Glimpses

by Lewis Shiner

  And the inmate says, “I may be crazy, mister, but I’m not stupid.”

  I like the punch line even better in Spanish, the way I first heard it: “Estoy aquí por loco, no por pendejo.”

  Brian loved it, especially the Spanish, which he made me repeat three times, until he had it perfect.

  It took Brian six days to finish Smile, like Jehovah in the Old Testament.

  I watched it come together and I saw why nobody else could have reconstructed it from the tapes in the vaults. It was like the Tommy Tedesco guitar part. Nobody but Brian knew what the missing pieces were, and the missing pieces changed everything.

  He worked all day and all night. We would sleep five or six hours in the morning and then go back to it. He delegated what he could and then put all the pieces together. I was in charge of sound effects. At four one morning I got caught holding a microphone to a fountain in somebody’s front yard in Bel Air. The cops called the studio and Brian somehow kept me out of jail. I taped myself digging a hole in Brian’s back yard and riding a bicycle with a playing card that rattled against the spokes. I went out for hamburgers and bags of produce. That’s me biting the celery on “Vegetables,” a part played by Paul McCartney in another version of history, the one that ends up with Smiley Smile.

  The biggest thing I did was keep Brian away from Mike Love. At least fifteen times Brian wanted to play something for him, and every time I convinced him to wait just a little longer, to wait for that finished master.

  He wrapped up the last vocals at 11 P.M. on December 7, a final touch-up on something called “Grand Canyon,” which had ended up being the “Earth” section of the Elements suite. He mixed it down, spliced it into his test reel, then ran us out of the studio so he could listen to the whole album by himself. It was me, David Anderle, Diane Rovell, and Carl, in the hallway waiting.

  “Capitol’s not going to like it,” Anderle said.

  “Here’s what you say,” I told him. “You say, ‘You guys may not sell a million units of this today. But you will eventually. You’ll still be selling copies of this record in twenty years.’ Then you should have Derek Taylor give an acetate to the Beatles. McCartney especially. Maybe he’ll give you a quote you can use in publicity.”

  “A quote?” Anderle said. “Like on a book cover or something?”

  “Why not? You have to market this as a work of genius, not a piece of disposable pop.” I was wired, ecstatic. It was so close.

  “It could work,” Anderle said. “It might actually work.”

  Brian came out half an hour later. He was smiling.

  We sat in the darkened studio. The fear that I’d felt that night in the park, sitting by Ocean Avenue, came back strong. I wanted the light on. I knew I couldn’t ask Brian. It was his grand moment and I couldn’t take that away from him.

  The tape started. The sound of a pedaling bicycle (me), laughter (human), laughter (horns). A distant, tinkling foretaste of the bicycle rider theme, then into “Heroes and Villains.” It’s a full-blown comic opera, complete with legendary cantina scene, gunfights, and even, buried deep in the mix, Brian’s voice saying “Estoy aquí por loco, no por pendejo.”

  Then into the “Barnyard” and “Do Ya Dig Worms” segment, “The Old Master Painter” and “You Are My Sunshine,” on through “Cabinessence” at the end of side one without a break. I couldn’t tell if it was crazy or not. I was too close to it, somewhere deep inside the music, fitting it carefully into my head so I wouldn’t lose a note of it, smiling and crying at the same time.

  Brian’s voice came over the intercom. “Side two,” he said.

  “Good Vibrations” led off. Instead of fading where the single did it went into a brief orchestral section which recapped the bicycle rider theme, slipped into a few seconds of “George Fell into His French Horn” and then segued, amid the laughter of horns, into “I’m in Great Shape.” Then “Child Is Father of the Man,” “Vegetables,” and the Elements Suite proper: “Grand Canyon,” “FreeFall,” “Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow,” and “Love to Say Da-Da.” Then, finally, “Surf’s Up,” complete with columnated ruins dominoing.

