Low Down: Junk, Jazz, and Other Fairy Tales From Childhood
Page 13
Dad and Jean had been together for a year or so before his habit outran her almost infinite patience and she broke things off. I’d asked if he was devastated when she left. “Well, I think the dope sort of anesthetizes you emotionally. I was hurt, but my relationship with drugs was still solid, so I never felt completely abandoned.” Thirty-five years later, they were reunited, like some made-for-TV movie. Whenever I had the occasion to visit them during school holidays, I’d drag my poor father to CBGB or the Mudd Club, where he’d stand in back wearing the pained expression of a man before the firing squad, praying for earplugs to go with his blindfold. He played piano at the Hors d’Oeuvrerie, on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center, for almost a year, and complained that the crowds there were no more appreciative than the bums at the old Hollywood dives. Dad contended that the restaurant was always chilly because of the wealthy patrons who were “cold as ice, the way most people with money are.” After a while Dad slipped back into using again for reasons known only to him, and he and Jean parted ways as they had so many years before.
I kept in touch with Jean over the years. She never had children, never married. She died of lung cancer about five years ago, alone in her apartment. In one of our last conversations, she said in her smoker’s baritone, “Your dad was always the only one for me. I loved that son of a bitch.”
last dance
Children are fearless, their courage boundless. No longer a child, at fifteen I was a fearful teenager with a set of my own problems that overwhelmed me. Now that Dad needed me once more, after being kicked out by Jean and back on dope, it seemed unrealistic that I could take off just as I was starting high school and fly to New York, pull off his socks, tuck him in, and stroke his brow as I once had. Besides, I’d taken a weekend job, and the extra money it pulled in was helpful. Gram and I were living on $482 a month, old-age pension and child allowance combined. My job was going door to door soliciting funds for the erection of a new HOLLYWOOD sign to replace the dilapidated, grafittied old one. For a nominal donation a person could lay claim to owning a piece of the new Y, or whatever letter they cared to attach themselves to.
Before Jean broke off with Dad, she’d managed to secure him a small apartment at the Manhattan Plaza, a pretty nice building in a seedy area where musicians could live and pay minimal rent. I went to see him a couple of times. Each time I recognized him less and less. He’d grown thin and gray, slumped over from the pain of chronic arthritis. His eyes, which at one time had seemed to contain the entire cosmos to me, had faded into dull, colorless stones. Over the next decade, our relationship would be reduced to a sad series of 2:00 AM phone calls from Dad, sometimes pleading and at others threatening me to send him money I didn’t have. Much to my shame, the more desperate he became, the further I stepped back. I just couldn’t do it. I wasn’t even sure what “it” might be.
In 1987 a book of William Claxton’s photographs was published. It included a haunting picture of my dad, and a nice mention from his old acquaintance Terry Southern in the afterword. I mailed Dad a copy, hoping it might inspire him. A few months later, in early 1988, Dad entered Roosevelt Hospital. I was on the plane going to see him when he died. At the time of his death, Dad hadn’t seen my mother for many years, yet they’d end up dying within six months of each other—two meteors on the same collision course. The day after his death, while packing up his apartment, I found—among used hypos, trash, broken glass, and a shoe-shine brush I’d made for him at age seven—the Claxton book, sitting on the floor, still in its mailer bag, never opened.
the end
Back in 1977, though I still retained a degree of hope for Dad and myself, inside I knew that ship had sailed years earlier, lost at sea with its cargo of broken promises and disappointment. Amid the chaos that came with my growing independence at fifteen, I still yearned for some parental guidance, which Dad was in no condition to give. It was then I made the decision to look up my wayward mother.
It had been ten years since I’d last seen my mother, and I found out from my aunt that she was living in some Tenderloin hotel in San Francisco. After tracking down her address, I headed over, full of nervous anticipation, only to find she wasn’t home, although her door was unlocked. I walked in and saw two finches chirping blithely in a small cage on the window ledge. There was an empty pack of cigarettes and a beat-up paperback of the poems of e.e. cummings, with a recent picture of me that she must have gotten from my aunt tucked in like a bookmark. I hoped this was a good sign.
In the lobby I asked where I might find Sheila Regis, as she was now known, and was told to check the bar around the corner. Out on the street, just as I turned off Fifth onto Market, I saw a small heap slumped on the pavement. Something made me stop, for I had seen this configuration before. I went down on one knee and peered beneath the black bobble cap that was pulled low over a tangle of gray-red hair at what remained of my mother’s once-fair face. “Can I help you, Mom?”
Her eyes opened slowly and turned to me. “You look like a slut,” she said, with a vague smile, then simply closed her eyes and said no more. I kept kneeling, with one hand on her shoulder, taking in what she had said. I was wearing a pale pink shirtdress, the flat ballet slippers I always favored, no makeup, hair tied back. Had she looked into my soul? Did she know about the relationship with her brother and blame me like the rest of them? Oh Father, Father, where were you? I stood up and took three large steps backward—then jumped over her tiny broken body with one deft leap.
Fuck ’em all. It was the last time I would ever see her. I closed my eyes and never looked back. I headed over to the Mission, where I knew I could score some heroin from a guy I’d met while browsing in a record store. That night and for many nights to come, I would dive into the bottomless darkness of my life and sink all the way down. It was a beautiful drowning.
A. J. Albany lives in Los Angeles with her husband and their two children, Charlie and Dylan.