by Lewis Shiner
“Do a double major. If you’re still not sold on Art History after your ba, you can renegotiate. Besides, we’ll be rich by then and you can do whatever you want.”
His utter confidence should have been charming, and she couldn’t explain why it had the opposite effect. “So between you and Kindred, you guys are going to make sure that I get to play at being an intellectual.”
“I don’t know where that bullshit is coming from, but it’s not from me. I’m not condescending to you about college. Your brain amazes me. You’re already at least twice as smart as I am, and by the time you get a PhD you’re not going to want to talk to an illiterate dropout like me.”
“You’re not illiterate. You read Matt Helm novels.” The joke, if she’d meant it as one, backfired, and she saw him withdraw into himself. “I’m sorry. That was not worthy of me. I don’t know what’s gotten into me today.”
“We’re growing apart,” Cole said.
It was like she’d fallen through a crack in the ice into freezing water. She was too stunned to keep walking. “Is that what you really think?” she said softly.
“You’re not that crazy about rock music. You’ve seen us what, twice since Gordo joined? I feel like you’re waiting for me to grow out of it. There’s no way that I’ve got any more college in my immediate future, maybe ever. The more successful the band gets, the more we’ll be away, and the more successful you get, the more tied you are to San Francisco.”
“We knew that from the start. And talked about it.”
“It’s different when it plays out in real life, though, isn’t it? You can’t pretend anymore that it’s not going to happen. You can’t keep putting off how you feel about it.”
Emotion was dialing up Cole’s volume. Madelyn awarded herself points for keeping her own voice down. “How do you feel about it?”
“I’m scared to death. I don’t want to lose you.”
“Oh, Cole.” Her mood broke and she moved into the circle of his arms, burying her face in his neck. “I will never leave you.”
His arms tightened around her, and in his silence she heard the other, unspoken possibility, that he could be the one to leave and still blame her for it, and now she was scared too, holding on, like he did, to escape the curse of self-consciousness and to be no more than two bodies in the October sunshine.
*
When the phone rang on the morning of Friday, the 13th of December, Dave seriously considered not answering. He’d been awake for an hour and a half and unable to get out of bed. He didn’t think he could bear any more bad luck.
He gave in on the fourth ring.
“I was wrong, okay?” the voice said. “Let’s get that out of the way to start with.”
“Hi, Sallie,” Dave said. “Nice to hear your voice.”
“Can we do it your way? Get all the guys from the first record, record it in New York, the same room, even, the whole megillah?”
“Me? Oh, I’m fine. An opening for you? Yes, I imagine I can find an opening for you.”
That got her to apologize and they spent the next half hour catching up. Her drummer boyfriend had been relieved of both positions. She blamed the failure of her second album on “too many upbeat songs” and assured him that would not be a problem this time. He told her about the Skip Shaw debacle, about scrounging for work even as the industry was exploding all around him.
“We need each other, Dave.” He didn’t say anything, just put his hand on his chest to try and make his heart slow down. “I want to be on the radio again. Can you get me on the radio again, Dave? Please?”
“You bring the songs,” he said, “I’ll bring the hit-making magic.”
He had barely calmed himself when Bill Graham called. “I’m not ready to do the Fillmore Records thing yet,” he said. “But I’ve got a band I think you should hear. They’re at the Fillmore West tonight, eight o’clock.”
*
Being Bill Graham, he made Dave pay for his own ticket. The band was called The Quirq, though Graham said they were trying to come up with something better. Dave liked what he heard. The problem was that their live show depended on a gimmick, a kind of musical high wire that they walked between the songs, apparently reinventing the path from one to the next every night. Dave didn’t see how to capture that drama on record.
He felt conflicted enough that he didn’t approach the band that night. He went home to bed, only to lie there with the melody to “Mariner” going through his head.
