gave interviews. As for Billy Boudreaux, the site said only “whereabouts unknown.”
It didn’t take long to find a Walsh Mechanics in Aurora, Colorado. It was four-thirty p.m. mountain time when I dialed the number.
“Walsh here,” a voice said. “What can I do for you?”
“Kevin Walsh?”
“That’s me.”
“I’m calling about the band,” I blurted.
“What band?”
“Potrero Sound Station.”
He laughed. “Now there’s a blast from the past. Are you with VH1? No offense, but I’m not interested in going on Bands Reunited. That was a long time ago, a totally different life.”
“I’m just an old acquaintance of Billy Boudreaux,” I said.
“Acquaintance? Sounds like he owes you money. You might want to take a number.”
“It’s nothing like that. I’ve just been wondering what became of him.” Walsh hadn’t hung up yet. I figured that was a good sign and plunged on. “Do you by any chance know where he is?”
“Sorry, doll. You’re asking the wrong person. I haven’t heard from him in decades. He got messed up in some bad stuff, you know.”
“What kind of bad stuff?”
“Coke, meth, whatever.”
“Do you know if he stayed in San Francisco after the band broke up?”
“He was there for a few years, but I don’t know how long. He alienated all of us pretty well. Just became a major asshole, impossible to be around. Sad, too, because before he got messed up with the drugs, he was the nicest guy you could hope to meet, genius on bass.” He paused. “You know, we got a mention in a Rolling Stone article in, I don’t know, ’84 or so. Ben Fong-Torres was the guy who wrote the piece. I was already out here by then, had a bad taste in my mouth from those years with the band, and Drew had gone corporate. Fong-Torres ended up interviewing Billy.” He paused for a minute. “I guess that’s pretty much all I got for you.”
“Thanks,” I said. “You’ve been helpful.”
“You bet. If your car ever breaks down in Colorado, you know who to call.”
I knew about Ben Fong-Torres. I’d seen the movie Almost Famous, and over the years I’d read a number of his profiles of famous musicians. He still lived in San Francisco, where he did a weekly radio show. Four days later, I found myself standing in front of his towering three-story house at the top of a hill in the Castro. I’d contacted him through KRFC and he’d e-mailed right back.
I rang the bell. The intercom crackled. “Is this Miss Enderlin?” Ben’s voice was deep and resonant, just like on the radio. I imagined, with a voice like that, he’d never had any trouble meeting women.
“Hi, yes.”
“You’re an hour early. You’ll have to come back later.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, before I realized he was joking.
“Elevator’s straight ahead and on your left. Take it to the third floor.” I thought that was a joke, too, but after he buzzed me through the entrance, I saw that, indeed, there was a small elevator, outfitted with leopard-print carpet and gold-painted walls. I climbed in, punched 3, and checked my teeth for lipstick. I hated riding elevators in my hometown, imagined worst-case scenarios in which the big one struck. In the aftermath of the earthquake, as sirens wailed and aftershocks shook the building, I’d be trapped alone between floors while the building crumbled around me. Lila used to make fun of my overactive imagination. She’d tried to reassure me by calculating the probability that I’d actually be in an elevator at the exact moment of a major earthquake, but logic did nothing to quell my fears.
The elevator shuddered to a stop and the door opened. Ben stood in front of me in black pants and a gray shirt, looking dapper and not a day over forty-five. I quickly did the math. He’d begun writing for the fledgling Rolling Stone in 1967, which meant he had to be at least sixty. Maybe rock and roll had kept him young.
“Welcome to the manse,” he said, grinning.
I thrust a box into his hand. “I brought you something,” I said. “From Chow. It’s the half-chicken with mashed potatoes. I saw the interview in SanFrancisco magazine where you said it was your favorite.”
“Thanks. You shouldn’t have.”
I suddenly felt stupid for bringing him an entrée, but I hated to arrive empty-handed and couldn’t think of an appropriate house gift for a man who surely had everything he desired. Normally, if I wanted to give a casual, heartfelt gift, I’d make someone a mixed CD, but I figured making a mixed CD for Ben Fong-Torres would be like making boeuf bourguignon for Anthony Bourdain.
“Make yourself at home,” he said. “I’ll go plate this up.”
The living room, like the elevator, was carpeted in a leopard print. The first thing I noticed was the view, a wall of windows facing north. At the far bottom of the hill the neon marquee of the Castro Theatre blinked on and off; the missing T on the sign gave San Francisco’s grandest old movie theater a pleasingly shabby look. Judging from the sign, you’d never guess that the interior of the theater was a throwback to baroque splendor, or that an organ rose from the orchestra pit each night before the seven-o’clock showing. It was a clear night, and the Golden Gate Bridge was visible beyond the twinkling city lights.
I walked over to the windows for a better perspective. In the patchwork of streets below I could see familiar houses, the roofs of apartment buildings I’d known all my life. It was strange to gaze down on my city from such a tremendous height. I knew these streets intimately, from the ground up. I’d walked the sidewalks thousands of times, looking up into the windows, spying on the lives of families. Our own family, I knew, must have been spied on this way as well by countless passersby. When I was growing up, the windows of our living room were always uncovered. My mother loved the natural light and the bottlebrush tree beside our driveway, loved being able to glance out into the street and see friends and strangers walking by. After Lila died, she put up shutters. For the first several years after that, the shutters were rarely open, so that our once cheerful house became dim and sunless.
