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  But that’s all the usual thing. The day Gage was hanging late in my room was unusual for us. I was unveiling my most prized possessions, unleashing the holy grail of my Beach Boys collection. The jaw-dropping stuff. So far, Gage seemed only mildly impressed. We were looking through my comprehensive collection of demos from the Beach Boys’ fake lo-fi, unproduced, spontaneous, “non”-studio album, Party! when she knocked on the door. I ignored the knocking, figuring she would give up. But she continued to knock.

  “Yes?” I said through the door. I am always instantly exasperated with her. She said something muffled. I opened up without lowering the music, which was pretty obnoxious, I mean it even annoyed me. Does it make sense to do things that annoy yourself? But I like to get her frustrated. I like to make her speak up. She stood there and tried to look past me into my room.

  “What?” I said.

  “Do you want me to set a plate for your friend?” She eyed Gage, who was mostly obscured behind my generously cut, mammoth jersey. Gage sat on my bed surrounded by stacks of CDs, LPs and 45s. He waved at my mother. He looked at me and shrugged.

  “Sure.”

  She smiled, her eyes darting from Gage to the stuff piled on the bedspread and then to me, her hands worrying the hem of her sweater throughout, all of which I ignored.

  “Ten minutes,” she said, but I had already begun to close the door on her, so she really had to shout it, “Ten minutes!”

  Gage held up an LP. On the cover was a bearded man in a faded, salt-stained blue-green T-shirt. He stands on a grassy hill with the ocean behind him.

  “Wow. Is this?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’d love to hear this. Where did you find it?” It was a bootleg of an unreleased solo album by Dennis Wilson, the drummer for the Beach Boys. This album is significant for two reasons, which I will take a moment to explain since it directly bears on a situation that I will soon recount.

  First, lost albums. These are the legendary albums that never saw commercial release, or only had a very small release many years ago. Sometimes the tapes are said to have been destroyed, but the chance that they will resurface is always there. For example the Keith Richards–Gram Parsons heroin sessions in the South of France, 1971. The legend is that the music was a mess and Gram dumped the tapes, but one hopes it will be unearthed someday, however sloppy-slurry the playing may sound. Then there are the label disputes, or someone has died. Or the jam sessions meant for private reference only. These eventually surface in legitimate form after years of being available extralegally as bootlegs. The most famous one is The Basement Tapes, the Dylan and the Band bootleg that everyone preferred to what Dylan actually put out (Nashville Skyline, which, of course, I like and actually prefer to The Basement Tapes). There are also great albums that only saw a brief initial release and are now out of print, or were recorded but never actually released for some tragic reason, usually death: solo demos by Pete Ham, the lead singer of Badfinger (classic hugely popular power pop), recorded weeks before his suicide. The solo album of the obscure member of that famously obscure band Big Star (classic unpopular power pop), Chris Bell. Or the previously mentioned album by Skip Spence, or his British counterparts, Syd Barrett and Nick Drake. Made and then disappeared. There are a million. And if they are truly great, they do often make it aboveground. Eventually in expensive box sets or digipaks with liner notes and extra bonus tracks. But until then they are the holy grails of music freaks—probably all related to the finite nature of a dead artist’s output. Couldn’t there be one more secret album out there, or one more song?

  So this album Gage had in hand actually hit all of the above points: it had one disc of an album out of print coupled with its follow-up—a genuine never-released gem. Naturally it was a find. But what is even more important was that this was by Dennis Wilson.

