“Exactly. Look at me. I’m stuck. I’m spinning my wheels. I want to know him. I don’t even know why anymore. Maybe just to blow past him, and get my life started.”
“I meant the way you’re holding your fingers—It’s just like Luke used to.”
“So you’ve said. Look, Mom, he won’t even return my calls. He won’t say he’s related to me, or that he even knows me.”
“Feel sorry for him, then, for what he’s missed.”
“I can—t. And I don’t even want to. I want him to tell me he’s my father and then I want to tell him to go fuck himself.”
“He was the love of my life, Billy. The kind of love that only happens once.”
Her eyes misted over. Lately, she had been drifting into sentimentality. Age. She seemed to enjoy it. Poignant memories, a good cry, it all appealed to her. The previous winter, staying in her house, I discovered her sitting in the living room at the window, watching the day break. The red glow of the rising sun moved across the frozen landscape like blood through icy veins. When she heard my footsteps, she turned. And I saw her face streaked with tears. Mom? I said, frightened for a moment. What’s wrong? And she shook her head, smiled. It’s all so beautiful, is what she said. Our little planet. All alone in space. And what I thought was: Oh my God, she’s losing her mind. Yet I envied her the voluptuousness of her feelings. A few months before that she had visited me in New York and when we walked through the Village—MacDougal Street, West Third Street, her old haunts—she was so overcome by feelings that she was breathless, we had to stop a dozen times and finally fled in a taxi. Yet even as we rattled up Sixth Avenue, I thought: There are no streets that mean as much to me as these streets mean to her; I have no memories to match hers. What am I doing with my life? I remember clutching at my heart.
ABOUT my heart. Despite the lurid distractions of a bohemian boyhood, in which years wafted by, borne on clouds of incense and, of course, on the wings of song, my mother and, nominally, I were ceaselessly visited by those beatniks and hippies who seemed so annoying then but whom I view with a certain misty nostalgia now, musicians, painters, political exiles, mind readers, suitors in buckskin, suitors in silk, even suitors in suits, hotshot politicos, schizophrenics, filmmakers, and sleazy journalists, despite all the commotion, the noise, the hope, the gossip, the overdoses, and the sense that history was a tidal wave on its way to our shores, despite all of that, my getting sick remains the humid, terrifying center of my mother’s accounts of my middle childhood years: the time I ran a fever of 107 and I screamed weakly each night as my fevered brain was visited by hundreds of hallucinations; her fear that I would die, her tears, her prayers, her nightly negotiations with God.
I remember very little about the rheumatic fever itself. I recall the leaden weight of the bedclothes, the astonishing distance between my head and my feet—my toes looked like pedestrians viewed from the twentieth floor, when I gathered the strength to prop myself up on my elbows and look at them. I remember the flavor of the medicines, especially the unpalatable sulfa carelessly hidden in the gruesome grape syrup. I remember the wet soupy stink of my piss-soaked pajamas as my mother led me on my tardy journey from bed to bathroom. Faces, muffled voices, the somber, almost scary dust on the Venetian blinds. A low drone. An animal sound. A feeling of having fallen off a mountaintop. The feeling of drowning in my own sweat. The icy stethoscope. Grandpa’s friend Dr. Greenwald’s kindly eye suddenly covered by an iron mask through which a blinding beam of white light shined directly into me.
The sensitive, practically infected issue of Luke’s not once coming to visit me in the hospital, of his never helping my mother, and his not paying so much as a dime of the massive medical expenses, obsessed Esther, and continued to after I was released from St. Vincent’s, on and on, season after season, until, shortly before my twelfth birthday, just when two years without my heart popping like a balloon had finally convinced my mother that I might just possibly survive, if not a game of baseball, then at least a game of stoop ball or a swim in the public pool on Varick Street, Esther pulled me out of my class at the Little Red Schoolhouse, and the two of us left for Morocco.
