Low Down: Junk, Jazz, and Other Fairy Tales From Childhood

by A. J. Albany

  Bad guys, it seemed, were everywhere. The only difference was how up front they were about it. As I sat waiting, I recalled that the sun had been shining in Dad’s face. I knew it was so, because it had reflected off his steely curls when his head was hanging down. He hadn’t even seen where Wumplebottom had his hands. I felt vaguely relieved. After that day, all office visits ceased. I went to Gram’s for a short time, and Dad disappeared, saying simply, “I have to cool it for a while, okay?”

  “Why ask me?” I thought. Kids have no say in their lives. When we were reunited, Dad never spoke of that day. Things were soon back to normal, whatever normal was within the twisted walls of our life.

  is that all there is?

  As a child, I tried to adhere to the same simple philosophy that many children have. I did my best to find love in some form, even when it appeared to be absent, and I tried to seek out beauty, though it wasn’t often present in any traditional sense. I found that it was always best to keep my thoughts private and attempted to avoid situations that had a potential for conflict. This last credo would prove particularly challenging. It was never wise to provoke or even engage in conversation with my dad after he had fixed. If you left him alone and buried your nose in a book, he would weather his high with only a few random outbursts that he usually directed at himself. Often his ranting would manifest itself in the form of a one-sided battle with an invisible foe I always assumed was the Devil. “You’re not God—I know who you are,” he’d yell, pointing at the air before him. My book would begin to slip out of my hands from the amount of sweat I’d shed over the possibility that Satan was in the room with us.

  He’d then go over to the piano and bang out some dissonant chords repeatedly, stopping at times to tell me how much he loved me or how much he hated the cold fucking

  world. Unfortunately, when we both lived with my grandmother, as we occasionally did, she was not able to ignore these drug interludes. Dad would emerge from the bedroom with a dull and distant, totally unfamiliar expression. As much as I warned her against it, Gram felt compelled to start in on him, tsk-tsking with her dark, agonized eyes and sad gray head. “Look at yourself. My God, my God.” I’d tug furiously on her sleeve, beseeching her silence.

  “Fuck your God, and fuck you,” he’d slur, his mouth set in an ugly scowl. Things would escalate rapidly, and he’d say stuff that I understood to be totally contrary to his true nature. When straight, he was the quintessential loving, worshipful Italian son.

  One night, Gram went for a full frontal assault. Dad had been peeling an apple and was still holding the knife. “Why don’t you just kill me?” she wailed at him, beating her chest.

  “Maybe I should,” Dad answered, taking two steps toward her, waving the knife. That was it. I jumped in front of Gram, horrified, and prepared to die. “You stay away from her—I hate you!”

  Gram grabbed my arm and swung me around to face her. “Amy, don’t you dare speak to your father that way!” What was this? I thought, totally mystified. I looked back and forth between the two of them, and they looked at me as though I’d had an inappropriate fit in the middle of a church picnic.

  Some kids would be much better off without the added confusion of an adult point of view. It destroys the purity of their world. Perhaps Gram and Dad found some bizarre contentment in these exchanges. I walked into the bedroom and put Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is?” on the record player.

  the bakers

  For a short period of time, Dad assigned us a new surname. For half of 1969, we became Amy and Joe Baker. From what I could piece together, he’d given the name of a local drug dealer to the authorities to avoid jail time and feared reprisals.

  My father would’ve gone to any lengths to avoid prison. At the age of twenty, he was arrested on drug charges and sent to Riker’s Prison. On the day he began serving sentence, he was given what’s known as a “blanket job.” Seven men got him alone in the corridor, threw a blanket over his head, and proceeded to sexually assault him. He spent five days in the prison’s hospital ward, only to be released into the same situation. Apparently, this is America’s remedy for reforming young addicts. Having survived this ordeal, and frequently reliving it in his mind, he found the idea of being locked up particularly unbearable. Had I been in his shoes, I’d have ratted out the Christ child and many others to avoid jail time. However, since he was a decent and loyal guy at heart, his singing only added a new demon to his host of others. We would be sitting having a meal when suddenly he’d freeze, a forkful of food halfway to his mouth, and say: “What are you looking at? I’m not a fink.”