  I knew “Surf’s Up” would be the last song. It was the thing I’d been afraid of since the lights went out. With the first notes, spare and haunting, just piano and bass and Brian’s voice, I started to shake. Like the version I knew, it built into a reprise of “Child Is Father of the Man” and then it went further, pulling everything in, the “ahhhs” from “Good Vibrations,” the cellos from “Old Master Painter,” the laughing horns, finally the “Bicycle Rider” theme and I knew it was over, all of it, not just the album but everything I’d come for.

  The final notes of the harpsichord swelled instead of fading, kept getting louder and louder until they distorted, until I could feel the pressure of the sound in my ears. I didn’t know if it was the tape or me. I couldn’t see the lights from the booth. I thought I might have fallen onto the floor. I couldn’t tell. I only knew that I’d found Smile and now it was me that was lost.

  When I was a kid I used to have this hallucination. I would lie in the dark and see the fibers in my pillowcase getting bigger and bigger. It terrified me. I thought I was about to fall through the spaces between things, between the fibers, between the atoms. And now it had happened, I’d come loose and I was falling and there was nothing solid around me, my atoms were falling through the spaces between the atoms of the chair and the floor and everything was dark.

  I wished I’d had the chance to say good-bye to Brian.

  Somewhere someone said the word “Doctor.”

  It was dark because my eyes were closed. I opened them up.

  I didn’t have to say “where am I” because I was obviously in a hospital. I didn’t have to ask “when” because Elizabeth and my mother were both there. I didn’t have to ask if anything had changed because when Elizabeth looked at me there was relief and love but there was anger and sorrow in it too.

  A nurse came in and picked up my wrist. It looked thin and there was a glucose drip stuck into it. “Welcome back,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Right.”

  c h a p t e r 5

  IN TRANSIT

  On the approach to Cozumel, the plane comes around low to show off the reefs. The water is so clear it looks like there’s something the matter with it, some kind of purple ooze on the surface. Then you blink your eyes and it clicks into place. The purple is submerged coral heads. The milky blue-green is where it’s shallow over a sandy bottom. Out past the reef, where it gets sunset blue, that’s the drop-off. Three or four hundred feet straight down, farther than a scuba tank can take you.

  That’s where my father bought it, there on the edge. I sat in the plane and looked at it, and after a couple of seconds I reached up to shut off the air-conditioning nozzle. I crossed my arms and felt goosebumps on the skin.

  The guy in the next seat gave me a concerned look. I didn’t want to talk about it. I’ve talked about it to Elizabeth and Graham, I even talked about it to Brian, and talk has gotten me nowhere.

  My rental car sat on Laurel Way for two days before somebody called the cops. When they finally came to tow it off they found me sprawled across the floorboards, dehydrated, apparently in a coma. The rental papers had Graham’s address on them, and he got me into a private room and sent for Elizabeth. She did the right thing and called my mother, though it meant a week of her apologies for being there. Then they both sat down to wait for me to live or die.

  One doctor said alcohol poisoning. Another one thought maybe some kind of blood-sugar problem. Elizabeth was convinced it was a plain, old-fashioned psychotic episode. Consequently I woke up to every test in the book, from glucose tolerance to Rorschachs and MMPI. The doctors found a guy pushing forty who drinks too much and doesn’t get enough exercise or decent food. The shrinks didn’t find anything at all, but then I’ve always been good at tests.

  The first chance I got I phoned a record store and asked for Smile. The kid who answe
red was maybe sixteen and had to look it up in the Phonolog. “Not listed,” he said.

  I asked for a manager and got a woman who said, “I know the album you’re looking for. I’m sorry, but it never got made. It’s kind of a musical holy grail.”

  So if I changed things, it wasn’t in my world. Not yet.

  As soon as the hospital let me go, Elizabeth booked us a flight to Austin. She convinced my mother that I would be okay without her. She was a little cold about it, but I let it go. I only managed a couple of minutes alone with Graham before we left, long enough to tell him that I’d found the album, that we’d do the tape when I was stronger.

