by Lewis Shiner
“Golf?” Cole said. He sounded like Joe had confessed to having sex with a goat.
“I’m learning.” He pantomimed a tee shot. “Future of this country gets decided on golf courses.”
“Is there a future?” Cole said. “I’ve been off the commune since September and from everything I’ve seen and heard it’s like we hit some kind of wall. Nixon’s like some first-grader who can’t stop lying, even though the lies get crazier and crazier. And somehow he’s still President. There’s this gas crisis thing. All the communes are falling apart. School busing is killing integration, whatever Nixon didn’t already kill. The freaks are doing coke and heroin instead of lsd. All our heroes are dead or junkies or sellouts. How did everything go so completely to hell in four years?”
“Y’all couldn’t follow through,” Joe said, taking another golf swing to demonstrate. “Being against the war was the only thing all y’all could agree on, so once that was over, y’all went your separate ways.”
“You said you were against the war too. You smoke dope. Your hair is over your ears. What’s with all the us-versus-them attitude?”
“Because there ain’t no ‘us’ that I belong to anymore. I got nothing but respect for the men I fought with, but I ain’t no gung-ho Semper-Fi lifer. I was and am against the war, but being over there, hearing about y’all burning flags and cheering on the vc, well, I didn’t like it. It felt disloyal. I feel older than you now, years older, but still not as old as my parents. I’m a chronologically displaced person, is what I am.”
“Maybe there’s a camp where they could put people like you.”
“There’s nobody like me.” He’d said it as a joke, but it came out serious. Cole didn’t have a comeback for that, which maybe was what Joe had been shooting for.
“Let’s go to the house,” Joe said, “grab a beer or two. You’ll stay the night, won’t you?”
“If it’s no bother.”
“It’s an empty nest, plenty of guest rooms. We’ll open up some canned green beans for you for dinner.”
*
People had a way, Cole had noticed, of telling the truth about themselves. When Joe had first talked about being older than him, Cole had thought he was being dramatic. As the evening wore on, it felt increasingly true. The jokes he made were more calculated than impulsive. He only listened with half an ear. Late that night, when he’d gotten a few beers into him and his parents had gone to bed, and he told a story about a five-day R&R in Bangkok where he’d rented a bar girl for the duration—the closest he came to talking about the war—even then he was watchful. Susan’s ex, Jesse, had been the same way. The friendship that he and Joe had once had was gone. In its place they had shared history and a certain residual goodwill.
In the morning, Joe insisted on driving him to US 75, even if it did burn up a little gasoline. Cole convinced him to detour past Elvis’ birthplace, and it was as uninspiring as Joe had promised. At the highway, as Cole unloaded his stuff, Joe handed him a folded sheet of paper.
“What’s this?” Cole asked.
Joe looked embarrassed. “Not sure yet. Maybe you can tell me.” Cole started to unfold it and Joe waved his hand. “Not now. Read it tonight or something.”
Cole was lucky and caught a vw bus in less than an hour, driven by a longhaired couple on their way to Marin County, as if the last seven years had never happened. Cole read Joe’s poem in the back seat. Or maybe it was song lyrics, because Cole could hear a melody. The title was “Could Have Been Me” and the verses were there-but-for-fortune snapshots of various destitute and broken people that the narrator had avoided becoming. Then the chorus turned it around and talked about how he could have been the man of his true love’s dreams. “Of all the men I could have been/Why couldn’t I be yours?”
Interesting, he thought.
*
Cole made it to Dallas at dusk the next day, having splurged the night before on a room at a Motel 6 on the edge of Little Rock rather than freeze to death. The Montoyas were just back from Guanajuato, Alex with Callie, Susan with her new fiancé, a soccer-playing lawyer she’d met while in law school at ut. Jimmy, who was now a ut freshman and staying in Alex’s old room at the Castle, had a willowy blonde girlfriend of his own named Amanda. All the cuddling as they sat around the den made Cole feel even more miserable over Madelyn, which in turn led him to more and more Bohemia.
