by Lewis Shiner
“You know. With your father and all.”
“My father?”
“You know. Trying to work out all this about your father dying and everything.”
“This isn’t about my father. This is about First Rays of the New Rising Sun.”
Jimi didn’t answer. The motion of the train made his head bob up and down. He smiled slightly and looked away.
When we came up on 125th Street it was still light. The sky was the same pink and purple and blue, the air was late-summer warm. Only now the air was full of smells: cabbage and roast pork, burning leaves and perfume. The streets were more crowded than in the Village and the clothes were even brighter, from leopard skin to gold lamé. Every different kind of music, from jazz to gospel, from Arab wailing to rock and roll, clashed in the air and made something brand-new, and voices shouted and laughed and chanted over it all.
I read somewhere that in Africa white is the color of death. I felt like a ghost then, not quite real, as I floated down the street. I didn’t think anyone but Jimi could see me, let alone touch me. Jimi sucked all those smells deep into his lungs. “This is where it all really started for me, you know. I had this old lady back then, Fayne Pridgeon. She really loved me, took care of me, made sure I had enough to eat and all. I was playing down in the Village, you know, or out on the road with like Joey Dee and the Starlighters or something, but this was home.”
Jimi stopped in front of a plate-glass window that said PALM CAFE. It had a few tables, a bar, a tiny stage at the back. A middle-aged guy at the bar said, “Jimmy James, blood! What you know?”
I ended up at a table with Jimi and five of his old friends. Three were men and two were women, the youngest around thirty and the oldest close to fifty. The cook brought out ham hocks and collard greens and mustard greens, hog jowls and pigs’ feet and chitterlings, fried chicken and mashed potatoes and sweet potato pie. There was red wine and Jim Beam to drink, though I stuck to Nehi. Everybody ordered more and more food and seemed to get a kick out of watching me try it. I was able to eat enough to satisfy them. In fact I could hardly taste it and it didn’t seem to fill me up at all.
It was hard to follow the conversation. It was mostly reminiscences about people I’d never heard of and places I’d never been, but I understood the drift of it, the sense of loss and inevitable change, and Jimi was there beside me with a shy smile or a touch on the arm or a reassuring nod.
There was a square-faced clock on the wall over the bar. It read six o’clock when we left, the same as when we came in. It was still light outside, but the streets had emptied. Everyone had gone home for dinner, I thought.
“Where you off to now, Ray?” Jimi asked me.
“I don’t know. I guess I hadn’t really thought about it.”
“Man, you better start to think about it. I got to let you go now, there’s someplace I got to be.”
“Sure,” I said. “I understand.”
“If you get back on that A train, you’ll go right downtown. Everything will be fine.”
“Okay,” I said. I still felt empty. It wasn’t hunger, it was something else. “Listen, can I come by the studio tomorrow? Hear some of what you’re doing?”
Jimi’s face was full of pain and sorrow. I didn’t understand it, but I knew it meant no. I felt like he wanted to say good-bye.
There was no traffic on 125th Street except one white panel truck, roaring toward us much too fast. Jimi shook my hand and turned to cross the street.
I saw what was about to happen. “Jimi!” I yelled. “Look out!”
He turned to face me. The truck was still coming. He looked at me sadly and said, “Ray. I’m the one that’s got to die when it’s time for me to die.”
And then he turned and stepped out into the street in front of the truck.
I stood there for what seemed like forever, not questioning, really, letting the moment rise up around me and take hold of me.
Then I walked off the curb after him as the truck’s brakes started to scream. There was a horrible wet thud as the flat front of the truck hit me, a weightlessness as I flew through the air, and another crunching sound as I landed on my shoulder and neck. There wasn’t any real pain, just a deep sense of something terribly wrong, something that could never be repaired, something absolute and final.
c h a p t e r 9
HEAVEN
I was walking through a summer forest. Everything was very green. The trees stood well apart, with high grass in between. I heard birds and squirrels and what might have been human voices. I stopped to listen but I didn’t call out. I was calm and happy and full of energy.
