Chapter 21
It was now Saturday, September eighth. In the morning light, I dreamt that I was back at the UMass 1977 spring concert with Procol Harum performing on that familiar football stadium stage. Even though the great guitarist Robin Trower had long left the group for his Bridge of Sighs album, Gary Brooker, the band’s lead crooner, didn’t disappoint us under those fuzzy lights at the far end of the patchy green field that day. He was surrounded by people below the stage, on the field, and in the surrounding packed-full stadium seats. These UMass spring concerts had two stages on either end of the football field, each of them set up over the end zones. When one act finished, the stage on the opposite end zone would come to life with a new act all raring to go: Lights, Camera, Action, Boom! While Brooker sang “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” I pushed my way through the smoky crowds on the field . . .
I tried to fight my way out of this murky dream and get back to Kansas. The putrid smell of beer was all around me as I groggily walked toward the bright stage lights and Brooker’s familiar voice. And then I was awake. What a surreal feeling the dream had been to me; it felt so real, just like it was that very day seven years before.
I drifted in and out of broken dreaming as I lay there on the floor in Kansas City, hearing the sounds of other rock classics slowly fading in and out from somewhere outside the dream . . . all of them sad, sad love songs.
Why did incredible love have to end like this? Would I ever find it again? What was Colette doing at this very moment, I wondered.
The clock in Faith’s apartment, out of sight somewhere behind my head, ticked as I lay there—ticktock, ticktock. I imagined it leading up to an imaginary ringing alarm, and then more and more alarms all going off in unison, hundreds of them filling the din of the morning just like it was coming from a Pink Floyd song. And then I remembered that grandfather clock in my grandmother’s kitchen ticking endlessly. I was only thirteen. I rolled over to write in my notebook.
The day they took the clocks away
We threw away our keys
And each of our IDs
No more fences, no more gates
No more walls, no more plates
No more bars, no more chains
We looked beyond our windowpanes
Music was the soundtrack of my life. Through all of the good times it played in the background hum of my mind . . . the ups, the downs. How it wrenched at my heart. Was everybody like this? Did everybody think this way? Did everyone wake up with heads full of music and vivid dreams? What was it trying to tell me? What did it symbolize? The music of the morning light weaved in and out of a continuous stream of moving pictures in my waking brain. Was there a message here to be decoded? I thought of those great “interpret your dreams” revelations that everyone talked about. I wondered what I might be missing—the secret to life that others had found while meditating on the mountaintops.
On the hard floor I slipped away again as I tried to remember if my dreams were in black and white, or were they in color? Was it Kansas or Oz? Asleep, I flew in my half-awake and half-dream state now. I tried to float outside of my sleeping self first, then slowly flew up to the ceiling of Faith’s apartment. I could do anything now. I was surely asleep again, but this state of awareness was kind of layered like an onion, for I came back down from Faith’s ceiling to a Huntington Beach couch where another level of me was dreaming. Crazy. I was dreaming that I was dreaming back in Huntington Beach! Then I got scared. What if I really was awake? What if I tried to fly again and jumped out of Faith’s second-story window by mistake? I shivered at the concept of not being able to tell my dreams from reality now, fearing that I could actually jump from a window and seriously cease to exist. In Kansas City, I suddenly lay frightened and wide awake, sweating on the floor.
Across the room, Faith was up and going through the cupboards in the kitchen, humming to the music. Lucas had moved to the couch. Decky was still on the floor in the hallway, although his snoring had stopped.
“Do you want to go to the supermarket in Mission with me to get orange juice and other things for breakfast?” Faith asked.
“Yes!” I was relieved.
It was another windy day outside. At the market, the stark florescent lights rained down hard on us at the store entrance; they were beams of brightness that hurt my head. Past the stacked shopping baskets and the cashier stations, a forty-something-year-old lady was handing out pork sausage samples. Faith tried one. I couldn’t eat yet so I flatly refused. I was so hungover I desperately had to turn away from the sample lady as she lined up the toothpicks at her little table and looked up at me.
“Sorry, ma’am, I’m a vegetarian,” I said to her, hoping that she’d pull the sample from my face quickly before I hurled. Declan had a word for hurling. He called it “Horking.” I felt like horking now.
“Then, you better take iron pills, boy!” she yelled after me as Faith and I rounded the first aisle corner. We quickly made the refrigerated section and the orange juice. It was funny how everyone had an opinion on what we all should and should not eat. Everybody was an expert. Everyone wanted you to eat and live like they did, except it was always a meat-and-potatoes existence out here on the wild frontier.