He went back for another listen on Saturday and then, while Terry Reid’s raspy voice filled the hall, he talked to the band backstage. The main singer went by the name of Cole and the others deferred to him in small but noticeable ways. He was handsome in a baby-faced, tragic way that Tiger Beat would have loved, if the band had been courting a different audience. Dave handed out his cards and was gratified that they knew his name.
“Here’s what I’m thinking,” Dave told them. “If I produce you, I’m not going to try to recreate your stage show. I think you’ve got an album’s worth of solid, hummable songs, and that’s what I would want to get out there. Then when people see you live, and those songs that they know from the record start to emerge from the jams, they’re going to go crazy.”
“Do you see us as a singles band?” Cole asked.
Dave shook his head. “What is it with you San Francisco types? What’s so wrong with having a hit single?”
“We’re from Texas,” Cole said, “and we’d love to have a hit single.”
*
The summer after Cole and Madelyn moved to San Francisco, Alex took a job loading trucks at the 7-Up bottling plant in Austin. The idea was his father’s—you needed to be 21 to work at a beer company, and a lot of the soft-drink logistics were the same. The work was brutal, mindless, leaving you too exhausted to think. Which was probably for the best.
Sunny was in Fort Worth, Joe was in Tupelo, Denise was in Denton, and Alex had the house to himself. He kept thinking that he heard music from Cole’s room, a couple of times so distinctly that he had to open the door and look in to prove himself wrong.
On weekends he’d go to Barton Springs, lie in the sun, and read The Brothers Karamazov, the Russian angst a good match for his mood.
In the fall he took second year Russian grammar, Russian conversation, and Russian literature in translation, along with Economics and Accounting. He rented Cole’s room to a bookish senior English major.
At first Cole phoned every week or two. Then, as things started to take off for him, every three weeks, then once a month. He didn’t blame Cole. Cole was the one with something to talk about: going to the Airplane Mansion, playing at the Fillmore, getting a record deal. Alex hated his own side of the conversation, how trivial it was, how utterly mundane. He didn’t want to trade places with Cole, he just wanted…
He didn’t know what he wanted.
*
As soon as Cole saw the envelope, he knew what it was. The return address was “US Selective Service Administration” and it was addressed to him at his parents’ house. His mother had enclosed it, unopened, inside a larger manila envelope. Madelyn, across the table from him, must have read it in his face. “What’s wrong?”
Cole opened it. He was to report for his pre-induction physical in downtown Dallas on Monday, December 23, at 8 in the morning. It would be his 19th birthday.
He handed the letter to Madelyn and watched her face go slack. “Dear God,” she said. “What are you going to do?”
“You wanted to go back to Dallas for Christmas. I guess we’re going.”
She came around the table to hold him. “They can’t take you,” she said. “You’re mine.”
“They take guys like me every day.”
They’d talked about it. Rumor had it that the government was about to institute a lottery system that would standardize the selection process. At the moment it was shrouded in mystery. Cole had not notified anyone that he’d dropped out, so he assumed ut had. He’d known th
e risk, and he’d put off dealing with it.
He woke up at three am with his mind racing. If he did pass the physical, crippled finger and all, it surely meant Vietnam. Since the Tet Offensive had begun in January, the war had burned through young soldiers’ lives like cord wood. Surely, he thought, with his brains and education they wouldn’t put him on the front lines.
Maybe he would live through it and come home and write about it. Songs, maybe a novel. Maybe Susan would finally be impressed with him.
Or, like Country Joe said, maybe he would come home in a box. Or missing an arm, and never play guitar again. Or paralyzed, impotent, deaf.
Once in Midland he’d found some partially incinerated frogs from the biology lab. The skin had burned away, leaving muscles and bones that had turned hard and brown. A napalmed body would look like that, he thought, and smell of cooked meat and gasoline.
He never made it back to sleep.
*
They flew to Dallas on the 21st. Cole had burrowed so deeply into himself that the outside world barely registered. Alex picked them up at Love Field and Cole recognized that he was happy to see them both. As for his own emotions, Cole couldn’t locate them.