  I’d do my best to ignore these outbursts. I knew they were connected to the fact that I now had to write “Amy Baker” on all my school papers. Though supposedly hiding, we never moved apartments or switched hair colors. Only the last name changed. All this led to my first serious bout of paranoia. I took to looking over my shoulder while walking, waiting to be abducted, at the very least, by some angry, faceless con. After five months or so, word came that the drug dealer in question had come to a nasty end, courtesy of a shiv in the stomach. Though pleased to be an Albany again, I never got over an intense feeling of unease that lives ever vigilant on the back of my neck.

  no brakes

  It was the tail end of summer, late one afternoon, when I found myself in the back of a brand-new Dodge Dart convertible. Dad was next to me, his friend Vinnie drove, and the great Terry Southern was the front-seat passenger. The Stones’ “Satisfaction” was on the radio, and Dad, possessed by Terpischore, the muse of dance, stood up and danced in the backseat as we flew around some hilly part of East L.A. They were all high and whooping it, getting big kicks out of small things. Vinnie suddenly announced, “Shit, the brakes are out!” I started to notice that we were sailing along at an accelerated speed, and Vinnie was whiter than usual, but Dad and Mr. Southern only laughed. I decided that their laughter would cheat death, and though nervous, I felt exhilarated. Now we were getting air when we came off the hills, and hell if Dad wasn’t still standing there hoofing it, snapping his fingers and rolling his shoulders, a cigarette dangling between serenely smiling lips. After we ran a couple of red lights, with Vinnie laying on the horn, Mr. Southern started reciting, “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death . . .” Dad reached forward and pulled hard on the hand brake to the right of Vinnie’s knee. The smell of burning tires was intense as we came to a halt at the top of the sidewalk, just grazing a bus bench. Dad’s upper body was in the front seat, his long legs in the air, while Vinnie sat with his head against the wheel and Mr. Southern said, “Joe get those boats out of my face.” My heart was pounding madly, my mind wild with images of being mangled, when these thoughts were suddenly banished by their laughter and the steady defiance of the Stones, still playing on the radio. Dad righted himself and grabbed me reassuringly. “You okay, baby? That was exciting, wasn’t it?”

  Vinnie was bugged because he’d scraped some paint off the right side of his brother’s new car, but other than that, no one was hurt, and thankfully, the police didn’t show. Mr. Southern said something about being lucky, and maybe they should “go bet on the ponies.” A call was made, and after a while Vinnie’s girl showed up and I was dropped off at Gram’s. The three of them went off in search of a new adventure with their female chauffeur in tow.

  As I sat with my head on my grandmother’s lap, breathing in the strong warmth that always surrounded her, I had a sad epiphany: I wanted to be a guy. Women could shout from podiums, rack up college degrees, burn their bras, and build their muscles, but they’d never possess “it.” “It” being man’s capacity for a certain swaggering joy, a supremely liberated confidence that is rarely deflated by the opinions of others. It’s those inborn coglioni, or nuts, that come with the knowledge that you are the chosen gender and will always rule the world.

  replay

  There is a point where love of music can give way to unhealthy obsession. I would (and still can) listen t
o the same song one hundred, two hundred times in a row easily—not necessarily the whole song, sometimes just the introduction, a solo, the bridge, et cetera. My hand would hover nervously over the record needle, or fingers tapping on the rewind button, desperate to hear it again and again. This habit was not driven by pleasure as much as obsession. It was a necessity that the song not end. As long as it continued, I was somehow safe from all enemies, both real and imagined, whoever they were at the time. I’ve spent nine or ten hours at a stretch doing this. At the age of eight, there were a few days when I decided the key to my salvation lay in the bridge of “You Do Something to Me” as sung by Marlene Dietrich.