After breakfast we quietly said good-bye to Luke’s sister Faith. With her constant travel and free spirit, I knew I could always find Faith. We would surely see her again. But for now, the three of us were alone and southwest bound on Interstate 35, traveling its crooked vein back into the pulsating heart of America. We headed toward Oklahoma City through Wichita. Oklahoma City was where one of Luke’s college girlfriends, Fran, lived.
In the Fairlane, it was Luke’s turn to drive. He was Sergeant Pepper and we were his Lonely Hearts Club Band. I rode shotgun, and Decky snored in the backseat, perhaps even dreaming about psychedelic album covers and strawberry fields as The Beatles played on the car deck. After a while, Luke switched out The Beatles tape in order to put in a Pink Floyd tape with the children all singing in unison in their song, “Another Brick in the Wall.”
As we drove on, I thought about the lyrics to this Pink Floyd song and envisioned that big, cold, stone wall that cut across all of Berlin. I hoped to see it someday. There was always a double meaning in all of this, I felt. These rock stars were our modern-day poets, laying out their observations of life in beautiful lyrics and rhyme, for it to hang out there on the airwaves and after much repetition, someday, sink in. I pondered their verses endlessly. With the music blaring in the car, my thoughts drifted back and forth in the winds while I transcended all of time.
There was the time that Colette and I had seen the movie The Wall in 1982. It was a feature film full of animation imagery and music from this same group Pink Floyd. We saw it at the theatre right across from South Coast Plaza. It was a crazy trip through someone else’s kaleidoscope mind, I thought. It was a visionary film, the future of music videos, just like MTV. I wondered if I was supposed to have taken some drugs before going into the theatre though, because it surely made me feel like I was on them.
But people tripping out on drugs always freaked out Colette. I took her to see The Grateful Dead at Anaheim Stadium in 1983. The “Dead Heads” in front of us at the concert were all tripped out on acid that day; a freaky guy in front of us with his tie-dyed shirt spun in circles and urinated all over himself without even realizing it. At the time, I thought that this was kind of funny and laughed at the guy.
“Maybe we’re not meant for each other,” Colette said to me on that day in 1983.
This had been right around the same time as the Red Sox game at Anaheim Stadium where I got into all of that trouble with her. I had given Colette two bottles of Budweiser to put in her pocketbook so she could sneak them past the entrance gate for me, so I wouldn’t have to pay for beers in the stadium. On the way in, we got stopped by security. The beers were pulled out, and the cops wrote her up a citation. They took away our tickets and told us to go home. A few weeks later, Colette got a ticket in the mail for carrying the alcohol; a few months later, she had to appear in court to try to fight the fine. I never even helped her pay for the fine. I was broke. I never even went to court with her because my Mercury Comet with the three gears on the tree wouldn’t turn over that day, and there were no hills in California like Eighteenth Street where I could just roll down in neutral and pop the clutch to jump-start the car. Maybe that was the start of my downward spiral.
On our drive through Kansas now, my head was clearing of my hangover. I drank a huge swig from a large jug of orange juice as Luke steadily drove on. Orange juice was life; I wanted to drink it in until the whole bottle was gone (since Decky was sleeping). I took a few more huge swigs of it and wished it could run all down the sides of my mouth. I couldn’t get enough of it. I imagined that if I had lots of money, I would buy more orange juice so I could swim in it. All the while, Luke’s eyes stayed fixed on the southwestern horizon that stretched out before us. The road was a never-ending ribbon for him that rolled under our hungry wheels as we pressed on, with the pavement feeding the Fairlane’s wandering fury once again as she set her sights through those rose-colored glasses affixed to her hood ornament. She set her sights on the distant Oklahoma plain.
We were all born into a time
Born into a space
Given a face
On the pavement
But the rook was a piece of the sky of night
A pirouette
A spiraling silhouette
Crossed against the light
It was such a mindless flight
“I would just burn it for the sake of art; the world would never see it!” Luke’s little brother Trent had said to me back in Topeka.
I had shown Trent this song that I had written about time:
Hour glass
Half full
Grains fall swiftly
And we grow old
Never learning our lesson
The answer is simple
Shepherd’s told
Life’s music
Rewards expression
“Those words remind me of Pink Floyd’s song ‘Time,’” Trent told me in Topeka.
“So what are you saying?”
“Plagiarism,” Trent coughed under his breath, holding his left hand to his mouth.
“Uh-uh?”
“Everybody borrows without knowing that they’re borrowing,” Trent said.
“Then what are you trying to say?”
“I’m telling you to burn it! That’s all,” he said to me before walking away.