  Dennis Wilson is a man I hold very close to my heart. To most people he is still a tragic joke, a colorful loser, a complete disaster. How could I not love him? Dennis was famous for being not only the only Beach Boy who actually surfed but for being so incredibly derelict for the last ten years of his short life that he actually drowned in a boat slip in Marina del Rey in like six feet of water. He was also the “good-looking” Beach Boy. He was also the Beach Boy who hung around Charles Manson because of all the easy drugs and easy pussy. (As if being a rich, handsome rock star didn’t give him enough easy drugs and easy pussy and he needed Charles Manson’s, or maybe there was something particularly potent in unbathed, helter-skelter cult pussy.) But what is hardly known about Wilson is that he recorded these two excellent if maudlin solo albums in the bad years before he drowned. This bootleg had both records in one double gatefold album. The second one is truly a “lost” record, nearly done but never released, and actually wonderful. Wilson was just too out of it to bother putting it out. Admittedly there are a lot of plink-plink sob-type piano songs sung in this almost embarrassingly sad, rusty voice. These real dirgy, messed-up vocals, unashamedly full of self-pity and raw emotion. I found it operatic, a complete expression of a tortured, not-too-bright, not-too-gifted, weary guy. But here is the thing, say what you will about skill, technique, control, brilliance: this stuff is truly moving. To me anyway. I don’t know why, but I listen to that album and I start bawling, I really do.

  So, anyway, Gage sat on my bed, listening to this priceless artifact. I had it cranked way up. He started to roll his eyes, smirking and laughing a bit.

  “It’s so swoon-on schmaltzy, isn’t it?” he said, giggling and then kind of moaning. After a few seconds I realized he was trying to make a parodic facsimile of Dennis Wilson’s vocal track. Then he stopped. “Just pathetic, this drunken guy crying about all his suffering, all his cliché regrets.” I flicked the needle handle up, interrupting the song, and snatched the album cover out of his hand.

  “Time to eat,” I said. We stumbled toward the dining room–TV room–kitchen area. As I said, the usual things were not in effect. For Gage’s sake we had the TV off. The table was set with a little more formality than normal. My mother even broke out a bottle of some wine that came in a 750-milliliter bottle instead of the 1.5-liter power jug of oenological glory that she usually poured. She filled our wineglasses. I realized then that Gage was fully an adult and actually not that much younger than my mother. For a millisecond I entertained the horrible thought that they were attracted to each other and they would end up together, but that thought was discarded when she proceeded to ask Gage a series of interrogative-type, as opposed to conversational-type, questions.

  Gage couldn’t really give any answers, or any normal ones. He was eating heartily, though, and talking through his food, so that in fairly regular, small intervals partially masticated bits would fly from his mouth. Amazing. It wasn’t as if Gage was saying anything scintillating or really of any consequence at all—surely we could all bear to wait the three seconds it would take until he swallowed his food and chased the swallow with a large gulp of the gold-hued wine from the 750-milliliter bottle. Which, by the way, we finished in no time.

  I didn’t like the scotch-and-butter smell of the wine. Or the glistening raw yolk yellow of it, but I did like the buzz.

  “Why did you leave Los Angeles?” I heard her say as we began bottle two.

  “My recording career didn’t really take off,” Gage said.

  “Did you make a living at it?”

  The wine was making me more generous. You know what, it made me less bored. I actually listened to this conversation. I listened to it raptly. It compelled me.

  “I did some gigging, but mostly I bartended and wrote some rock criticism, which I rarely got paid for.”

  “I’d like to read it,” I said. I really meant it, too.

  “Do you like music as much as your son?” Gage finished his food and pushed his plate back toward the center of the table. After he asked his question, I saw him eyeing the remaining food on my mother’s plate. He wanted more, but instead he refilled his empty glass, killing the se
cond bottle.

  “I do like music, of course. I mean I used to, quite a bit. I don’t listen to much anymore,” she said. She got up and started clearing the dishes. She returned to the table with another bottle of the same wine. She smiled slightly and went back to the kitchen. We could hear her washing dishes. Gage opened the bottle.

  “So what happened to your dad?” he said to me in a semi-whisper.

  “Dead,” I said, not whispering at all. He nodded like he expected the story.

  “Eight years ago he was driving home one night. It was during a snowstorm—do you remember the year we had that freak blizzard? The roads weren’t cleared, so conditions were pretty bad. He drove off the road and crashed in a field. He saw some lights, which I guess he thought were a nearby house, but the lights were on the other side of the field. He got about halfway there and passed out in the snow. He died of hypothermia.”

  “No shit.”

  “He was totally drunk. He was also a drug dealer. Neither of which I know, of course. All I know is that he was a contractor who died in a car wreck.”

