Vineland (37 page)

 

Whoo! is this the start of a

Cheap ro-mance,

Nothin' much to do with

High fi-nance,

Is it th' start of,

Another cheap ro-mance?

 

(Here Scott Oof, as he had for thousands of identical renditions, filled with a phrase stolen from Mickey Baker on “Love Is Strange” [1956].)

 

This hot tomato's lookin'

Mighty sweet,

Uh just th' thing to git me,

Off my feet,

Oboy, the start of,

Another cheap ro-ho-mance!

 

Yep—looks like the start of

Another cheap ro-ho-

Ma-a-a-a-ance . . .

Gits ya thinkin', is it

Me, or is it mah

Pa-a-a-a-hants?

 

Well cheap romance is my

Kind of thing,

Uh just in case you were

Wondering,

“Is it the start of,

Another cheap ro-wo-mance?”

 

“
That's
what made her fall in love at first sight?” Prairie inquired, years later, when Zoyd told her.

“Well, that and my good looks,” said Zoyd. But when everything was coming apart he'd also screamed at Frenesi, “It could've been anybody, Scott, the two junkie saxophone players, all's you was lookin' for was some quick cover.”

The baby slept on silently in the other room. Frenesi had been watching Zoyd for weeks as he clumsily pieced the story together. She could have helped but was hoping, by then naively, that he'd take a false turn, come out with a version where she'd look a little better, caring less about his opinion, finally, than about her mother's. Zoyd, anyway, didn't oblige—just kept stumbling and bullying, missing details but getting it basically, mercilessly right, Brock, Weed, Brock's return, all of it, allowing her no pathways to safety.

Though to the romantically inclined observer it might seem like Brock had come looking for her, at least had included finding her on his list of chores during his West Coast visit, Frenesi had been making it as easy for him as she could, spending more time than she normally would have over at Sasha's on the assumption that the same surveillance she remembered growing up with, the creepy twitching highlights off camera lenses, the threatening forms and sounds at night, all was again in place, and that she would be seen, and seen by him. And that sooner or later he would come and get her.

She moved into the house at Gordita Beach as “Zoyd's chick,” then “Zoyd's old lady.” Pregnant with Prairie, she sat with a few other young women in the band's social orbit out on the screened deck of the house, facing the sea, spending sometimes whole days together, drinking from earthen mugs infusions of herbs thought to promote higher mind/body states, listening to KHJ and KFWB, ice plant in bloom spilling down to the white beach, sea breezes swirling in through the screens. The line of girls' eyes gazing in a locus of attention fixed at the horizon . . . in her second trimester she fell into UFO reveries, saw them clearly any number of times, though she got teased, popping in and out of the sky-blue Rayleigh scattering as if through a perfectly elastic sheet, advance units for some other force, some pitiless advent. Meanwhile, landward, back up the long built-over dunes, across the coastal highway, the great Basin, intoxicated, traffic-infested, shadow-obsessed, extravagantly watered and irradiated, drew Zoyd away from the beaches he was musically supposed to be representing, out on restless commutes as long as working hours into thickest billowings of smog soup, roof and gutter work during the day, Corvairs gigs at night, in smaller clubs and bars from Laguna to La Puente. It happened to be the ripe, or baroque, phase of L.A.'s relations with rock and roll, which had swept in on what to Zoyd, with his surfer's eye, judged to be a twenty-year cycle—movies back in the twenties, radio in the forties, now records in the sixties. For one demented season the town lost its ear, and talent was signed that in other times would have kept on wandering in the desert, and in what oases they found, playing toilets. On the assumption that Youth understood its own market, entry-level folks who only yesterday had been content to deal lids down in the mail room were suddenly being elevated to executive rank, given stupendous budgets, and let loose, as it turned out, to sign just about anybody who could carry a tune and figure out how to walk in the door. Stunned by the great childward surge, critical abilities lapsed. Who knew the worth of any product, or could live with having failed to sign the next superstar? Crazed, heedless, the business was running on pure nerve, with million-dollar deals struck on the basis of dreams, vibes, or, in the Corvairs' case, minor hallucination. Scott Oof had somehow hustled the band a species of recording contract with Indolent Records, an up-and-coming though bafflingly eclectic Hollywood label, and the day they came in to sign the papers, the head of A & R, not yet out of high school, having just made the mental acquaintance of some purple acid with a bat shape embossed on it, greeted them with unusual warmth, believing them, as it developed, to be visitors from another dimension who, after observing him for years, had decided to materialize as a rock and roll band and make him rich and famous. By the time they left, the Corvairs were believing it too, although they had to take the standard contract of the day just the same, further clauses being impossible to get, written as they would have had to be in some human language, a medium for the moment inaccessible to the by now audibly vibrating department head (“Department
head!
” he screamed, “everybody around here's a department . . .
head!
Ha! Ha! Ha!”).

