Second Chance (3 page)

She answered the phone now, with a business-like hello. "Judy, it's Woody. How are you?"

"Don't you ever call when we're
not
having dinner?”

“Damn, that's right, you're three hours behind, aren't you?”

“If you weren't so simple, Woody, I'd have to get mad at you. You want to talk to Frank." It was a statement, and the next thing Woody knew, Frank was on the line.

"Hey, bud, what's
happenin
'?"

"A party, Frank."

"Can it wait until I finish dinner?"

"No. I want to have a party, Frank. Back at Iselin. The old apartment."

There was a slight pause. "I haven't been back there in years."

"Me neither. I want to make it as much like the old days as possible. The same place, the same people, clothes, music . . . especially music. Everything."

"You can get the place?"

"I don't know, I haven't checked on anything yet."

Frank paused again. "So when do you want to do this?"

"As soon as we can. I want to ask Alan and Diane, Fred, Eddie . . .”

"What about Curly?"

"Yeah, sure. And Pete and Zipper and
Sharla
. Hell, there are so many."

"Right, right. Just one question."

"Yeah?"

"Why? I mean, why do you want to do this, after all these years? It's been a long time."

“Just for fun. For old time's sake. They were pretty good times."

"And they were pretty lousy times too. Sad times."

Woody knew what Frank meant. He meant Tracy and Keith and Dale. He meant friends—and lovers—dying young. "Yeah. Yeah, that's a part of it. But we're not going to concentrate on that. It's not going to be a wake, Frank. It's going to be a party."

"This have anything to do with your music?"

There was no point in lying. "Yes."

"Fucking artists," Frank said, and Woody heard Judy caution him about his language. No doubt the kids were at the table.

"I need to make some new music. There was a lot of joy back there, Frank."

"Sure. But there were other things too—there was rage, there was frustration . . . this was the sixties, pal. And confusion and loss, remember them?"

"They can all make music."

"How about pain? Can you make pain sing? And is it gonna be a song that anybody can stand to hear?"

Pain. Frank was right. In all the long years, he had never sung Tracy's song aloud. But it had always been there, floating way in the back of his mind. "You're overplaying this. I just want to party, okay? I just want everybody in bell-bottoms and crocheted miniskirts,
Jimi
and the Doors on the stereo, beer and cigarettes and greasy pizza . . . and us passing around the new
Playboy
and Judy getting pissed off."

That got him. Frank laughed at the memory they shared of his then-girlfriend grabbing at the centerfolds as he and Woody ogled them with theatrical appreciation. "Better be a 1968 issue," he said.

"1969. A better year for
Playboy
."

"’69, huh?" Frank chuckled, but Woody heard the knowledge in his voice. 1969 was the year Keith and Tracy had died. "So you're inviting us? This is why the call?"

"Inviting you, but also asking if you want to help. Maybe just the last few days. I want the party to be on a Saturday night—“

“Naturally."

"So I thought if you could get off the Thursday before, you could give me a hand."

"Woody, what's there to do? Get in a keg or something?"

"No, I . . . I think there's going to be a
lot
. I mean, the idea is to recreate a night in '69. As close as we can come. Just make everything the way it was."

"Woody, this sounds neat, okay? But what makes you think that people are gonna come from all over the country to just a
party
, for
crissake
? I mean, we ain't all as rich as you."

"That's why I'm going to pay everybody's way. Put them up and everything."

"And everybody's going to take your charity?"

"It's not charity—it's my party. I'll send tickets along with the invitations. And reservation numbers at the Iselin Holiday Inn. It's far enough in advance that people can make plans."

"What about spouses?"

"I thought about that. Judy's invited. And Alan and Diane are married, and that's cool. But anybody who wasn't really there, well . . . no."

"That's not going to go over real well with
Curly's
new bride.”

“You met her?"

"Last time we visited Judy's mom in California. She's fifteen years younger than Curly. Typical California beach cattle. In fact, I think he
met
her on a beach. Chick can fill out a bikini. You haven't seen her?"

"I don't get to L.A. much. I bet
Curly'll
come anyway. He never let girls push him around."

"That's what got him his first divorce. So where you gonna start with this little Saturday night time machine?"

~*~

Woody Robinson started by flying to Pittsburgh, where he rented a car for the hour and a half drive to Iselin, home of Iselin State University.

He drove east of Pittsburgh, and then north, driving for miles without seeing another car. The road wound up and down hills, through valleys gently greened by the first shoots of spring. The land, at least, had not changed. It was still as wild as it had must have been when the pioneers traveled through it two hundred years before.

Or maybe, Woody thought sadly, it only looked that way. Maybe acid rain was eating away at those trees even as they budded, ruining the water in the streams and creeks he crossed.

Woody had done benefit concerts for environmental causes, but had not been active otherwise. He was pessimistic about the planet. Pessimism made him fearful, and fear stole his creativity, so he could not afford to be active. But he was aware of the problems. It was impossible not to be, especially among the musicians who played his kind of music and the people who listened to it.

Woody drove on, passing through a series of small towns, none of which contained more than a dozen houses. The terrain was more familiar now. The trees began to thin, exposing hillsides shaved bare by strip mining, pocked by slag heaps, and he wondered how the area had ever been chosen as the site of a university. Did the founders think of it as "Iselin Normal School for Those Wishing to Escape the Drudgery and Early Death of the Mines?"