Alex was driving his father’s Cadillac. Cole got in the back seat and they took Madelyn to her parents’ house. Cole carried her suitcase in and he and Alex said hello to her parents. Everyone was about as relaxed as if he had terminal cancer. When he kissed her goodbye, Madelyn gave him a worried look and he said, “It’ll be okay.”
At the Montoyas’ everyone gathered at the dinner table. Susan and Jesse were there, both parents, and Jimmy, who would start high school the next fall. Cole regaled them with stories of his budding fame, meeting Gordo at the Airplane mansion, playing the Fillmore West, traveling up and down the coast with the Dead, Moby Grape, and Country Joe, getting ready to go into Pacific Recorders in January to cut a demo with the guy who produced Sallie Rachel and Skip Shaw.
When he laid it out like that, he even impressed himself. Had he really come so far in six months? At the same time, he knew he was making an inventory of everything he stood to lose.
Later, as everyone headed off to bed, Jesse put a hand on his shoulder and said, “Let’s take a walk.”
The night was clear enough to see stars, the temperature in the forties. Despite his thrift-store pea coat, Cole couldn’t warm up. They headed toward the school playground down the street and Jesse lit a joint and handed it to Cole. “You haven’t been eating much, have you?”
“No,” Cole said.
“You trying for i-y?”
“What’s that?”
“Deferment for non-disabling medical condition. Underweight, overweight, high blood pressure.”
“I hadn’t really thought about it.”
Jesse stopped and faced him. “Think about it. You don’t want to go over there. Believe me on this.”
Cole had to look away from the intensity of his eyes. “I don’t want to go.”
“Your physical is Monday?” Cole nodded. “Don’t eat again between now and then. Drink a big glass of water before bed tonight and don’t drink again. Starting tomorrow afternoon, spit.”
“Spit?”
“Every time you think of it. When you’re in the bathroom, when you’re outside, keep spitting. You’ll dehydrate yourself.”
They got to the playground and sat on the merry-go-round. The green painted wood creaked when they sat and the cold burned through Cole’s jeans. They finished the joint in silence and then Cole said, “How bad was it?”
“I generally don’t talk about it. Talking about it makes it more real, you know? But I will say this. That fear you’ve been living with since you got the notice? You don’t have to say anything, I could see it the minute you walked in the door. It’s like that, only worse, and it never goes away. You can’t live like that, not without it changing you. It changes you into the kind of person who can function while being afraid a hundred percent of the time, and when you become that person, you can never stop being afraid again, because now being afraid is part of who you are. Down at the cellular level, down in your dna.
“When you’re scared all the time, you’re not really there. The way you haven’t really been here tonight. You learn to fake it. People think you’re normal, you’re hanging loose, you’re having fun, and inside your head you’re on point with an M-16, listening for a rustle in the grass or the snap of a twig.”
Jesse was quiet for half a minute, then he stood up. “Let’s go get you that glass of water.”
*
Cole let Madelyn drive him to the Selective Service office downtown. A tall gray building in a block of buildings just like it. He felt like an automaton. He kissed Madelyn without feeling. She said, “Call me as soon as you know anything,” and clung to him briefly. He got out and took the elevator upstairs.
A big room from another era, worn linoleum floor, plastic chairs. Thirty or forty other young men waited there for their names to be read out. Most of them were black, which struck Cole as odd, because he’d hardly seen any black people in Dallas in the time he’d lived there.
In another dingy room they stripped to their underwear and put their clothes in wire baskets, like at the swimming pool. A hippie with shoulder-length brown hair and drooping mustache had to explain to the sergeant that he wasn’t wearing underwear and was allowed to keep his bell-bottoms on. Blood pressure test, short arm and anal inspection, height and weight, urinalysis. Cole was so dehydrated that he couldn’t piss. Eventually he squeezed out a couple of drops and left the cup where he was told. Nobody said anything about it.