I thought he might be messing with me. Trent so liked messing with people. He had really made me laugh when he visited Luke in Newport Beach in April 1984. He and Declan had been in an argument one day. After it all, Declan told Trent that sometimes he was more immature than a young kid.
“You’re even more immature than that!” Trent fired back. “You go further back than a little kid!”
“How can anyone be more immature than that?” Decky asked him.
“You’re more immature than foreplay! You might as well be the silly thought before it all!” Trent hollered back at Decky.
“A silly thought before it all? What’s that supposed to even mean?” Declan asked.
“Exactly!” Trent said to him and walked on out the door.
“Everyone borrows the very words that were taught to them,” Trent would say to me. “Don’t worry about it, Mike! We all formulate our opinions and our thoughts from what we learn from our parents and mentors, that’s all. Don’t worry about it; someone else will someday take whatever they learn from you. So be very careful what you write down. You don’t want to be responsible for too much change in this world,” he said. “Your job is to go through this life as an observer.”
“Why?” I wondered.
I was lost. Was he still messing with me? And what would ever become of Trent? Perhaps he would go to live on a mountaintop and would take a vow of silence never to speak again for the rest of his days—because that was art in its truest form.
The blue vein, Interstate 35, took us west again toward Wichita. It was as if the wind and the road didn’t want us to ever leave that side of America. With the sky all funny and overcast, it didn’t seem like any particular season to me anymore . . . neither summer, nor fall, or anything in between. Where were the hot and dry Indian summer canyon days of Utah? There was nothing but crazy static air everywhere now. I noticed a man and a woman up ahead walking down the shoulder of the lonesome highway; they had two bags in each of their hands. There were no thumbs in the air; they simply looked down at the dusty shoulder as they walked. Their clothes were ragged, worn out by the years of dirty asphalt rubbing against them. They had hard features due to their exposure to the raw elements over the years of dripping time. Luke didn’t seem to notice them as we two roared right on by. Declan was still sound asleep and snoring in the backseat of the car.
Bales of hay dotted the windblown fields for miles on either side of the interstate.
“What is that stuff? Is that wheat?” I asked Luke.
“No,” he said to me, “it’s hay . . . Did you ever read that short story in school The Three-Day Blow by Hemmingway?”
“No. Why?”
“With the wind blowing like this, it kind of reminds me of that story. It’s a story about the wind blowing hard for three days, and all the while that it blows, these two main characters keep on talking about life while they are drinking whiskey in a cabin.”
“I wonder what Hemmingway is trying to say?”
“I’m not sure,” Luke said. “At the end of the story, one of the guys decides to try to go back to his old girlfriend . . . ’cause he realizes ‘nothing is ever finished’ . . . I’m sure that there’s a message in there somewhere.”
“I like Hemmingway,” I said. “One of my favorites is The Old Man and the Sea. I love that book; I love it because it’s so short.”
Luke laughed.
I used to hate reading and would obsess on the margin on the left of the bookmark getting bigger as the margin on the right disappeared. I’d obsess on it more than the story that I was reading.
“Yeah, it is weird with all of this crazy wind!” I announced. “What if it’s the dawn of another Dust Bowl?” I watched the dirt devils kicking up on the plain. “Like The Grapes of Wrath during the Great Depression with the Joad family!” I said.
I remembered Henry Fonda on that black-and-white big movie screen. The Joads’ old packed car driving across the California border with their Grandma dead and falling off the back of it before they ever got there. It was classic.
“I wonder if this blowing wind has affected Decky’s behavior,” Luke said to me laughing, “A good sleep is never finished!” he chuckled as Decky continued to snore in the back.
“We can write a new story, The Three-Day Snore!” I proclaimed.
“It’s a boring read that just makes people sleepy,” Lucas laughed a whoop again, turning momentarily from the road to wipe his mouth with his hand.
“Those people walking there back on the highway, do you think they are like the Okies leaving their land, like the ones from the Grapes of Wrath?” I asked him.
We were homeless like them, I thought, but only by our own choice. Perhaps these poor people arrived there differently, going from home to home of family and friends, sponging, skating, amassing unpaid debt, wearing out welcomes, moving on, and finally with family gone, they had to walk the highways for another town, disappearing into obscurity, the uninhabitable plain, with most of America too busy to notice because they were all off chasing their own dreams. Just like the Brookers in Tidebrook, I thought, these poor people were everywhere; perhaps they were the Brookers of the West, not having the wherewithal to know any better. They were right smack-dab dead center in a burgeoning dust bowl thousands of miles from paradise, forgotten forever.
“I didn’t even see them,” Luke said to me. “Back there on the highway?”