I walked for an endless time, maybe for days. Eventually I came to a park bench under a tree. Jimi sat there in the military jacket he’d bought when he first came to England, the one with the gold braid down the front.
I sat down next to him. “Hey, Jimi.”
“Hey, Ray.”
“Where are we? What is this place?”
“We’re dead, Ray.”
“Both of us?”
“Both of us.”
I let that sink in. It made sense. There had been the business with the drop-off in Cozumel. Then I’d let myself run out of food in Austin, and gone after Jimi again in spite of how weak I was. Still it seemed unfair. “Why didn’t you let me save you?”
Jimi seemed to listen to the forest for a while. Finally he said, “I had my thing, you know, which was music. I wanted to be able to move people in a higher way and everything, to move them spiritually and maybe show them something that I might think at that particular time was the truth. But it’s so hard, man, it’s so hard to get their attention. So I would make love to my guitar or play with my teeth or set my hair on fire or something else and people would say, ‘Ooooh, there’s the Wild Man of Borneo,’ or whatever, but they listened, at least for a while. And that was what I had it together to do, that one little thing, you know? It wasn’t up to me to save the world, single-handed with just me and my guitar. Why did you think I could?”
“Because you’re like me,” I said. The words surprised me. “You did want to save the world, no matter what you say. That’s what First Rays of the New Rising Sun was all about. Music to save the world, to heal all the broken places between men and women, between black and white, between mothers and daughters and fathers and sons. Because music is the only thing that can do it, because music doesn’t have a country or a language except itself.”
“No, man. I mean, that is a very beautiful idea and everything, but you got to understand that that is you talking, that is what you wanted that record to be. You can’t expect me to go saving the world for you. Dig. I couldn’t save the world if I wanted to. Not with no album and not by making love to every pretty woman who wanted me and not by giving money to every brother that came to me with a good line.
“And you couldn’t save me, either, man. Some things you can’t have. You got to figure that out, figure out what you can have and what you can’t, you got to learn the difference.”
“It’s a little late now, isn’t it? If I’m really dead?”
“You’re really dead. But you’re here too, which means there must be some things you haven’t let go of yet.” He stood up and stretched.
“Where are you going?”
“I got to move on, Ray. You understand.”
“No. No, I don’t understand.”
“You rest here a while. Maybe your head will quiet down or something and it’ll all make sense.”
“Am I going to see you again?”
“I don’t think so, man. But that’s okay. Everything be everything. Just lay back and get into something real nice right here.”
It was really beautiful under that tree. My thoughts wandered where they wanted. I thought about making love to Lori, and laughing with Brian, and seeing Jimi play at the Speak. I remembered how I used to feel after two or three sets of good tennis, tired and peaceful, like all the jumbled pieces inside me had been polished up and laid back where they belonge
d. I remembered nights when the Duotones had torn the place up, when all the voices in my head had been turned into music and set free. I remembered a patch of sweet peas next to the porch of our house in Santa Fe, the rich, deep colors and the thick cloud of perfume that hung over them in the late spring. I remembered running down a hillside in Arizona on the first day of summer with a cloudless sky overhead. I remembered sitting on the porch with Boy Baby in Tucson, eating a grape Popsicle that my mother had made in our freezer with Kool-Aid and a red rubber mold. I remembered a crib and a white blanket, and soft light and comforting voices in another room.
After a while I’d thought about those things long enough. I got up and followed the path deeper into the forest.
The trees gradually got thicker, cutting off the light. After a long time I came to another bench, on the other side of the path. Jim Morrison sat next to an old man in clothes the color of dusty concrete. Morrison was instantly recognizable from the videos: black leather pants and concho belt, loose white shirt, hair to his shoulders.
“Say hey, brother Ray,” he said. “How you doing?”
“You know me?”
“Sure I know you. If it wasn’t for you I would never have made Celebration of the Lizard. Hendrix was through here a while ago, told us to watch out for you.”