Though he wanted to like Callie for Alex’s sake, he found her needy and quarrelsome. Maybe he was jealous. She focused on Alex as if the rest of them were only phantoms. She kept touching him in intimate ways, nipping his ear lobe, resting her hand low on his stomach. When she disagreed with him, she did it at full intensity. She kissed him lingeringly before she went off to bed.
By 11 he and Alex and Alex’s father, the last men standing, reconvened in the dining room for more pumpkin pie and whipped cream. And more Bohemia. Cole was not the only one feeling its effects.
“Can I ask a question?” Montoya said to Cole.
“You can ask me anything you want, any time.”
“Are you a Communist now?”
“Papa, for god’s sake,” Alex said.
“It’s okay,” Cole said.
“Alex marching against the government,” Montoya said, “coming home from New York full of Black Panthers and power to the people, you on a commune for four years, it seems like a fair question.”
“People in Wytheville were always asking us the same thing. If you’re talking about all-out Soviet-style collectivism, no, it wasn’t like that. For one thing, we only had one very old tractor. Stalin would have been mortified. On the other hand, one of our basic principles was, ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,’ which is from Marx.”
“Actually,” Alex said, “Marx got it from Louis Blanc, who was a French socialist. ‘De chacun selon ses facultés, à chacun selon ses besoins.’”
“If you say so.” Cole understood that it had been his own choice to bail out of college. He’d sold his education down the river for fame and fortune, and the check had bounced. Ever since, though, when the conversation turned intellectual, whether it was Sugarfoot going on about Thoreau and Emerson, or Madelyn with her French post-structuralists, whatever the hell that meant, it got his back up, made him feel like a bumpkin.
“What about ‘a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work’?” Montoya said. “That was Franklin Roosevelt. I don’t see anything wrong with that.”
“The problem,” Alex said, “is that it leaves it up to the bosses to decide what’s fair. Blanc’s idea is that you should decide for yourself.”
“And if you’re greedy?” Montoya said.
“The hope is,” Alex said, “if there’s enough to go around, greed will eventually disappear.”
“But there isn’t enough,” Montoya said. “There’s not enough oil, not enough of anything. Like in that Limits to Growth book. And your farm, it went under.”
“We had some bad luck,” Cole said. “We were on our own, we didn’t have anybody to help us through the crisis.”
“If it had been a lot of individual farms,” Montoya said, “instead of one big one, would all of you have gone under?”
“Because of the salmonella? No. But I don’t know that individual farms would ever have gotten off the ground in the first place.”
“Well, I wasn’t there,” Montoya said. “But I’m willing to bet that some of them would have. The ones where the people worked the hardest. If that’s true, it means that combining everything into one big farm made you weaker, not stronger.”
“Strong like who?” Alex said. Up to that point it had been a theoretical discussion, and now something had clearly wound Alex up. “Strong like Hitler? Strong like Nixon’s National Guard? Survival of the strong, and death to the weak and unlucky? Where’s the compassion in that? Where’s the humanity? If the price of having a few individual farms survive is having a lot of individual farms fail, maybe that’s too high a price. Maybe it’s
better that we all go down together than that a few of us make it by standing on the dead bodies of everyone else.”
Cole was shocked into silence, more by the force of Alex’s emotion than by what he’d said. Montoya seemed just as shocked, but then he reached out and took Alex’s hand and said, “You make me very proud, son.”
Cole’s eyes stung and he had to look away.
“I learned it from you, Papa,” Alex said. He was still full of bloodshed and defiance. “You taught me, ‘ponte en la piel del otro.’”
“Did I say that?”
“Only about a million times. And maybe there would be enough, if we didn’t all want so much.” Alex’s face had gone wistful, as if he no longer believed the words even as he said them.
“‘The Skin of the Other,’” Cole said. “That’d be a good title for a film.”
“Yeah, well,” Alex said. “Somebody else is going to have to make it.”
Montoya had also picked up on the weird tone of resignation in Alex’s voice. “What do you mean?”
Alex took a deep breath. “I’m quitting film school. Callie and I are moving to Dallas. I’m going to go to work for you, if you’ll have me, and she and I are going to get married this summer.”
