The Rich Man's Table

by Scott Spencer

  He looked surprisingly well, though no longer young. There was no longer even a trace of his faintly girlish beauty. He was a man, gray-bearded now (though the beard would be gone in weeks); there was gray in his once juvenile Jewfro. The mockery was gone from his eyes, replaced by caution, unhappiness. Growing older wasn’t a mess he could leave for the others to clean up.

  Finally, we in the front noticed he was starting to sing. It took another couple of minutes for the silence to spread all the way to the rear, to the trampled-down fences, and the sway- backed tops of the vans, and the hills and the treetops where the last of the pilgrims had gathered, and by then Luke was halfway through his first song.

  When I tell you the truth babe

  You only get mad

  You want me to help you find something

  You never had

  Shut the window

  Slam the door

  I’m not so sure

  No no

  I’m not so sure

  I

  Ever

  Loved you.

  I was stunned. His first song in public in seven years and he’d chosen a hate song! By the time he had come to the final verse, he was no longer even singing. He just stood there playing his guitar and let the audience carry the song, and when it was done, he smiled and indulged in the night’s sole line of stage patter: “Where you guys been?” Another five minutes of worshipful cheers followed. And as I looked around, it stirred me and frightened me, too, to see how many in the crowd were openly weeping. They sobbed, they buried their faces in their hands and rubbed their eyes and then looked up at the stage again, humbled, worshipful. It was as if my father were an apparition, the Virgin Mary on the summit of a war-torn mountain, Christ in concrete.

  Luke in concert sometimes scoldingly steered clear of the hits, the archetypal Luke songs, and as the evening wore on, and some of the crowd began to worry that they might never get to hear, say, “Rivers of Steel” or “Lullaby of the Apocalypse”—which would mean that they weren’t going to get the ultimate Luke experience, the one they could tell their friends about, their grandchildren—a few in the audience grew restive, and began to shout out the titles, at first in a loud, reminding sort of way, and eventually with a kind of frantic fury, a howl of cultural panic. But Luke gave not the slightest indication of even hearing them, much less being interested in altering his play list to suit their tastes. His choice of material had a vein of petulance going through it; he concentrated on songs from albums that had tanked. He even tempted the large contingent of journalists present by singing a song from American Shakedown, a touching little mazurka called “Romance in Odessa,” which was at the time of its composition meant to be a poetic re-creation of Sergei and Katarina’s courtship, but which managed to survive as a meditation on young love in general, and made me think about Luke’s love affair with my mother, a liaison which remained far more emblematic of romantic excess than anything that had ever happened to me.

  I had known about this concert for months—that was how I was able to get a ferry ticket to the island, whereas most of the fans had to become Boat People. My source of information was Wendy Crabtree, the distaff side of one of my father’s longest- lasting relationships. There had been a long antipathy between Wendy and my mother, and we steered clear of each other until I began to compile facts about Luke, traveling the country as widely as my moth-eaten wallet would permit, in order to interview people once associated with Luke. I caught up with Wendy in Dorset, Vermont, where she was visiting her adopted daughters Sophie and Marlene, strapping strawberry- blond twins with none of Wendy’s darkness and delicacy, who were living then in a lesbian commune, where thirty or so women supported themselves in the most agrarian, regressive ways imaginable, hours of stoop labor, raising sheep and weaving sweaters from the wool, growing fruits and selling little Mason jars of jam—just the sort of thing women did before they were allowed to go to school and vote and smoke in public. Wendy had been doing me a favor, letting me talk to her there—normally she lived in Carmel, California, and she wanted to save me the journey. We met in town; men were forbidden from entering the women’s collective, and there was no point pushing it. I was sitting in the designated café when Wendy walked in. She wore a cobalt parka; the hood was lined with silver fur. Her face looked like a carving. I raised a finger: It’s me. She sat down in the chair opposite mine, pulled off her moon-walk gloves. The skin around her eyes was multicolored and looked as delicate as the wings of a butterfly.

  “My God, you’re Luke all over again.”

  “And you didn’t even believe I was his son.”

  “You’re right. I didn—t. But I must have believed something. Otherwise, why would the conspiracy of starlight have led me here?”