I had to walk slightly uphill to get to where they were. “What happened after the album? Did you keep it together and stay sober?”
Morrison shrugged. “It was pretty good for a while. My lawyers took care of that accident business, we did a tour.” His voice came from the center of his body, hoarse and full of dramatic pauses. His eyes were nearly black and his stillness was the stillness of a coiled snake. “But after a while you think you really are on top of it, you know? I’d have a couple of drinks and then another couple, and pretty soon there I was, back on the floor.”
“So,” I said. “You got busted in Miami?”
“Yeah. Busted in Miami. Went to Paris with Pam, let her talk me into something stupid, wound up dead in a bathtub.”
The old guy next to him followed the conversation back and forth, and didn’t seem to have anything to add. “That’s all there was to it?” I asked Morrison. “No mystery, no faked death? With the closed coffin and no witnesses and everything?”
“Drug trouble, Ray. Everybody covered their asses. I died, man. People want dreams, not reality. They want to hang on. They want me to be alive. They don’t like consequences. Consequences, Ray. You know what I’m talking about.” His voice was calm, modulated, soothing. “Don’t you?” His eyes burned holes in me. “Don’t you?” he said again, and I saw he wasn’t going to let it go.
“What do you mean?”
“Ray, I want you to meet a friend of mine. This is Billy Joe Powers.”
The old guy held out his hand and I shook it. I could smell his dingy clothes and the cheap wine on his breath. “Hi,” I said.
“Billy Joe was born in 1918, on Armistice Day. Isn’t that right, Billy?” Billy nodded. “He came to California during the Depression to pick citrus.”
“Met that Woody Guthrie, the singer,” Billy said. “Nice fella he was, too. Come and picked oranges right next to me. Told him my story and he said he’d put it in a song one day. Don’t know if he ever did ’cause I didn’t get to hear too much music, you know?”
“Woody Guthrie,” I said. “That’s really something.”
“Got married when I was sixteen. She died the week after my fortieth birthday. Never had no other woman, before, during, or after.”
“Remember?” Morrison said. “Remember when you set me up to make Celebration? Remember the accident my lawyers had to get me out of? Well Billy Joe here is the man you threw under the wheels of my car.”
My legs wouldn’t hold me up. I sat down against the trunk of an oak and stared at the old wino. “You’re not real,” I said. “I made you up.”
“I’m real, all right,” he said. “From the look on your face I expect you can smell me well enough. You didn’t make me up, buster, you found me, that was all. Everything you can think of exists somewhere. I existed once, and now I’m dead. It wasn’t no great life, sleeping in washaterias, riding that Night Train, but it was my life and you took it from me.”
Morrison got up. He was still grinning. “Okay, Ray, you get the point. You can have the bench now, me and Billy Joe are going to walk on for a while. Pam’s waiting for us down the way. You rest up now, okay?”
I sat on the bench and said, “I didn’t know.” Except it wasn’t true. Part of me had known all along that if the music was real then so was the dead man.
I felt bad for Billy Joe Powers. Not the racking guilt I would have felt if I was alive, the icy fist in my guts. It was too late for that, like it was too late for Hendrix’s advice.
I was dead.
I don’t know how long I sat on that bench, in a reverie. At some point I saw a shadow through the trees, a big man, maybe six and a half feet tall, carrying a lot of weight. I tried over and over to tell myself it wasn’t Brian Wilson, but of course it was.
When he saw me, the confused, childish look on his face gave way to a huge smile. “Ray. What in the hell are you doing here?”
I stood up as he came over and hugged me. “No, man,” I said, “what are you doing here? You’re not dead.”
He looked sheepish. “I think maybe I am, Ray.”
We sat down on the bench and looked at the trees. After a while I said, very softly, “What happened?”