Alex had just handed his father the gift he had always wanted. Montoya sat as if the slightest movement would turn it into fairy dust. Cole, for his part, didn’t like the resignation in Alex’s voice.
Then Montoya couldn’t stand it anymore. He got to his feet and held out his arms. Alex stood up and let himself be pulled into the embrace. Montoya kissed him on the cheek and seemed in danger of crushing him. “If I’ll have you? Are you crazy? This is the happiest day of my life. I feel like waking up your mother to tell her the good news.”
“Don’t, Papa, please. There’s time enough tomorrow. Right now it’s late and we’re all tired.”
“I couldn’t possibly go to sleep now,” Montoya said. “I may be up all night.”
“Not me,” Alex said, and stepped away.
Cole hugged Alex too. “Felicitaciones,” he whispered. “You just completely blew my mind.”
“Yeah,” Alex said with a tired smile. “We’ll talk.” He went upstairs.
“Another beer?” Montoya said. Cole nodded and brought two in from the garage. “Did you know about this?” Montoya asked. He was as excited as a kid in a room full of puppies.
“Complete surprise,” Cole said. “I wish I could take credit, but I had nothing to do with it.”
“I can find you a job too, if you wanted. Maybe something creative, in the advertising department. You could live here until you got on your feet. Then I’d have both my oldest sons together with me. That would make me even happier than I already am.”
“Maybe another time,” Cole said, moved yet again by Montoya’s unencumbered love. “I thought I might go back to Austin, try and put another band together.”
“You need a place to stay? Your old room is available. Same deal as before, free rent if you do the handyman work.”
Cole took both of Montoya’s hands. “I would like that very much.” Madelyn would haunt that room, he knew, but in his present mood he wasn’t sure that was a bad thing. He remembered how he’d felt when he first saw the house, how he thought it would give him a firm rock to stand on. “If only my father had been more like you.”
Montoya shook his head. “What Alex was saying about getting in the skin of the other guy, I hope someday you can manage to do that with your father. We all of us do the best we can. You may not believe that now, but it’s the truth.”
Cole felt too much tenderness and gratitude to argue. “You want to look at some cards?”
“You must be exhausted.”
“I’m good for a while longer.”
Montoya sat back in his chair and smiled. “Deal ’em up.”
*
Cole took Jimmy and Amanda up on their offer of a ride to Austin. It was Sunday morning, January 6, and the spring semester started on Monday. They rode down in Jimmy’s new 1974 bmw model 2002.
Jimmy had come into his own in the years since Cole had last seen him. Handsome as a movie star, long, dark blonde hair and a high forehead, dressed in a uniform of rayon Hawaiian shirts, jeans, red high-top All-Stars, and St. Mark’s blazer, even in the cold of January. He had the self-confidence of somebody twice his age, and yet seemed flattered that Cole wanted to hang out with him. He was in Plan II, as was Amanda, Jimmy thinking about photojournalism, Amanda about sociology. She had a way of combing her hair back with her long fingers and long, long red fingernails that Cole found suggestive and extremely distracting.
Jimmy had an 8-track player, and as soon as he started the car, the fiddle-based hippie swing of Willie Nelson’s “Stay All Night” came blasting out of the speakers in the rear deck.
“You heard any of this?” Jimmy asked as he backed out. “Any of this outlaw country stuff?”
“I guess I heard a little,” Cole said, leaning forward. “Waylon Jennings, Kristofferson, those guys?”
“Forget them. Austin is where it’s happening. The Armadillo, Broken Spoke, Soap Creek, Threadgill’s. It’s the Texas guys that are driving this. Willie, Jerry Jeff Walker, Michael Murphey, Townes Van Zandt. You should come out with me some night, check it out.”
If Amanda, who was kneeling sideways in the passenger seat, had a reaction to Jimmy’s “me” instead of “us,” Cole didn’t see it.
“Do you play?” Cole asked.
“Nah, Alex got all the musical talent. I’m not a creator, I’m a consumer. I mean, somebody’s got to buy your records, right?”
“Not so far,” Cole said. He hadn’t meant it to come out quite so harshly.