  By the end of our afternoon together, not only was Wendy convinced of the veracity of my claims to be Luke’s son, but, piecing together a few dates and dim memories, she also figured out that when my mother came to Chicago to tell Luke that she was pregnant (with me), Wendy and Luke were just beginning their own love affair. “That was you inside your mother’s tummy then, that was you,” she said, almost as if I would be pleased.

  Wendy tipped me off about Luke’s concert, and a few weeks later she sent me a laminated (limited access) backstage pass. “Sorry,” the note had said, “It’s not All Access, but there are NO all access passes for this show. When LF is involved, paranoia runs deep.”

  Tonight, Wendy was dressed Gypsy-style, phyllo pastry layers of sheer skirts, orange and blue and brown. Her bread- stick arms each impaled fifty silver bracelets. She dragged a shawl behind her like a matador’s cape. With her free arm, she waved at the audience, which greeted her appearance with a roar of what seemed as much like lust as it did welcome. It was good timing all around, since after two hours of Luke, and calling out for songs he refused to sing, and listening as his voice tired and lost its edge, its pitch, and started sounding like a swarm of bees, the crowd was ready for some fresh blood.

  The band began playing “Shiva the Destroyer” and Wendy grabbed the microphone and said, “Hi, everyone. I’m Wendy Crabtree!”

  Down by the Ganges

  A workingman in shirtsleeves

  Back by the station

  Talking incarnation

  The sun drips blood

  After the flood

  Shiva says to the kid

  I’m afraid your name is mud!

  I figured them for three songs and then two encores—Luke never did more than two—and so I wound my way closer to the left side of the stage. I wanted to be there with my backstage pass the moment the music stopped. It was hell getting through. Despite giving every outward sign of being blissfully transported by the concert, every pilgrim seemed acutely aware of their spot in the mass and viewed my coming forward as a kind of encroachment, an imperialistic gesture, a land grab. This was worse than emptying a full cart of groceries onto the conveyor belt at the express register, while the fellow with a bottle of seltzer and a box of Cascade glares murderously at you. This was a high crime; this was war. People were actually grabbing at me, trying to pull me back. People were blocking my way, saying Fuck you, man, where you going? I am Luke Fairchilďs son, I might have said, not that any of them would have believed me, and not that it would have made a difference. Getting as close to Luke as possible was a kind of wild and irrational emergency. They wanted to touch the hem of his garment, and they scrambled and scratched for a place close to him as if it could save their lives, like those poor panic- struck people leaping for the bottom of the helicopter as the last chopper out of Saigon took off from the embassy roof:

  Whirly-birds turning in the yellow heat of day

  Open the doors, take me away?

  Let me inside your mighty machine

  Make me an American, awww I want to come clean …

  —“The Citizen Ship,” recorded 1974

  But I was not to be deterred. Fatherless boys are used to going where we are not wanted. I endured, I
pushed back, I wedged, edged, and waited, I slid between, I was as valiant as the one sperm fighting its way through a condom, past a diaphragm and its dab of deadly goo, through a seething rain forest of endometrium to its final, fateful rendezvous with the egg. And my timing—which is, after all, everything—was perfect. By the time I made it to the front row and was face to face with the security guards, who stood with their arms folded over their implacable chests, Luke and Wendy and half the crowd were singing “Stacked Deck,” one of Dad’s existential cowboy songs:

  He never knew violence

  He specialized in a different kind of pain

  Black bat or white hat

  to Earl it was really all the same

  She said how it hurts me

  to see you looking such a wreck

  He could barely meet her eyes

  He was dealing from a stacked deck …

  It was the concert’s final encore, and I had already taken the laminated backstage pass from my pocket, peeled off the back of it, and stuck it to the center of my T-shirt, where it glowed like an oblong orange heart.