  When I first got home I slept twelve or fourteen hours a day. I couldn’t stand the smell of beer and couldn’t eat anything but eggs and turkey sandwiches and vanilla yogurt, just white food. I found myself crying a lot, not for any reason that I could understand. Nothing seemed real. It still doesn’t. I’ve been taking long walks every day, three and four miles. I roam the neighborhood, watch the cars on 290. If the weather’s nice I take my shirt off and work on my tan. Elizabeth hasn’t mentioned getting pregnant again. We haven’t made love, needless to say. It’s like all of that never happened.

  I spent a couple of late-night hours on the phone with Graham. Celebration of the Lizard was selling like crazy and he was hot for the follow-up. He’d got hold of one of the original insert booklets Capitol printed for Smile and he bootlegged the art for our CD. Everything was printed and he pushed me to come do the master tape. I tried to tell him about me and Brian, about the way Brian had changed me. All Graham could see was the music.

  I keep coming back to my father, and I’ve started to dream about him again. In one I’m trying to exercise, to do some sit-ups, and my father is standing on my chest. I hit his leg with my fist and he still won’t get off. I ask my mother for a hammer so I can smash his leg with it. Then I realize this is the wrong approach and pull his sock down and try to tickle his foot, not playful at all but deadly serious. He then tries to tickle me with equal seriousness, and there is this contest of wills being fought in this totally ridiculous way.

  The dream seemed obvious. Hating my father was not working and I have to find a less violent way to deal with him. That was when I started to think seriously about Cozumel.

  I was an emotional basket case, and I knew making the Smile tape would wring me out even more. One night toward the middle of April Elizabeth and I were eating in front of the TV. We had the doors and windows open and the air was full of honeysuckle and the sound of crickets. The news was about the Iran-Contra trial which was just getting started, and Abbie Hoffman’s death which might have been suicide, and drug cult murders just over the border in Matamoros. It all connected with the sixties in my mind, the way everything had gone to pieces since. Elizabeth was only eleven in 1968. How could I explain? I said, “I’ve been thinking about Cozumel. About us maybe going there.”

  Elizabeth looked at me in disbelief. “How am I supposed to find time to go to Cozumel?”

  Something happened to me then. Up to that point I was a guy who wanted to work out some problems with his marriage. In the back of my mind was our honeymoon in Cozumel in 1979, right before we moved to Austin. Maybe I thought all that sun and sand could get something started again. But when Elizabeth looked at me like that I thought, this is not just another argument. This is serious and I want to be very careful. My heart started to pound. “Just for a week,” I said. “We could do it next month, after school lets out.” You have to try to meet me halfway on this, I thought. Just halfway.

  “This is still about your father, isn’t it? What are you trying to prove? What’s in Cozumel that’s going to change anything?”

  It was like she wanted me to snap. I’d already decided this was not going to be my fault. “It’s about us, too. Don’t you think it would do us good to get away?”

  “We can’t afford it.”

  “I can pay for it out of Graham’s money.”

  “I thought you’d spent that.”

  This wasn’t about my going back to L.A. to do another album. I wanted to stick to the issues. “There may be some more coming in.”

  She didn’t move except to turn toward the TV, only it was like she was falling away, falling down the huge chasm between us. There was nothing I could say, nothing I could do to reach her. “I don’t think I want to go to Mexico,” she said.

  “Well, that’s it, then, isn’t it?” And it was. Inside I was numb except for a clear, calm voice that said, as of now, this marriage is over. There’s nothing left to hold on to. I should have told her then and there that I wanted a divorce but I didn’t have the guts. I’d been biting my tongue too long.

  I looked down at my plate of spaghetti. It had gone cold and inedible in a matter of seconds. I picked up a piece of it and put it down again. I’d cooked, so the dishes were Elizabeth’s. I went upstairs and listened to Pet Sounds for a while, then I called the airlines and made some reservations. To L.A. first, then to Mexico. When it was done I felt giddy with relief.

  The divemaster is named Tom Crane and he was at the airport to meet me. I recognized him from my mother’s videotape. He looked perfect for the part: tan, weathered, calm. He had a beard and balding hair that were both trimmed short, thongs, white jeans, a blue guayabera. He pushed off from the wall and said, “Mr. Shackleford?”

  Mr. Shackleford was my father, and he’s dead. I said, “Just Ray. Please.” We shook hands.