Still, it had been founded and it had survived and grown from Normal School to State Teachers' College to plain old College, and finally to University status. But when people asked Woody where he went to school, he always said Juilliard, which was where he had done his graduate work, because he quickly discovered that most non-Pennsylvanians had never heard of Iselin.

However, he always thought of Iselin as his alma mater. Iselin was where he had grown up, where he smoked his first cigarette, drank his first beer, lost both his virginity and the solipsism which had been his philosophy in high school, where he learned that there was more to the world than his own needs and desires.

He seldom thought about those days, but now, nearing the college he had not revisited for over two decades, he wanted to look back. It was only natural, he supposed. The past few years had made it more difficult than ever not to look back.

Every week was the silver anniversary of something—the so-called Summer of Love, the release of
Sgt. Pepper
, the 1968 Democratic convention, the assassinations that shook the sixties—even the Manson killings. Good and bad events alike were rearing their gray and wizened heads. America was aging, and looked to the days of its youth for comfort. Even the Vietnam war had been granted the imprimatur of nostalgia. Jesus, how things had changed.

Iselin had changed too, Woody saw, as he drove into it from the west. As the university had grown, so had the town. Back in 1969, the stretch of road he traveled had only a shopping center, a Burger King, and car dealerships. But now, before he came to those familiar landmarks, he passed two other malls, a Sheraton, and a strip of half a dozen fast food chains. The stores in the old shopping center were all different. The drug store where he had bought a bizarre assortment of cigarettes, including English Ovals,
Fatimas
, and
Gauloises
, which he had smoked for several months, had been replaced by a T. J. Maxx.

By the time he got to the campus, things looked more familiar. The utilitarian and boxy dormitories, new in the sixties, were still there, but now there were other buildings around them. He couldn't tell if they were classrooms or dorms, for there was a gray sameness about them. He thought of parking and walking around, seeing what was left of the grove of trees in the campus center, but decided to go to the apartment first. That was what he had really come for.

He swung the car north on Ninth Street, driving past the music building where he had spent most of his undergraduate years, and the theatre on his right, where he had watched Keith and Tracy and his friends act in plays and musicals, and had himself played in concerts beyond counting.

Then he was off campus and into the town, driving down narrow, tree shaded streets, remembering walking down those streets with Tracy, or staggering down them late at night after a party, and God, yes, there was the tree in front of Dr.
Leffler's
house where he had thrown up a bottle of Orange Driver. He made a face. Frank was right. All the memories weren't so wonderful.

Now he was a block away from Lincoln, the town's main street, and he saw the building ahead on the left, and his throat tightened, his hands clenched the steering wheel.

It hadn't changed. It looked the same as it had over two decades before, when he and Keith and Frank had shared the second floor apartment. Oh Jesus, he thought, 4 South Ninth Street, still alive after all this time, still crazy after all these years.

The entrance was in the back of the building, and Woody drove his car into the loose stone parking lot and parked between a Tempo and a Subaru, both of which had university parking stickers on their bumpers. He got out, locked the car, and stood for a long time staring up at the building.

It was weathered, red brick, three stories high with a flat roof, and semi-detached from the building next to it. Woody noticed that the woodwork needed a coat of paint as badly as it had when he moved out in the spring of 1970. The window sills were chipped into an appaloosa texture, and he saw that one of the windows on the west side of the building was partly open. There was someone living there then.

Before he mustered the courage to go upstairs, he walked past the enclosed stairway onto Ninth Street, but his hopes that the bookstore was still there were dashed when he saw the vacant storeroom through the grimy windows. When he stepped back to the edge of the sidewalk, he could make out the ghosts of letters that had been scraped off the plate glass window—
The Alternative Book Store
.

It might have been there not too long before, he thought, for apparently no other business had occupied the place since its closing. In its time, the "Alt" had been a gathering place for the local heads. Although it sold rolling papers and bongs, its main business was books and magazines, and, along with the stacks of used paperbacks, it also was the only place in Iselin to go for
Ramparts
,
Evergreen Review
, and
Grove Press
books.

Woody had spent hours there talking jazz with the owner, a short, bald man named Riley, capable of carrying on as reasoned a conversation with Keith about explosives, or with Frank about radical politics. Riley also dealt in military collectibles, and many patrons remarked on the store's weird juxtaposition of peace sign posters and Nazi banners. But it was the sixties, and everything was cool.

And now it was the nineties, and everything was empty. The store may have stood vacant for years, and Woody reevaluated his theory that it closed only recently. The dust was thick, and the walls near the window showed only traces of where the bookshelves had stood. Though the sun had
shone
on them only a few minutes a day, the paint the shelves had covered was bleached to nearly the same pale shade as that of the rest of the wall.

Woody hadn't really expected the store to still be there. In fact, he had been pleasantly surprised to find the building was there. He walked down the sidewalk to Lincoln Street, hoping that Dom's would still be alive.

It wasn't. Dominic's Atlantic City Pizza had become a software store. The counter was still there, but that was all. The ornate brass cash register had been replaced by a large, gray monitor, and the walls were lined with pegboards on which brightly colored boxes leaned on gleaming metal brackets. Woody gave his head a shake of regret, and walked back the way he had come. No more delays. It was time to climb the stairs and see who he was going to have to deal with.

The bottom door was unlocked as always, and Woody was amazed to see that his old mailbox was still there, mounted on the inner brick wall. He lifted the lid and saw that it had been reattached with wire, but was otherwise intact. Then he climbed the stairs, paused on the boards of the landing, and looked onto the parking lot below, drunk with memories. “Jesus," he whispered. "Oh Jesus."