  I was suddenly in a knot of the chosen, all of them bearing passes. As usual, Luke had attracted a lot of celebrities—more tonight than usual, because of the long layoff. On one side of me was Teddy Kennedy, an Easter ham in lime-green shorts and a pink Lacoste shirt, and on the other stood Bob Rafelson, who directed Luke’s stupendously failed movie debut, the comic-epic western Chile Con Carne, a production that saw a rape, several arrests for cocaine use and cocaine smuggling, and a middle-aged male studio executive stealing into Dad’s trailer with romance on his mind and a subsequent outburst of violence that put the studio executive in the hospital and Dad behind bars, though each for only twenty-four hours. Also among the backstagers was the director of Dad’s second movie, which fared even more poorly than Chile. This director—nameless here, for legal reasons—was one of those Europeans who wear their jackets draped over their shoulders, and he tried to keep Luke happy on the most unhappy set by sharing his own tastes for heroin and elaborate, theatrical sex—charades of desire that would have perplexed the Marquis de Sade.

  There were a few whom I recognized—Carly Simon, Mike Wallace—and a few whose identity I only figured out later—Alan Dershowitz, Quincy Jones, John Mellencamp. In all, there were perhaps fifty of us, the chosen, and the security guards broke us off from the pack and herded us quickly behind the stage. We stepped through a morass of thick electric cables that looked like the roots of live oaks, and pasture grass shiny and slick with spilled drinks.

  “Backstage” really meant behind the stage, where there was a modest wooden platform the performers mounted before heading onto the stage proper. Beyond the platform was a huge trailer, which had surely functioned as Luke’s dressing room, and which now sat idling in the night, sending its silvery exhaust up into an open window of moonlight. And beyond that were at least twenty massive trucks, a few of them bearing the logo of MO BILL SOUNDZ. Off to the side, a striped green- and-white tent had been pitched, and that was where we were herded, winding our way through teamsters and roadies and sound men and electricians, like a busload of tourists who’ve been brought by guides to gawk at the workers in a native factory.

  Inside the tent, a table had been set up, with seltzer, beers, Cokes, and huge plastic bowls of potato chips. So this was the Good Life! We milled around. The seltzer went fast; a few beers were opened. Luke, of course, was nowhere to be seen, nor was Wendy. That would happen later, if at all. They were in the dressing room / van, peeling off sweaty shirts, coming down from the nerve-shattering high of performing. As a kind of sacrificial lamb thrown to the celebrities, Danny Manning was sent into the visitors—tent, still holding his drumsticks, his gaunt face pale with exhaustion, his black suit soaked through in back, his eyes throbbing like little blue hearts. He was a sweet guy, but he looked a little shifty, like a card cheat. A diamond stickpin winked in the center of his hula-girl tie; his pocket-watch chain swung back and forth like a strand of drool.

  Danny hadn’t seen me since I was twelve or thirteen; I’d grown eleven inches, put on eighty pounds. When he saw me, I registered to him as someone he somehow knew.

  “Hey, Danny,” I said. “Billy Rothschild.”

  “Billy! You’re here!” he said, breathing his remarkable garlicky breath—he ate several cloves a day to ward off colds. He clutched my shoulders and shook me back and forth while he grinned wildly.

  “Good show, Danny,” I said.

  “How’s your mom, Billy? How’s the lovely Esther?”

  “Still lovely. Is Luke coming out soon?”

  “Who knows, man. He doesn’t tell me shit. Never has and never will. Some things never change, huh?”

  “I’m hoping to see him.”

  “The thing is? You just did. You saw the very best of him. He was so fucking on tonight. Some of those songs—they never sounded better. I was beating my drums and crying. On ‘Trust Fund Mama’? and ‘Mushroom Cloud’? So where’s your mom? Still in the same old place?”

  I was about to say yes, but then I remembered that Danny hadn’t seen my mother in nearly ten years, and to him the same old place was our walkup on Sullivan Street, with the catfight air shaft, the jade plants the size of armchairs, the onion-skin Oriental runners, the stained-glass panes in the French doors.

  “No, she’s in the country now.”

  “No shit?” “No shit, Danny. She gardens, she sews….”

  “Ah, that’s beautiful, man. My old lady does all that shit. Very life affirming. She just lays out that steady four-four time and I can go as crazy as I want. That’s what you need in an old lady—someone to put down that steady beat, just like laying brick.”