On the advice of friends, she had stopped expressing her loneliness and contempt for Luke, but these feelings did not disappear—if you think matter cannot be created or destroyed, try your hand with passions. Instead, they burrowed parasitically within her and nibbled night and day on her senses of equilibrium, humor, perspective, and self-worth, until she was sure she would never take a deep, clear breath until she was away from Luke, away from the city, the state, the time zone, the country. And so when my mother and I boarded the Yugolinia freighter bound for Tangier, all she had by way of sanity was her love for me and her determination to somehow survive. Everything else had been blown to smithereens or scorched beyond easy recognition by her million-megaton realization that nothing—neither the king nor the king’s horses and men—could put her and Luke back together again.
The freighter left New York on a hazy, warm October afternoon, carrying a cargo of red and white ambulances and a dozen or so hippie travelers. Back then there was such a thing as countercultural travelers, and they circled the globe, forging a well-worn path to high times and enlightenment that went from Marrakesh and Amsterdam to Beirut, Bombay, and Katmandu. And there was such a thing as Yugoslavia, and Yugoslavians themselves were known for their good humor and fairness. Yugolinia was a hip way of beginning the journey, a way of saving money—and what could be more romantic than leaving by sea? What could put you in closer spiritual touch with the expats of the past—the John Reeds, the Chester Himeses—than to bid a long goodbye to your native shore as it slowly, heartbreakingly floats farther and farther away, until finally it is sucked like a strand of spaghetti into the maw of the horizon and all that remains is the sea?
And what more fitting for my mother’s melancholy sailing than to spend those last few minutes with her elbows on the deck’s rail, scouring the waterfront for Luke. Even if Luke had known we were leaving, he would not have “come to his senses” and tried to stop or join us. Even I could have told my mother that. But I was bound to remain at her side for the entire, morbid fantasy of her final watch, and then I turned away from the vanished shore and the screeching gulls that flew in formation over the V of our wake, and saw that we were not alone. Standing at a reasonably respectful distance from Esther were seven of our fellow passengers, fans of Luke who had quickly recognized my mother as Esther, the Esther, the Esther of the love songs.
The acolytes were our constant companions through the six-day journey, their questioning voices as steady as the tuneless song of the ship’s old engines. In that way, Luke remained with us on our long sail, knot by knot, and by the time we reached port in Tangier—despite Mother saying “Look, Billy! Africa!” and despite my seeing a group of Moroccan stevedores dressed in djellabas—it seemed to me that we had come a long, long distance only to arrive at the same Fairchild-haunted place Esther had forced us to leave.
At first, I pined for America. I missed hamburgers, peanut butter, neon, baseball, my few friends. I even missed school. I could not bear to blame Esther for my misfortune, and so I heaped more hate upon my father than I’d ever heaped before. Now he was not so much an unattainable god who had turned his back on me, but a creature full of vengeance who had pushed me away—away from him, away from my country, my friends, my life.
But Mother seemed to thrive in our expatriation. After a kif-drenched month in Marrakesh, where we lived in a small, brightly tiled house in the medina, with a double-decker balcony over a shady, aromatic courtyard, and where Esther became a kind of opium den mother to the resident hippies, we boarded another boat—this time the ultra-posh Da Vinci, which we picked up in Gibraltar—and headed for Italy.
They say you went to Italy
Where you spend the coin of my desire for you
With your summer dresses, sparkling wine
You’re feeding Christians to the lions
/> Do you tell the Roman senator how you held yourself above me?
Do you tell the blind child that you never really loved me?
—“Good Riddance Farewell,” recorded 1979
After shaking Luke’s songs by their heels and studying all the spare change and pocket litter that poured out, I have come to be wary of the autobiographical presumption—too many of the lyrics are free associations, or panicky lunges at rhyme—and I have also come to accept (and adopt) Luke’s own bitter assessment of the hagiographers—obsessive scannings of his work and the presumptuous, pathetic interpretations these devout hacks have devised as they create a kind of alternative universe in which a word like “crosstown” must refer to Galilee, and a phrase like “my steely sleeping beauty lies naked in her chamber” must make reference to Luke’s father’s suicide by gunshot. Nevertheless, I am fairly sure that the “blind child” in “Good Riddance Farewell” is me. But what was my blindness? An insinuation of my weakened heart? Or an allusion to how many times I had already gazed into his, Luke’s, face and failed to know that here without question was my father? Or was the blindness meant to suggest a kind of delusion, an insistence upon the patent absurdity that this spermless demigod was father? Whatever afflicted the lyric’s blind child, however, the notion that Esther would tell me or anyone that she never really loved Luke is just pure paranoia.