As the weeks rolled along like less than perfect waves and the weekly tear-off options went crumpling one by one with no album commitment from Indolent, not exactly gloom, but a sort of dimmed calm, took over. After all, the Corvairs were working pretty steadily, getting a reputation as a bar band if not as a “Surfadelic” one. Dutifully, they did keep setting aside time to drop acid together at inspiring day and night locales around the Southland, but nothing much ever happened for them, nothing coordinated anyway, Van Meter's reliving of an earlier life as a buffalo roaming the plains in a herd the size of a Western state seeming to have little in common with Scott's delight in the omnicolored streams of cartoon figures that liked to issue from his fingertips. Lefty the drummer had nightmare sessions full of snakes, decomposing flesh, and easy-listening music tracks, the sax players, both fond of heroin, often dematerialized someplace, perhaps to inject their drug of choice, though perhaps not, while Zoyd kept going through endless tangled scenarios with a luminously remote Frenesi, Frenesi his life sentence, she who could make him forget even the eye-catching production values of LSD.

And who meanwhile waited, watched the aliens' steel horizon, or borrowed people's cars to drive in and visit with Sasha, out in the little patio in back, drinking diet sodas and picking at salads. From the beginning Frenesi tried to get her mother asking the questions it would hurt most to answer. DL's name came up right away. Frenesi said, “She's gone. I don't know. . . .” Sasha sent her a look and, “You two were so close . . . ,” but soon they were back to the unavoidable subject of the baby on her way.

“You can always stay here, you know, there's nothing but room.” The first time this happened, Frenesi semideclined, “Oh, Zoyd might not go for that.” To which Sasha nodded, “Great. I wasn't asking him.” Later adding, “Time marches along, and I hope you don't intend to have the baby at the beach.”

“I wanted her to hear the surf.”

“If it's positive vibrations you want, how about your old bedroom? A little continuity. Not to mention comfort.”

Frenesi hated to admit that her mother had a point. When she brought it up with Zoyd, he nodded, bleakly. “Your mom hates me.”

“No, c'mon Zoyd, she doesn't really
hate
you. . . .”

“She said ‘hippie psychopath,' didn't she?”

“Sure, that night you were trying to run us over, but—”

“I was tryin' to get the fuckin' thing in Park, darlin', it jumped into Drive by itself, 't's what the recall was all about, 'member I showed you in the paper—”

“But, your screaming and stuff, she must have thought it was on purpose. And she could've called you worse than that.”

Zoyd sulked. “Yeah? How come she don't even walk us out to the car anymore?” But though a few seconds might remain on the clock here, Zoyd knew the game was over and the women would prevail, the only question being, would they allow him in Sasha's house to see his own kid get born?

Of course they would and so it came to pass, one sweet May evening, with mockingbirds singing up and down the street, that Prairie's slick head came squeezing into this world, Sasha holding tight to her daughter's hands, Leonard the midwife easing the rest of the baby on through, and Zoyd, who at the last minute had dropped just a quarter of a tab of acid on the chance of glimpsing something cosmic that might tell him he wouldn't die, gazing mind-blown at the newborn Prairie, one of her eyes plastered shut and the other rolling around wild, which he took to be a deliberate wink, the lambent faces of the women, the paisley patterns on Leonard's Nehru shirt, the colors of the afterbirth, the baby with both eyes open now looking right at him with a vast, an unmistakable, recognition. Later people told him it wasn't personal, and newborns don't see much, but at the moment, oh God, God, she knew him,
from someplace else.
And these acid adventures, they came in those days and they went, some we gave away and forgot, others sad to say turned out to be fugitive or false—but with luck one or two would get saved to go back to at certain later moments in life. This look from brand-new Prairie—oh, you, huh?—would be there for Zoyd more than once in years to come, to help him through those times when the Klingons are closing, and the helm won't answer, and the warp engine's out of control.