  “I want you to know how sorry I am about…everything. We did all we could—”

  “I know all that,” I said. “I’m not down here to make trouble, I promise you.”

  Suddenly this thin woman in dark glasses stood next to him. “Then why the hell are you down here? If you don’t mind my asking?”

  I hadn’t realized they were together. “Sorry?” I said.

  Crane rubbed his forehead. “This is Lori,” he said. “My…assistant. She’s worried about lawsuits and all that. I tried to tell her—”

  “I’ve got no complaint with you guys,” I said. “You were real good to my mom. I’ll put it in writing if it’ll make you feel any better. I’ve just got some personal stuff to work through, that’s all.”

  I couldn’t manage a smile. I was hung over from a celebration blow-out with Graham the night before. We’d finished the final mix on Smile and we were both pretty thrilled. I had a cassette copy in my suitcase along with my hand-held recorder, a portable CD player, and a bunch of CDs. You’d think I was down for a music convention.

  She wouldn’t have gone for the smile anyway. She projected this image of tough and impatient and not in the mood for my bullshit. Her clothes looked like they’d been thrown on in a hurry: a loose red cotton blouse, tucked here and there into cutoffs, and nothing else but rubber thongs. Hair reddish brown, almost to her shoulders, wavy and lighter at the ends from a perm that had grown out. She wasn’t quite as tan as Crane and the sun had peeled her nose peel and left little lines at the ends of her mouth. I couldn’t tell anything about her eyes just then because of her cheap red sunglasses.

  Crane took my shoulder bag, which was full of CDs, and I asked about customs. “They don’t really care,” he said. “You could buy anything you want down here for half what it would cost in the States. Why smuggle it in?”

  We got through the crowd into daylight. The sky was bright blue and there was a line of palm trees across the street. The breeze smelled of spice and dust and diesel, the essence of the tropics. At the curb was a red VW convertible with Cozumel Dive Surfari on the side. A kid of about seven sat on the hood. Crane gave him a dollar and he ran away without a word or a smile.

  Lori said, “I’ll get in back.” Her red shirt fell open when she got in and I got a sudden, unexpected glimpse of her left breast, small and perfectly formed. I stood there with my hand on the door, unable to move. She obviously wished she’d never set eyes on me, and there I was, paralyzed with teenage longing.

  “You coming?�
� Crane said.

  I nodded and got in the car.

  Crane has half a dozen cinder block guest rooms behind his shop that he rents out as part of the dive package. The walls are painted yellow inside and out and the bathroom floor is raw concrete with a drain in the middle. I thought it was fine. It was clean and the air conditioner blew cold when I turned it on. Crane gave me a key and told me to meet him next door when I got settled in.

  I unpacked the CD player first and connected the pocket-size speakers. I put on Earth, Wind & Fire and hung up some clothes and then stretched out on the bed, which smelled faintly of mildew. I thought about taking a shower, which would leave nothing to do between dinner and bedtime. After a while I got up and put on a Hawaiian shirt to remind myself I was on vacation. I shut the music off and went outside.

  The bar next door is a thatched-roof job with beat-up metal tables. Most of the paint is worn away, but you can make out the logos if you know what to look for: Tecate, Corona, Superior. The chairs are generic beige folding chairs, just like the ones at Western Recording or TTG Studios, only rusted and caked with salt. I was surprised to see Lori in one of them. They had three of the tables pushed together. Tom was across from her and there were four other people in the group.

  I sat down next to Tom and got introduced around. There was a young, athletic-looking couple who could have stepped out of a toothpaste ad. They are Pam and Richard and they work for Delta. He’s a navigator and she’s a stew. He had black-rimmed Ray-Bans and an open shirt over Speedo trunks. She had long brown hair hanging down over one of those red one-piece suits that Elizabeth calls Barbie suits. Her nipples made bumps in the fabric, but not on my account.

  There was a guy in his fifties with a salt-and-pepper beard, glasses, and thinning white hair. He was bare-chested and was sunburned everywhere I could see. “This is Dr. Steve Lang,” Tom said, “our resident headshrinker.”