I wondered if they had been apparitions. I had walked the streets myself for a few days back in Paradise Beach after we had all been thrown out of our apartment back in 1977. Zane, Robert Hillyard, Nick MacNamara, and I walked the streets with bags of clothes on our backs, afraid to call home and tell our mothers we had been evicted. We had nowhere to go as we walked to the doors of our beach friends and asked if they could take us in. Sometimes we’d go on “clothesline shopping sprees” during the night, to find a new pair of shorts to wear. We walked through the beach neighborhoods after midnight, stealing other people’s things, threads that had been so innocently hung out in the cool air to dry. One night, Nick MacNamara wheeled a bicycle beside him that was left unlocked behind a porch.
“What if we get stopped by the cops?” I freaked out. “Do we just run?”
“I’ll tell them we were just evicted from our apartment,” Nick said to me. We were no-good thieves.
When I hung with Ray Champeaux’s gang back in Lowell, we even stole cars. During those days, Ray would pop the lips off of the steering column ignition with a flathead screwdriver, stick the screwdriver into the wiring there and pull out all of the ignition guts, then stick the screwdriver back in, turn it slowly, and fire it up. Mercury Montegos and old Pontiacs were Ray’s specialty. I was only fourteen years old when we went on our first joy ride all the way to Paradise Beach from Lowell.
Ray sang “Midnight Rider” from the Allman Brothers as he drove there, taking the back roads through Kenwood, Methuen, Lawrence, Newburyport, and Salisbury. We cruised coolly through the marshes of the Brookers and sailed into the sweet salt air of Paradise, finally there. Life seemed easy for us cheaters. For a fleeting false moment, it was pristine.
Ray Champeaux sang as if he were Greg Allman himself, singing “Midnight Rider” and riding all high and mighty in that stolen car all the way home . . .
One morning after one of those great rides to Paradise Beach in 1973, my sister Kate jumped off the phone and yelled to my parents at the breakfast table, “Dad! Someone stole Lisa’s parents’ car last night!”
Frank was aghast. He was disgusted with the growing crime in our neighborhood. Unbeknownst to him, I was involved in it all. It wasn’t long after that, though, that Ray got caught. You see, his thirst got to be too much. He started taking it in big gulps, having to steal a car almost every night, and the slope got real slippery for him. He wanted more and more, but he was sliding fast. Ray finally fell off the stage. The cops were out patrolling the shopping center parking lot one night and caught poor Ray with his screwdriver in the ignition of a purple Montego. Luckily for me, I had walked from that job. And then Ray went away for a while, but that’s a whole different story.
“What a shame! What a sin it all is! Do they know what they’re doing?” Frank asked aloud.
“Do you believe in karma?” I asked Luke now on the never-ending western plain. “Like, if you do something bad earlier in your life, will it somehow come back to you in some form or another and haunt you forever until you have made good again?”
“Well, heck, yeah!” Luke said to me, all wide-eyed and turning from the wheel. He looked at me to wonder what I might come out with next.
The sun was now breaking through the windy Oklahoman horizon.
“Stealing a car is a sin,” Frank looked me in the eye and told me that morning back in 1973. I never told him it was Ray and I, though. I never told anyone.
So here, karma was staring me down eleven years later. All of these sins and countless others had stuck with me . . . petty thefts, our clothesline shopping, the wood from the neighbor’s barn that we stole to build our dream clubhouse, the cars, everything was mounting here now. Was it a simple case of Catholic guilt? I was doomed forever until the day that I could bring myself to kneel down on that cold maroon padded rail in the shadowy depths of the confessional booth in St. Matthews, until I gave it up to the dominant priest behind the little cloth window. Sure, I gave up the light stuff to Father Downs, like wasting my food and my belief in extraterrestrials, but never gave up the heavy-duty stuff to him. And God forbid ever having to give up the heavy stuff to the likes of Father Cunningham!
Look at Father Cunningham
Sitting in his chair
He’s grinning ’cause we’ve all sold out
This always happens every year!
Luke shoved in a cassette tape that our friend Vandy Vanderkampf made for us. Vandy worked for the L.A. Times as a writer; he got the job right out of college when he came out to California from Minnesota, because he was such a brilliant kid, always writing articles in the opinion section. Vandy had opinions on everything. The tape was a collection of music that Vandy had mixed and given to us before we left Huntington Beach that night. It was all of the new stuff going from the late ’70s into the ’80s, the new stuff that everyone listened to now. Decky and Luke listened to this new kind of music too. Decky loved it, and so it rolled with us through the lonely plains now. There was some older Bowie on it, but mostly the newer groups like the Go-Go’s, R.E.M. and U2. It was okay music, I thought, much better than disco.