  On one particular day, Dad was having an ugly fight with a girlfriend, Jackie, over matters of dope and sex so lurid that I felt my head would explode if I heard another word. I turned up the stereo to its maximum capacity and pressed my forehead into the tattered speaker grille. With eyes closed, one hand poised atop the record arm, I listened to the soothing voice of Dietrich, pouring lazy as honey over the beauty of Cole Porter. I was just beginning to feel at ease when Jackie rushed over, snatched the record away, and sent it sailing out the window. Something so sacred hurled to its death like a cheap Frisbee. I guess it felt similar to someone punching you full force when you’re deep in the middle of a favorite dream. “What is wrong with your fucking kid? She’s as crazy as you are!” I drank in the calm air of divine justice, for I knew Jackie had just stepped over the line. Dad lunged at her with assured grace and grabbed her blue-black hair like an Apache dancer, dragging her through the door, down the hall, and out of our lives. I was sitting with my hands over my ears and my head in my knees when Dad lifted me in his arms and began to sing: “Let me live ’neath your spell, do do that voodoo that you do so well . . .” Over and over he sang, and I quietly rejoiced that we were both as mad as each other.

  i, spartacus

  Dad signed up for the methadone program in January 1970, and a visit to the clinic became part of his daily routine. On the weekends, when I didn’t have school, I’d travel with him from Gram’s, where we were once again living, to a clinic in the San Fernando Valley that seemed a hundred miles away. It appeared that people were sent to the farthest, most inconvenient place possible—perhaps the system’s way of saying: “We know you’re desperate for your dose, and we’re going to bust your chops about it just because we can.” One married couple Dad knew, Mary and Joe, had to bus all the way out to Pomona from Hollywood for their methadone. A month into this daily nightmare on the not-so-rapid transit system, Mary became very ill and was admitted to UCLA Medical Center with some rare form of lupus. Her husband, Joe, then had to travel from Hollywood, to Pomona, to the hospital in Westwood. After a week or so, he was chipping in order to cut down on the Pomona trips, but was soon found out and terminated from the program. Joe started borrowing a car from a sympathetic neighbor to make the ride to visit Mary, which worked out well until the day he crashed while driving loaded and was brought in DOA to the same hospital as his wife. She didn’t last too long after that, and it was just as well. The medical center was getting ready to kick her out anyway, for nonpayment of bills.

  One overcast Sunday found Dad in an exceptionally joyful, mischievous mood as we hung around the clinic waiting room. The night before, we’d watched Spartacus, one of his favorite movies, on the late show. When you needed to escape life’s rough edges for a few hours, nothing could beat seeing a great film. Most everyone around us looked understandably miserable. If this was how they spent Saturday, chances were their lives were none too bright and breezy. Dad recognized a couple of the guys there, not surprisingly both musicians, and they embarked on a loud and boisterous conversation about film music scores. The exasperated-looking woman behind the reception desk slid back the glass divider and, glaring at Dad, yelled, “Hey! Pipe down, you, you—what is your name?” Dad looked at her with mock surprise, then jumped up on his chair, shouting, “I am Spartacus!”—at which both of his acquaintances and, incredibly, two complete strangers followed suit. There were a total of five madmen standing tall on fiberglass chairs, beating their chests or hands on hips, yelling “I am—Spartacus!” Dad looked down at me and winked, smiling with his pearly Clark Gable dentures, and I thought he was the world’s biggest star, far too big for the galaxy to contain. The gruff receptionist, not overly impressed by this scene, and probably accustomed to bizarre behavior, shook her head, saying, “You is all crazy, that’s what you is.” She slammed the divider closed and went back to her magazine. A buzz that felt like hope ran through the place, and now almost everyone, except for those too sick, was laughing. It was the power of cinema in action. A movie could turn a meth clinic into a great coliseum, where all the junkies were transformed into mighty gladiators, even if only for one wild moment.

  valentine

  In January 1970, Dad and I moved into a little studio apartment on Gramercy Place. Things seemed to be looking up until Dad got busted on Valentine’s Day for some probation violation.