At one point a doctor said, “Ever have any problem with those feet?” Cole shook his head and the doctor walked on. Only later did he remember something about high insteps when he was a kid, and having to pick up marbles with his toes. Wait, he wanted to say, I do have problems, but it was too late.
Later they were lined up in a hallway, still in their underwear, the hippie standing next to him. “I’m on speed,” the hippie whispered. “My blood pressure is through the roof. I’m already as good as out of here.” He shifted from leg to leg with nervous energy. Cole stared at him. A few minutes later two men in uniform came and took the hippie away.
Finally he was alone in an office with a doctor who was reading from a clipboard. He had white hair and a lined face. “Jeffery Cole?”
Cole nodded.
“Height five-ten, weight one hundred and twenty-two pounds.” He looked Cole over.
“I’m six feet.”
The doctor said, “We measured you today at five-ten.” They had lied, Cole realized, because they knew what he was trying to do. “That’s still seriously underweight,” the doctor said. “High arches, injury to right middle finger. Let me see your hand.” Cole reached across the desk. The doctor put on a pair of glasses and gently examined Cole’s finger. He nodded, took the glasses off, and looked at Cole and smiled. “Yeah,” he said, “I think we can get you out.”
*
Cole dressed and rejoined his group and they were led to a room with elementary-school-style desks where he was given a written test to complete. He felt a grudging admiration for the way the test was put together. No matter how little education you had, it would be difficult not to pass. Along with basic math, the questions drew from auto mechanics, from farming, from gambling. As they finished, they handed their tests to a sergeant at a desk at the front of the room, who graded them while they waited. The room was overly warm, and Cole dozed until his name was called.
The desk sergeant handed Cole a piece of paper with the status of i-y stamped on it. He pointed to the door and said, “You’re free to go.” Then he paused and shook his head regretfully. “Outstanding intelligence test, I have to say.”
It was one in the afternoon. Cole went down to the street and found a pay phone. He called Madelyn and she screamed with joy when she heard the news. He felt like screaming too. He was only beginning to realize how completely his emotions h
ad shut down.
He called the Montoya house and told Alex’s mother. “Thank God,” she said. “Are you on your way home?”
“Madelyn’s coming for me.”
“See you soon.”
He crossed the street to Dickey’s, where he got a sliced brisket sandwich and potato chips and a big Coke and a wedge of cheddar cheese. He sat by the window to watch for Madelyn, and forced himself to eat slowly. Even so, his stomach had shrunken to where he couldn’t finish and he felt queasy.
Vietnam only accounted for part of his fear. Hiding under his desk in primary school, rehearsing for a nuclear attack. Living in Suez during the Cuban missile crisis, seeing a bomber flying low overhead and believing he was about to die. Hearing the news of the JFK assassination as a freshman in high school and realizing nobody was safe. He’d spent his entire life under the shadow of annihilation. How could he not have loved Bob Dylan, picked up a guitar, moved to San Francisco?
He was waiting at the curb when Madelyn pulled up in her parents’ station wagon. She jumped out of the car and ran to him and cried as she hugged him. “I was so scared,” she said.
“Me too,” Cole said. “Me too.”
The Montoyas, despite preparations to leave for Guanajuato the next day, had thrown together a surprise birthday party. A homemade banner said, sorry army you can’t have him. Susan held him tightly and said in his ear, “I’m so glad we didn’t have to have the Plan B party.”
“Was there a theme?” Cole asked.
“O Canada.”
Alex hugged him too. “Would have served you right, you fucking idiot, but I’m glad you got out.”
Jesse gave him a thumbs-up with one hand and flashed a peace sign with the other.
Much Bohemia was consumed, and Cole, dehydrated and undernourished, got drunk very quickly. No one seemed to mind, and he had little trouble convincing Madelyn to stay the night. They retired early, leaving the party to continue downstairs without them, and made love with exquisite tenderness.