In Italy, Esther rented an old farmhouse near the town of Todi. The house had not been occupied for five years, but the land around it was still cultivated by a neighboring farmer, a young, bare-chested Adonis who drove his noisy red tractor through the rows of gigantic sunflowers, their immense, oily yellow heads too heavy for their thick green stalks. Unlike Marrakesh, where the steady stream of stoned travelers included many Fairchild fans and even a budding Lukologist or two, and where, within days, Mother was widely known, even by some of the Moroccans, as Esther of the Album Cover, Todi was almost completely free of expatriates, and we were known simply as the beautiful American woman and her sickly son.
We were used to being around people all the time—in that way, the medina had been an extension of Sullivan Street—and it was blissful, at least for me, to suddenly plunge into this bottomless Umbrian sea of tranquility. Privacy. Silence. My mother, I suddenly realized, had been raising me in the midst of some perpetual party, a mad binge that had been the background noise of my entire life. But now we were alone and I saw her as never before—curled in a chair reading aloud in a studious murmur from a beginner’s Italian grammar, humming to herself while she washed out her pantyhose in the bathroom sink, walking slowly through the winding, sun-blind streets of Todi with her string bag filled with cheeses and blood oranges, a jar of Nivea for her, and a jar of Nutella for me, and wishing me good night while perched at the edge of my stern little cot, with the soft indigo remains of the persistent Italian daylight boring through the shutters, and taking her time for once because there was no pot of communal pasta steaming on the stove, no waiting tearful, possibly suicidal friend who had come for Esther’s advice to the lovelorn, no suede-booted folk singers who would raid the refrigerator, chug-a-lug the wine, and maybe even curl up like dogs on the carpet if she didn’t get back to them soon. Now, in that old tilted farmhouse, which we soon called Todi Hall, with its almost purely decorative lamps with their twenty-watt bulbs, its inexplicable drafts, its carved oak doors, its oxblood beams, and its ancient kitchen in which even toasted bread seemed like a feast, there, at last, I had her to myself, and if this was somehow the culmination of my Oedipal drive, it was also its termination. Italy had done for me what I might have all along been hoping Luke would do—it had driven out the hordes, and now that Esther was available to me I could more or less stop longing for her.
But it was all destined to change a few weeks later, when, with the sadly predictable return of a malarial fever, Mother acquired a new suitor. He was a German named Gerald, a former medical student who had come to Italy to study in Bologna and had fainted during his first surgery. He was tall, sturdy, blond, but nonetheless far from Teutonic: his psychological frailty, his trembling hands, his dark, sad eyes made him appear more a potential victim than a perpetrator of Master Race theories. He and Mother met while she was sitting in a café on Todi’s central square. Esther was drinking from her late-morning carafe of white wine; I was in the steep side streets behind the square, stalking the gray doves that hopped and flitted from awning to arbor. By the time I got back Gerald had already ordered a second carafe of wine and a shocking bowl of dirt-black spaghetti in truffle sauce, and though Esther pushed her steel-legged chair out from the table and patted her thighs, beckoning me to sit upon her lap, I was nonetheless excluded from their conversation, except when I occasionally and acidly corrected the minuscule malapropisms Gerald would commit—the shoe has fallen off the other foot, saving up rainy days, that sort of thing.