As a consumer, Jimmy had a different threshold of saturation than Cole. He was happy to let the tapes cycle through repeatedly, whereas once was enough for Cole, especially with Nelson’s nasal whine. He had to keep reminding Jimmy to switch them out.
Of the albums Jimmy played on the three-hour drive, Cole was most impressed with Murphey’s, especially a song called “Backslider’s Wine,” full of powerlessness and regret that got inside Cole’s defenses. It made him think of Tyler and the Wagon Wheel and Corrina and poor, dead Jerry who’d always wanted him to have a hat.
The landscape was as flat and barren as ever, with some of the landmarks gone. I-35 went straight through Waco now, and the few formerly empty miles between Round Rock and the outer fringes of Austin had been taken over by shopping centers and housing developments, power lines and fast food restaurants. They were building express lanes on an upper deck to ease the congestion downtown.
Cole was surprised by how much Austin felt like home, despite his only having lived there for nine months. As they drove up the steep incline of 15th Street, the memories flooded in. Walking in Pease Park with Madelyn, playing the Deke house with The Other Side. Discovering the Castle on that first trip with Alex and his father, making love to Madelyn for the first time, the aroma of Sunny’s Dal Biryani in the kitchen. Madelyn, Tupelo Joe, Denise, Madelyn, Madelyn, Madelyn.
Jimmy pulled into the driveway of the Castle and cut Jerry Jeff off in the middle of a drunken and decidedly inferior version of “Backslider’s Wine.” “All ashore,” Jimmy said, “that’s going ashore.”
Cole hesitated at the steps, the Silvertone in one hand, the knapsack in the other. Jimmy, at the front door, picked up on his feelings. “You’ve got your keys, right?” Cole nodded. “Your bed’s made up with clean sheets. You should be set. If you need anything, holler.” He glanced inside the house and from the angle of his gaze Cole guessed he was watching Amanda climb the stairs. “Well. You might want to give us a while before hollering.” He smiled as he turned away, leaving the door ajar.
Walking through that door, Cole knew, would subject him to the ambush of memory, to countless reminders of failure, to the claustrophobia of having nowhere else to go, to the lonely comfort of self-pity.
Take your comfort, he thought, where you fi
nd it.
He crossed the threshold and climbed the stairs. In his room he unpacked his meager wardrobe, freshly washed at the Montoyas’, and put his new albums and paperbacks on the shelves. It was 2:17 in the afternoon. His hunger and thirst could wait.
He took the Silvertone down to the basement and stowed it on a top shelf. As promised, La Pelirroja was there in its hard-shell case, along with the rest of what Madelyn had sent. He knew she was not the vengeful sort, still he was relieved when he took La Pelirroja out and saw that it was intact. He put on the new set of Darco strings that were in the case and tuned it up, sitting on the gray metal folding chair there in the basement. The rich, pure sound of La Pelirroja, after four years of the Silvertone, was a revelation. Without conscious intent, his fingers found a G7 and he sang:
Golden light comes streaming in
On golden hair and molten skin
In for a penny, he thought, in for a pounding. Why settle for a little pain when you can have a lot? Though he had to fumble for some of the words, they came to him in the end, and then he played “Cielito lindo,” making a liar of himself when he sang, “Canta y no llores.”
*
By five Cole had unpacked everything. Meager as they were, it felt like drunken excess to have so many possessions again. He changed the strings on the Strat and verified that his amp still worked, then he hooked up his suitcase stereo and played the Wailers. By that time Jimmy and Amanda had emerged. Jimmy took him around to meet his new roommates. Chip, in Joe’s old room, short, dark, and athletic. John, downstairs, a senior pre-med student who already looked short of sleep.
Jimmy insisted on taking Cole to dinner, and Cole, in keeping with his mood, suggested Matt’s El Rancho. As they drove through downtown, Cole saw young people everywhere, panhandling on the corners, driving around in vw microbuses, lined up outside the crumbling Paramount Theater. Austin, Jimmy explained, had become the Land that Time Forgot, where hippies still roamed wild in their natural habitat, subsisting on cannabis and Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill wine.