  Early on the evening of the fourteenth, I was waiting for him to return from the store. We were planning a Valentine’s party for just us two broken-down sweethearts. I was listening to Fats Waller’s “Fat and Greasy,” which was feeling-good music, as opposed to Billie singing “What’s New,” which I’d play when I was low. Anyway, I was looking out the window for Dad when I spotted a cop car and an unmarked vehicle with two thinly disguised narcs inside. The uniforms would look up at the window occasionally, but the narcs stared straight ahead. Half an hour they sat, but in our neighborhood, stakeouts were a common sight, so I didn’t give it much thought.

  Then, up the drive sauntered my father. His walk was most musical and swinging, like all his gestures. He was carrying a bag and looking up at the window, starting to wave, when he spotted the cops and they spotted him. They jumped out, grabbed his hand, still midwave, pulled it down between his legs, pulled his other hand up between his legs, and cuffed him that way—like a contortionist. They were pushing him into the back of the unmarked car just as I got outside. He was looking at me, yelling, “Everything’s okay!”—very unconvincing. I looked at the ground at all the little things that had spilled out of his bag. Little candy hearts with sayings like GROOVY, KISS ME, et cetera, hot dogs, a couple of Yoo-Hoo chocolate drinks, and a card. The illustration on the card was classic liquor store art, with a cartoon guy who looked like Mr. Magoo, with a big red nose, striped prison garb, and a ball and chain with hearts around it. It said: “I’m just a prisoner of your love.” I reached down for it, but an officer grabbed me from behind. His mistake. I scratched, spit, and punched, trying to get my hands on that card, to no avail. Things become vague after that. I think I had a major asthma attack, as I was inclined to do under duress. At that point in my life, I had seen a few fairly nasty things, but to this day, the thought of that card can cause me more pain, and make me cry more deeply, than all the loss and sorrow in the world. After Dad went down, they decreased his methadone dose from ninety to ten milligrams a day as “punishment.” Of course all that did, besides making him sick, was force him to supplement—and he was off again.

  tunnel rats

  In 1970, the war in Vietnam was an obvious concern for anyone who was half conscious at the time. I remember reading a harrowing piece in Life magazine on the Tunnel Rats of Cu Chi. The Tunnel Rats were American Special Forces who had the undesirable task of lowering themselves into holes they could just squeeze through, trying to secure the labyrinth of black tunnels, two hundred miles’ worth, that the Viet Cong were operating out of. The tunnels were often booby-trapped in a variety of horrible, imaginative ways, and the solider going into one had no idea what he’d find as he groped along in the narrow pitch darkness.

  I don’t know if it was my acute fear of the dark, my perverse interest in war, or both that riveted me to this particular article, but I know it haunted me endlessly. I cut it out and pasted it into my scrapbook entitled Bad Rotten Stuff. This article was a prim
e example of “things could be worse” for me. I could be a Tunnel Rat. When something screwed up occurred that couldn’t be placated by the sweetness of some old, conjured lyric or by thoughts of Jerry Lewis, I would turn 180 degrees in the opposite direction. A look at Bad Rotten Stuff usually shifted my desperate perspective. Strange sometimes, the incidents that send you over the edge when you’re young.

  Dad spent some time in the company of a girl named Ronda. I couldn’t say exactly, but I’d guess she was twenty or so, compared to Dad’s forty-six years. Perhaps forty-six is about the age when men begin to sense their mortality, and fear sets in regarding their waning appeal to the fairer sex. I don’t know.

  I do know that there was no outwardly obvious reason for Dad to take up with this girl. She wasn’t his type at all. She looked like a Manson follower—hairy and frumpy. Spaced out. Up to this point, I’d had a lot of exposure to the drug culture but not much exposure to sex. I wasn’t sure what people got up to in that arena, and I didn’t much care to find out.