Gerald had ended up in Todi because the brother of an Italian friend owned the very café at which my mother had been sitting with her Pinot Grigio; Gerald helped manage the place, and it had been his idea to rename it Caffè di Todi, and to expand the menu. Gerald might have been a depressive, but he knew dozens of people in Todi, and soon my mother was in a social circle that included chefs, waiters, vintners, lawyers, a priest, a jeweler, and Todi’s mayor. It made Mother happy to be a part of things in the town, and I imagine that when Gerald began spending the night at our house, that made her happy, too. She was a vital woman, passionate, expressive, and despite having a son who was a jealous pain in the ass, she was only thirty-three, far too young to live the life of a grass widow.
Looking back at it now, Esther and Gerald were not half- bad as a pair; comparing the relationship with others my mother had, and, surely, comparing it with my own tattered history of fraught flings and nerve-wracking stalemates, my dark brooding mom and her anguished Aryan lover were actually, in hindsight, very appealing. They laughed; they slow- danced to the radio; they played chess; they chased after and netted bright Umbrian butterflies and then set them free; they read poetry aloud; they drank, probably to considerable excess.
And then, somewhere in early July—those Todi days were nicely numberless—I had a more or less complete physical breakdown. I went to bed one night with aching legs, but we put that off to a day’s touring on foot through the nearby town of Perugia. I was also feeling nauseated, but Gerald pointed out that those free samples at the Perugia chocolate factory were probably the cause. However, the next morning everything was worse. My body was so wracked with fever I couldn’t muster the strength to get out of my little Catholic cot and so was obliged to spew the clotted contents of my stomach onto the bedroom’s stone floor. I called weakly for my mother. She somehow heard me through two closed doors and a haunted hallway, but by the time she reached me I had fallen unconscious.
Mother and Gerald tended me through the day, but when I got no better Gerald proposed they put me in his car and drive me all the way to Bologna, where he knew at least one doctor whose competence he trusted. Though Bologna was at least a day’s hard drive, it was actually a compromise solution. Gerald had really wanted to take me to Germany, or at the least to Switzerland; his true opinion was that every doctor in Italy was backward.
The days went slowly, the nights stood still
Checked the hour on a clock without hands
All I wanted was to be myself
Me and my traveling band
The city so quiet, not a soul around
Except for fools who quote me chapter and verse
I thought I would get over you soon
But things just went from bad to worse.
I looked for you in San Antone
Called your name in old Tangier
I had to find you or at least die trying
That much was coming clear
Loving you was all I knew
Though love was like a curse
Had to find you before the next daylight
Things were going bad to worse.
/>
Followed your trail to Italy
To a little brown town in the hills
Heard you were there with a son and a lover
Living on wine and pills
By the time I was there you were gone
The Harlequin said you’d split with your nurse
So I went to the church and damned my fate
Things had gone from bad to worse …
—“From Bad to Worse,” recorded 1980
Not only is “From Bad to Worse” one of Dad’s most successful songs, finding its way onto the first Best of Luke Fairchild compilation, as well as all the subsequent anthologies (Golden Luke, Acoustic Luke, Luke Revisited, and, during the semisilence of the post-Karpanov years, Remembering Luke), but it is also one of his most remunerative, having been covered by the Byrds, Judy Collins, Emmylou Harris, Foghat, Eddie Vedder, Arlo Guthrie, Sting, and the Neville Brothers, and by more unlikely performers such as Julio Iglesias, Frank Sinatra, the Gypsy Kings, Mel Tormé, ABBA, Liza Minnelli, and Andy Williams. Its merits aside, the song functions as a kind of diary—or “dia-reeya,” as Luke put it, in a particularly candid (i.e., drunken) interview given live on WNEW, while he and Sergei were rocketing around Manhattan. Fact: he did miss Esther horribly once she and I were gone. Fact: he worked hard to garner information about where we had gone. Fact: he flew to Casablanca, hired a car to speed him through the souks and camel-tilled farms on the road to Marrakesh. (The “old Tangier” was allowed through that special poetic license issued to people too lazy to find a rhyme for “Marrakesh.”) The brown town in Italy was, of course, Todi, and Gerald, in Luke’s homophobic lexicon, was the nurse. I, of course, was the son, though the lyric might have proven more poignant if he had written “my son.” But there’s no arguing with success. What’s my famished ego compared to a half-dozen gold records?
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