What no one acknowledged—certainly not Zoyd in his cheery haze of paternity, less certainly Sasha—was how deeply, for an unbearable day and then the weekend, Frenesi was depressed. No amnesia, no kind leaching bath of time would ever take from her memories of descent to cold regions of hatred for the tiny life, raw, parasitic, using her body through the wearying months and now still looking to control her . . . there were no talk shows back in those days, no self-help networks or toll-free numbers to learn anything from or ask for help. She didn't, so surrendered to her dark fall, even know she needed help. The baby went along on its own program, robbing her of milk and sleep, acknowledging her only as a host. Where was the clean new soul, the true love, her own promised leap into grown-up reality? She felt betrayed, emptied out, watching herself, this beaten animal, only just hanging on, waiting for everything to end. One 3:00
A.M.
, in front of the Lobster Trick Movie, Sasha rocking the baby, Frenesi in a slow tuned throb, breasts in torment, bathing in Tubelight, whispered, “You'd better keep her out of my way, Mom. . . .”

“Frenesi?”

“I mean it—” oh fuck, why bother? lurching toward the bathroom, taken over by a rising hoarse groan that broke into such terrible spasms of crying that Sasha was unable to move, could only remain holding the sleeping Prairie while her daughter wrenched out tile-echoed sobs painfully into the world one by one . . . was the baby getting this primally unhappy message by ESP link, and how, Sasha wondered, did you throw yourself between them, absorb the assault? She cried, “Oh, Punkin . . . please, no, it'll get better, you'll see . . . ,” waiting for Frenesi to answer, answer anything. She thought of what was available in the bathroom, and all the ways Frenesi could do herself harm in there. About the time she put down the baby and started in, Frenesi came back, took her mother by one wrist and in a voice Sasha had never heard, ordered, “Just—get her the fuck out of here.” Her blue eyes, with this precise placement of room lamps, gathering most of the light, eyes so long loved, glaring now, savage with a foreglimpse of some rush into fate, something shadowless and ultimate.

It was in those hours of hallucinating and defeat that Frenesi had felt Brock closer to her, more necessary, than ever. With his own private horrors further unfolded into an ideology of the mortal and uncontinued self, Brock came to visit, and strangely to comfort, in the half-lit hallways of the night, leaning darkly in above her like any of the sleek raptors that decorate fascist architecture. Whispering, “This is just how they want you, an animal, a bitch with swollen udders lying in the dirt, blank-faced, surrendered, reduced to this meat, these smells. . . .” Taken down, she understood, from all the silver and light she'd known and been, brought back to the world like silver recalled grain by grain from the Invisible to form images of what then went on to grow old, go away, get broken or contaminated. She had been privileged to live outside of Time, to enter and leave at will, looting and manipulating, weightless, invisible. Now Time had claimed her again, put her under house arrest, taken her passport away. Only an animal with a full set of pain receptors after all.

An awkward time for any more men to be showing up, but not long before breakfast, who of all people should arrive in a taxi lit up like a canteen truck but Hubbell Gates, who'd received word of his new grandchild over the phone from Zoyd, at the opening of a discount furniture store outside Sacramento, just as he was cracking apart the first white-flame carbons of the evening into sky-drilling beams of pure arc light. The band hired for the occasion struck up the Gershwins' “Of Thee I Sing (Baby),” and that was how Hub entered grandfatherhood, among the twinkling spinners and national bunting, the upbeat music, with Sno-Cone and hot-dog stands and kids bouncing on the king-size waterbeds out in the lot, and his own fleet of photon projectors aimed at the purple sky, calling out across the miles of great valley to wage-earning families snug at the table and restless cruisers out on old 99 alike, here we are, forget the night falling and come on over, have a look, TV, stereo and appliances too, no cosigners or credit references, just your own honest face . . . one of those evenings when everything felt in harmony, at ease, and how long'd it been since that had happened? So Hub decided, “Heck with it, history can go on Pause for a little while,” and, leaving the spotlights and trailer rigs to his crew, Dmitri and Ace, hopped a complicated system of buses local and intercity, ending up long after midnight at a phone booth way out in Hacienda Heights, where he was obliged to go through a legal-history check before the taxi would consent to charge him an arm and a leg to get here, hence the late, or did he mean early, hour. . . .