  Just then, his eyes left me to scan the room, and when they returned, for a moment’s farewell, the light had already vanished from them. I was used to the seduction of show-business types, that way they have of overwhelming you with their undivided attention one minute and blowing you off the next. Depending on these people was like trying to garden in a place where the sun shines brilliantly fifteen minutes a day. I knew how to not take it personally, for the most part.

  “You gonna be around?” he asked, backing off.

  “Sure. I’m right here.”

  “Great to see you, Billy. Tell your mother to stay in touch.”

  “Where do you live?” I asked, but Danny had already turned and was heading toward Martin Sheen, and he didn’t hear me.

  I lingered in the VIP tent for more than an hour, without a sign or even a rumor of Luke. The rest of the band came in, and so did Wendy—she waved briefly at me but was engrossed with Carly Simon and someone who I suddenly recognized was David Byrne. I stepped out, telling myself I wanted to take a look at the concert area, to see if the crowd was still lingering, the way they do in St. Peter’s long after the Pope has gone inside.

  I could tell they were still there as soon as I was under the dome of stars. I could hear the voices. I walked to the edge of the stage and peeked out. Hundreds of tents had been pitched and others were going up. Fires burned. Someone threw a log on a nearby flame and it shot up an explosion of dark orange sparks. The smell of food cooking. No one wanted to leave, and besides, there was nowhere to go—the next ferry sailed at daybreak, and even the most enterprising of the islanders probably wouldn’t be shuttling passengers in the middle of the night. It was a tent city for Luke, just like the old days.

  I hadn’t bothered to try and get into Dad’s trailer. Two security guards languished in front of it, wearing black T- shirts, the oil in their Afros glistening in the moonlight. They eyed me when I first walked past them—these guys get bored, of course, and many of them would appreciate it if you tried to get away with something—and now as I returned to the tent they looked me over again. Over the years hanging around the carefully patrolled outskirts of my father’s life, I had perfected a kind of nod that seemed somehow to convey the following information: I have a right to be here; No you may not
help me, I know exactly where I am going; We have already been through this and there’s no need to do so again; and I just might have enough pull to get you fired. I gave them this nod and they rocked back on their heels.

  Just then, however, the door to the trailer opened. A V of bright light poured out, whitening the grass, the tops of the guards—paratrooper boots. And then: Luke. He had changed into a Harvard sweatshirt (honorary degree ten years before) and a pair of jeans. He held a dark red apple in one hand, and with the other hand he stroked his chin, as if wondering whether or not he needed to shave. Now that he was visible, the guards became extra-vigilant. They immediately stood between Luke and me.

  “Luke!” I called, knowing I had but a moment.

  Did he know me at all? Luke had seen me often when I was a baby, he had even held me, fed me, without ever admitting he was my father, but still wanting to be near Esther. But finally my mother could tolerate his trying to worm out of paternity no longer. She cut off all contact, while he remembered her in songs, got richer off his harrowing, lovesick memories of her, and blasted off into the stratosphere, propelled further and further from anything resembling the terra firma of normal life by the booster rockets of fame and fame and fame, and by then whatever residual temptation she might have felt to see and to love him again was made moot by his inaccessibility. When I began to insist to her that she help me know my father, she had no better idea of how to reach him than the average fan.

  Yet the curiosity I felt was more than idle wondering. It was subject to that sorrowful alchemy of the emotions: the more it was denied, the stronger it grew. Once I knew who my father was, I burned to see him. I began dreaming of him sometime shortly after Esther told me his name, and by the time I had a little Benedictine fringe of hair around my dick I was in a rapture of my own fatherlessness. Everything broken or unsatisfactory in my life was explained by Luke’s abandonment of me. Tears on my pillow, as the song goes. Over the years, I had written to him, sent him pictures of myself, hunted down his ever-changing private phone number, nabbed him once backstage at Madison Square Garden, once at the Nassau Coliseum, and once again, most recently, at Antoine’s restaurant in New Orleans, where I caught him eating crayfish with Allen Toussaint, and where two elderly but athletic waiters blocked my path to the table and whisked me out into the humid, dank night before I could say a word.