The Human League, one of these British new pop groups on Vandy’s cassette, had a hit song that came up as we drove. I listened closely to this metaphorical tune that I had come to know. It was called “Mirror Man” . . . In the repetitive verse, as I listened closely to the words that I had heard so often, it now sounded like the singer was trying to put distance between his relationship with someone else; a lover perhaps? The singer promised to change, while the cute girls singing in the background just “oooddd” and “aahhhd” on and on. Who was the mirror man?
Our Huntington Beach friend Vandy was a guy who drank in life the same way that Decky did; he was always excited about everything, especially new music. He had such a thirst for it; he loved this new sound. He believed it was going to be as big as rock and roll. It was the natural progression of music, he told us. The disco bandwagon had faded quickly. It fizzled in a puff under a ball of silver and glitter in 1979, but rock and roll continued to live on. This new stuff was a derivation of rock, Vandy said, and he gleamed with it as it rolled out on L.A.’s KROQ. That summer, Vandy camped out all weekend at the US Festival in San Bernardino just so he could see all of those bands perform live: The Police, The Ramones, Oingo Boingo, The English Beat, The B-52s, and The Pretenders. This new music defined the ’80s for Vandy. He probably heard it in his head all of the time, like at a Minnesota Twins game or even at those “Golden Gophers ice ha-key games.”
For us, with this blossoming age of MTV and music videos, this new music brought on new and endless possibilities to express ourselves in a new kind of film medium. Every time I saw that image of Neil Armstrong landing on the moon with that psychedelic MTV flag, I dreamed of writing and directing a new music video. We were going to do it in England!
A coyote lay dead on the cold shoulder of the Oklahoma road while a hawk in the near distance stood alert atop a rolled bale of hay. The hawk waited for his space back, for our car was roaring too close to the dead carcass. The hawk seemed content to wait until we passed, and as we did, I saw in the rearview mirror his resolve to fly back down to the road to resume his purge of the fresh roadkill, wings ablaze and talons jumping. Crops of yellow-petaled flowers randomly graced the shoulder of the desolate fields; they looked like baby sunflowers. Miles and miles of lime green and rust brown prairies stretched to the east and western horizon behind the flowers. In the distance, I saw purple grazing cattle, some looked miniature again in rolling hills. Our country was vast and beautiful. We had tied a pair of sunglasses that we had found in the salt flats of Utah to the hood ornament of the Fairlane, and I looked out at them now through the windshield as they took in the road ahead.
I longed for another day where I would roam these roads again comfortably with a 35 millimeter camera or even an 8 millimeter as a director taking black-and-white pictures of the gray beauty that the open road of America and God had created. But there was lots of distance between those days. I had to get through this long journey first. And then my crazy mind jumped the mad track again beyond the panorama of the beautiful rolling hills and went dark with thoughts of tomorrow and my next car payment for a car that wasn’t mine no more. The Subaru that still sat alone back on a lot in Huntington Beach.
I changed tapes, in and out, listening to one or two songs at a time to get my mind off of it until we were only sixty-eight miles from Oklahoma City. It was six o’clock in the evening with patches of blue sky and the sun blazing hot, burning the crazy clouds away. She also had finally chased away the blowing wind for good.
Caprissi, Taboo, and I had rolled through Oklahoma City on Interstate 40 in 1981 in my red three-on-the-tree Mercury Comet. First gear was down left, then clutch, second gear was up right, then clutch, and third went straight down from there, where we cruised all the way through the cowboy city without stopping. I remembered those never-ending prairie plains approaching the city on either side of the dusky night in 1981. We had never been this far west back then, but had nothing but eyes for California, and wanted to keep moving on.
And now in 1984, I would finally stop here. We were already well south of the Kansas border, with Interstate 35 dropping straight down from Wichita. On the Rand McNally map, we were just a little past Highway 134 and Perry, Oklahoma. I anticipated running into Interstate 40 again as I looked at the colored map paper booklet. It would be a night in Marlboro Country with Luke’s friend Fran from Topeka. I had flashback visions of the giant Marlboro cowboy cutout on Sunset Boulevard where Belushi had died.
Decky was awake in the backseat, fresh again, but now I was growing weary. My head rolled back until it snapped my sad eyes wide open again. I had cowboy cutout random dream thoughts bleeding in and out of reality. In the far distance, across the weary fields, lay the Oklahoma City skyline, and all at once, an opening in the cloud cover allowed the sun to come raining down on it, like a spotlight pointing us to the right place. It was a vision of someone’s paradise. Another hawk out over the field was flying toward the distant light beam with a small bird, a sparrow, attacking it as the hawk tried to a