I imagined the people in the houses far below, looking up at the house on the hill, making up stories about the lives of the people who lived here. Did it ever occur to Ben, when he stood before his windows surveying the brilliant city, that someone might be watching? Most of us go about our lives with a belief in our own privacy. I had done so myself for many years. But then I sat in Thorpe’s office, looking through binoculars at my old bedroom window. And just weeks ago, in a café in Diriomo, I ran into a man who had been aware of my presence in the town long before I was aware of his. Nearly two decades before, in the restaurant in North Beach, I had been the voyeur, watching Peter McConnell during his Monday lunches. How far did this network of spying eyes extend? We were all the watchers and the watched. Privacy was just a comforting illusion.
As I stood staring out the window, lost in thought, I glanced up and saw Ben’s reflection in the glass. He stood completely still, hands in his pockets. Some moments are almost too perfect, their symmetry too precise. I recognized this as one of those moments: as I was looking out at San Francisco, Ben was looking at me. Our eyes met in the glass.
“Funny,” he said. “When someone walks in the hou
se for the first time, it never takes more than five seconds for them to gravitate to that exact spot.”
“Great view.”
“It is. Now if only the city would invest in a gigantic fog blower so it could look this good all the time.”
BEN HAD INSISTED ON POURING ME A GLASS OF 2002 Malbec from a friend’s winery in Patagonia. We sat at the breakfast table off the kitchen, eating chicken and mashed potatoes, which he had split onto two plates, and sipping our wine. I hardly knew him and yet I liked him already. I appreciated the casual way he received me into his home, the immediate intimacy he invited by joking with me as if I was an old friend. I could tell he was a person who lived at ease in the world, a talent I’d always envied. I would have preferred to live that way myself, and was often embarrassed by my own formality, a slight but unnerving social stiffness that I could never quite get past.
I sipped my wine. “How is it?” he asked.
“It’s good.”
“A bit fruity for my taste, but not bad,” he said. “The chicken on the other hand is excellent. Do you cook?”
“A bit. What about you?”
“I know a few tricks.”
The phone rang and he went into the living room to answer it. The breakfast nook opened onto a small den, which was outfitted with a television, comfortable chairs, and a karaoke machine. A couple of Emmys stood atop the TV, which was on, tuned silently to the TiVo menu. I took the opportunity of Ben’s absence to look at what he’d recorded: Top Chef, Project Runway, Storytellers with Elvis Costello, Waterland, and The Last Waltz, Martin Scorsese’s classic documentary about The Band.
I was still craning my neck to see the TiVo screen when Ben returned. “You’re busted.” He picked up the remote from the couch and turned off the TV. “So, you’re here about Billy Boudreaux?”
I told him about Lila, and about Boudreaux’s white Chevy parked out at Armstrong Woods. I reached into my purse and pulled out a copy of the article from Rolling Stone, which I’d dug up at the library. I handed the article to Ben.
“Ah, yes, I remember this,” he said. “Billy was living in the Lower Haight in those days. We met at a bar in his neighborhood. This was ’83 or ’84, but he was still living like it was the good old days”—Ben ended his sentence with a line from a song—“all strung out on heroin on the outskirts of town.” His singing voice was clear and deep. Maybe all that karaoke paid off. “Know that one?” he asked.
It felt like it was a test. I was glad I knew the answer. “Warren Zevon. ‘Carmelita.’”
“Not bad.” He dropped the article on the table. “I asked Billy, off the record, what the hell he was doing. He was an amazing bass player, and he was throwing it all away. He told me he was going to clean up his act, and I remember exactly what I said to him—‘I hope you do, but the odds are against you.’ By then I’d covered the deaths of Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Elvis for Rolling Stone. I could see where he was headed.”
“At the end of the interview,” I said, “the two of you agree to meet up exactly one year later at the Top of the Mark. He says he’ll be a different man by then. He even promises to buy you a drink. Did that ever happen?”
Ben shook his head. “I waited forty-five minutes and he never showed. There I was at four o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon, drinking Scotch alone at the Top of the Mark. It was just me and a bunch of rowdy guys from a bachelor party. I figured Billy was either dead or strung out in some motel in the Tenderloin.”
“And that was it? You never saw him again?”
Ben thought for a moment. One thing I’d noticed in talking to him was that there were no false starts in his speech, no ums or ahs or other verbal tics. His words and sentences came out precisely, as if they’d been planned. It must have been his radio training.
“I did run into him once, in the rhythm and blues section of Amoeba Records. He was dressed strangely, in overalls and boots. He shook my hand, apologized profusely for standing me up that day at Top of the Mark, and offered to buy me a drink. We walked over to Zam Zam and sipped martinis in the back room.