  “Really.”

  “He even did time for drug dealing. As I said, I don’t know any of this.”

  “Actually, I think I heard something about that.”

  “Of course. It just required the most nominal investigating to verify what happened.”

  “She seems pretty sad about it still.”

  “Just look at the newspaper report. Five minutes on Lexis-Nexis. But I never talk to her about it. It is clear she doesn’t want to discuss it, so it’s not like I have to pretend not to know. It never comes up. It’s easy. It’s amazing how easy it is to live with not talking about the Big Things. Particularly of the past.”

  “She must miss him, she seems—”

  “She’s always been like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like when I was a kid, I always had this idea that one day she might go out for a bottle of milk and never come back. She would disappear forever.”

  Gage looked up. She had appeared again.

  “What music were you listening to right before dinner?” she said.

  “What did you think of it?” I asked. Gage shook his head.

  “I liked it,” she said. She pushed back her hair and readied her little pipe as she spoke. “That voice sounded so familiar. Who was it?”

  “Dennis Wilson. He was the drummer for the Beach Boys,” I said.

  “Honestly, Jason, I think I know who Dennis Wilson is. I grew up during those days. You’re the one who shouldn’t know who Dennis Wilson is,” she said, now annoyed. Gage laughed.

  “I didn’t realize you followed popular music,” I said.

  “How much do you have to follow to know the Beach Boys?” she said. “It’s not like the Beach Boys are obscure. I mean Nancy Reagan liked the Beach Boys. I think that disqualifies them from ‘cult’ status.” Gage really guffawed at that. I was unused to my mother being so sarcastic, but I can’t say I didn’t completely deserve it.

  I began, calmly, patiently. “The Beach Boys’ extreme commercial popularity is precisely one of the reasons they are cult figures. Cult objects are one of two things: genuinely undiscovered artists and objects that deserved recognition—often with music that is quite conventional, quite as poppy as what is on the charts, but just unheard—or they are famous mainstream artists with secret counterlives in which they created risky, edgy experimental work. Work that very possibly deconstructs their more commercial work. That’s the thing—the perversity of it. The subversive, even courageous, quality. And the price must be paid: sometimes they almost ruin their careers. Usually they get destroyed by their label and the mainstream press. This sort of cult stuff is almost always unconventional, formally radical, hugely ambitious, drug-fueled follies that destroy the artists emotionally and physically. But I don’t expect you to understand my appreciation for the Beach Boys.”

  My mother nodded, smiling. She paused for a moment as if she were about to speak, but I had not finished.

  “Dennis Wilson is the double whammy, because even though he is well known as the only good-looking Beach Boy, as a musician he is an obscure member of this very famous band—”

  “I met Dennis Wilson once,” she said softly.

  “—and his solo records are therefore truly cult—” She smiled at me. I stopped for a second. She sucked daintily on her pipe.

  “What?”

  “I said I met Dennis Wilson once,” she said.

  “Are you serious? When?” I said.

  “I met him in a bar in Venice Beach. In 1979, I think. Or maybe 1980.”

  Okay. A bar in Venice Beach. Do I ask her what she was doing in a bar in Venice Beach? It was pre-me, my mother to be, how can I really imagine that? She is unformed, she is waiting-to-be in my mind. So she started to tell this tale about some scummy bar called the Blue Cantina.

  “It was where the surfer guys hung out. And bikers. Hells Angels too.”

  I struggled to envision my mother among drunken Hells Angels. But I said nothing. You don’t want to remind them of their audience at this point, at least not until you get the goods.

  “Living in Southern California was pretty depressing in those days. You know, everything was less than it could have been. Just casualties everywhere, drugs and venereal diseases. All dissolute and sleazy—that’s what it felt like in 1980. Anyway, I was by myself and I noticed this very tan guy in his late thirties. He was still handsome despite having uncombed hair, a ratty beard and a bloat around his eyes. He wore, I remember, a white linen shirt, which was unbuttoned and hung open. And white painter’s pants. His body was still muscular, his belly was still trim. If you didn’t look too closely, he would seem just fine.” She put down her pipe and picked up her wineglass.