“It was Smile, man. The music was right, you heard it, you know it was. But all it did was screw up my life. Mike Love quit over it and Al went with him. That was the end of the Beach Boys. I played it for my dad and he hated it. Capitol hated it and didn’t promote it so it only sold forty thousand. I kind of took to my bed, and Marilyn got fed up and split.
“I mean, I just wanted to do an album that would make people happy. And I lost everything.”
“Christ, Brian, you didn’t kill yourself…”
“It’s a fine line, you know? I mean, you can take a lot of pills or drive off a cliff, that’s the sure way. Or you can get really stoned when you’re all alone in a big house and fall off your stupid slide, onto the edge of your swimming pool. Knock yourself out and fall in the pool and…”
“Drown.”
“Yeah. Like your dad. I didn’t want to have to tell you that.”
Once I was past the first shock, his being there didn’t seem like such a surprise. Like with Billy Joe Powers, a part of me had known what I was doing, the chance I was taking, when I pushed him to finish Smile.
“So what happened to you?” Brian asked. He made his goofy face. “This is like one of those prison movies. ‘What are you in for, kid?’”
I felt totally off guard. What was I supposed to say, I got run over in a dream? “I don’t exactly know.”
“Yeah. See? See what I’m saying? In the prison movie, everybody in prison is innocent. And here, everybody died by accident. Only, come on. All those accidents?”
“If you hadn’t finished Smile you’d still be alive. This is my fault.”
“If I hadn’t finished Smile I would have gone crazy. Crazy or dead, that isn’t much of a choice. At least this way I left a hell of a good album behind. Don’t work yourself up over it. We have to go on, you know?”
“Go on? It’s over, Brian. We’re dead.”
“No, man. I mean, go on.” He pointed to the path, and stood up. “It was really good seeing you, Ray. Be nice to yourself, will you?”
“Wait,” I said. “Can’t I go with you?”
“Sorry, Ray.” He was already walking away. I could have run after him. It was all right, though, just to sit a while longer. My thoughts had been a jumble at first but slowly, like Jimi said, they were quieting down. I could sit for a long time watching a branch move in the breeze and not think at all.
Finally I got up and walked some more. I took it easy. Brian was long gone, and there was nowhere I needed to be.
I noticed tiny variations in the shape of the oak leaves, found familiar shapes in the patterns the breeze made in the tall grass.
Some time later I heard a noise like barking and I stopped to listen. It was barking, deep and relentless, that turned into a baying sound at the end. I would have recognized it anywhere. It was Lady, my basset hound, who died the week before I met Elizabeth in 1978.
I crouched and clapped my hands and she ran up the path toward me. When she saw me she got so excited she squatted to pee, then rolled on her back and kicked her stubby legs in the air. I rubbed the stiff white fur on her stomach and said, “Hey, Lady, how you been?”
It was the usual story. I was twelve when I got her and I promised to feed her and bathe her and take care of her, the way a kid will. I went away to Vanderbilt and I couldn’t take her with me, any more than I could keep her in the succession of ratty apartments I lived in before my marriage. By then my parents were so used to her, and vice versa, that she wasn’t really my dog anymore.
When her kidneys finally gave out my mother put her to sleep and didn’t tell me until it was done. She couldn’t understand why I was so angry at not getting to say good-bye. She had no idea what it was like to sit in my drafty garage apartment and watch snow fall yet again in a Dallas winter that had been constant snow, to drink Jack Daniel’s straight out of the bottle and know that the one creature on the planet that had ever loved me without reservation was dead.
It seemed a long time ago. “Hey, Lady,” I said to her. “You want to go outside?” She jumped up and down and barked, her long brown ears flapping in the air. The very word “outside” had always been magic to her, even if she’d just been out, even if she was outside at the time. It was the eternal promise of something better.
We went up the path together, Lady’s chest practically dragging the ground as she waddled along. I had figured out by then what had to happen next. I still hadn’t decided how to handle it when the path turned around a particularly thick old oak and I came to another park bench. Sitting in the middle of it, like I knew he would be, was my father.