“That was in the days when the bartender refused to serve anything other than martinis. Billy made the mistake of ordering a bourbon and Coke, he got into a huff with the bartender, and we almost got kicked out of the place. He eventually settled on a martini, and then he proceeded to tell me the story of his past few years. He’d hit rock bottom in the late eighties, and by ninety, having had a brush with mortality, as he put it, he finally decided to get sober and pull his act together. He moved back to Petaluma to work on his brother’s dairy farm—apparently he’d lived there off and on over the years. That’s what he was doing when I ran into him. He had come into the city to see old friends, but the reunion hadn’t gone well, and he was on his way back to the farm that afternoon. As much as he loved the city, he felt that it was a dangerous place for him, too many of his old habits lurking in the doorways, I guess.
“I was happy to see him sober, but I got the feeling he was still fragile, like his mind could crack at any moment and send him spiraling back into the abyss. In the conversation he kept referring to his demons. It was freaking me out a little bit.”
“What was he like as a musician?”
Ben thought for a moment. “He never quite got there, but he could have been a great one. When I saw him, he hadn’t entirely given up on the music. I was in a hurry, due down at KSAN to interview Sheryl Crow, but he insisted that I follow him out to his car several blocks away so that he could give me a tape. It was something he’d recorded in his brother’s basement, four new songs he’d written. I can’t tell you how many people have given me tapes over the years—in San Francisco, half the young guys you run into on the street have a band and a tape. But this was one I actually wanted to hear, because I knew what Boudreaux had been capable of.”
“How was it?”
“Pretty good. Nothing like the stuff with Potrero Sound Station, but there was definitely something to it. I might still have it lying around somewhere.”
I followed him downstairs, where the hallway was covered with black-and-white wedding photos—Ben in a mustache and shaggy seventies hair, his wife, Dianne, looking like an inspired emblem of the times with her pixie haircut and flowy white dress.
“Great pictures,” I said.
“Annie Leibovitz took them. There she is.” He pointed to a photo of him and Dianne lying across a bed. His face was deadpan, and she was laughing, like he’d just told some fabulous joke. The camera was aimed at the mirror, and Leibovitz herself was in the corner of the frame, her camera covering a portion of her face. “There’s Jann Wenner,” he said, pointing to another photo, “and this is Cameron Crowe.”
The office was down the hall. It had huge windows, a built-in desk that wrapped around the room, and floor-to-ceiling shelves. On the walls were photos of Ben with Ray Charles, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, George Harrison, Janis Joplin, Grace Slick, Bill Clinton.
“Wow,” I said. “You’re like Zelig.”
“I just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Used to be you could hardly walk the streets of San Francisco without running into an up-and-coming rock star.”
“I just saw Damon Gough buying records last week at Street Light,” I said. “And a couple of years ago, I saw Nick Cave on Ocean Beach. It was this weird, foggy day, no one out but the surfers, I’m sitting on a log watching the waves, and this tall, rail-thin figure dressed all in black comes striding down the beach toward me. It scared me until I realized who it was. He said hello, and I managed to mumble something stupid like ‘Nice day for a walk.’ When I got home I checked the Pink Sheet—he was doing a show that night at the Fillmore.”
“Oh, yeah,” Ben said. “I was at that show, backstage. I interviewed him afterward. Nice guy.”
“Oh, neat.”
“Neat?” He grinned. I wanted to crawl under the desk. Being in Ben’s presence made me feel like I’d lived a pretty boring life. It was another hazard
of life in San Francisco: people of my generation were destined to feel uncool.
On the shelves of Ben’s office were dozens of magazine files labeled by date and publication. While I browsed the shelves, he rifled through a desk drawer, looking for the tape.
“Are you in all of these magazines?” I asked.
“Yep.”
“It must be pretty cool to leave a record of yourself behind in the world.”
Ben looked up. “It’s not a record of me, my dear. I’m just the observer.”
I walked over and peered over his shoulder. There were hundreds of tapes in the drawer, which appeared to have no system of organization. After about ten minutes, he gave up.
“Sorry,” he said. “I may have loaned it out.”
Ben turned off the light and led me back upstairs. At the third-floor landing, he paused. “I’m curious,” he said. “Why are you doing this now, after all this time?”
I didn’t quite know how to answer. I could see how, from a stranger’s perspective, it might look pointless. “Can I show you something?” I asked.
“Sure.”
I retrieved my bag from the couch and pulled out Lila’s notebook. I told Ben the story of the notebook, how it came to be in my possession. “It may sound weird,” I said, “but having her notebook with me for the past few weeks, I’ve felt closer to Lila than I have since she died. It’s almost like hearing her voice.”
“I hear you.”
“Ever heard of the Kepler Conjecture?”
“Nope.”
I laid the notebook on the table and flipped through the pages. “It was first stated in 1611 by Johannes Kepler,” I said. “Kepler became interested in the problem while he was corresponding with an Englishman named Thomas Harriot, who was trying to help his friend Sir Walter Raleigh figure out the best way to stack cannonballs on ship decks. The goal was to find the densest possible spherical arrangement, in order to get as many cannonballs as possible onto a ship.”
No One You Know Page 16