  “He kept staring at me, and it was then that I noticed he was barefoot. He had wide, filthy, beat-up feet, and I remember thinking, Why would they let him in with no shoes and pretty much no shirt? He came over to where I was sitting. I knew this would happen because I did make eye contact with him, which is the equivalent of an open invitation in a bar like that.”

  I could’ve been spared, couldn’t I, the knowledge that my mother knows the lingua franca of seedy biker bars?

  “He said hi. I looked at him up close, and he seemed very familiar. Somewhere behind the beard and the shaggy hair. His neck was kind of short, but he was quite striking. And so familiar.

  “‘I’m Dennis,’ he said.”

  “No way,” I said to Gage.

  “I realized it was Dennis Wilson, the cute drumming-and-surfing Beach Boy. He sat down on the banquette across from me and put his hand on the table between us. I wasn’t hiding very well my thrill, and how extremely impressed I was that I was talking to Dennis Wilson, however barefoot and disheveled. And drunk, which I also realized. In fact, he was sort of eyeing my drink.

  “‘Would you like another?’ he said.

  “‘Sure,’ I said, draining my glass. ‘A grapefruit and vodka with salt on the rim.’

  “‘Would you mind covering it? I’m short right now.’ I shrugged and bought us two drinks. He retrieved them from the bar but this time sat next to me, on my side of the banquette.”

  “No way,” I said, whispering now. For a moment I entertained the fantasy that she was about to reveal that I was actually the love child of Dennis Wilson—no doubt one of many—thus explaining not only my sense of her caginess but also my fixation on all things pertaining to the brothers Wilson—Brian, Carl and Dennis. But of course I wasn’t born until 1983, which means I was conceived in 1982, and this story we were hearing just somehow doesn’t feel like the beginning of a three-year love affair, you know? No, it sounded like something other than that. She took another toke on her pipe. As did Gage.

  “Anyway, I felt sort of bad for him. I had heard how both Dennis and Brian Wilson would go on benders for days at a time. They would tell people in bars, Hey, I’m a Beach Boy, buy me a drink. And sometimes they woul
d even play piano for free drinks. But he didn’t say anything about the Beach Boys.”

  “Are you sure it was him?” I said.

  She sighed.

  “Okay, okay, go on. Please.”

  “There was a jukebox. He went over and put a quarter in. He asked me if I wanted to dance. That old Procol Harum song, ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale,’ started playing.”

  “Wait, did he pick it or did you?”

  “He did.”

  “He picked a Procol Harum song. What were the other songs on that jukebox?”

  “I really don’t know, Jason.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “He said, ‘I love this song.’

  “I said, ‘What does this song mean?’

  “He said, ‘It doesn’t mean anything. It feels something.’”

  “Right. Wow. Did he put the moves on you?”

  My mother smiled at this question. “No, not really. I mean he was probably more interested in getting drunk than getting laid.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “But it was somehow a sweet moment—the afternoon light, the innocent song and this sad guy swaying with me. The world was going from bad to worse, I had been in L.A. way too long, Ronald Reagan had just become president, but America was still a place where you could dance with a barefoot rock star in a nowhere bar in the middle of a weekday afternoon.”

  So there my mother was, telling me about her moment with Dennis Wilson. And my mother had no business being in L.A. in 1980 and saying she had been there too long. But what did I actually know? She graduated from college in 1972. And she had me in Washington State in 1983. So there are like eleven years I know nothing about. I recall her once saying she left California after she finished school. That she had a falling-out with her parents, and she didn’t keep in contact with them. But I don’t remember asking for any specifics. Here was a perfect opening to pin her down on some things, but I said nothing. She smiled her vague, receding smile, half apologetic, half fuzzy with substance, and the conversation was over.

  Okay, so here’s the thing. You don’t question these sorts of details, why would you? But what kind of fight do you get in with your parents where you never talk to them again? And moreover, who is this woman, drinking in bars, alone, on weekday afternoons? I’m no genius about people, but something is definitely up.