Where All The Ladders Start Read online

  “One night we’d all of us—there was a gang of about six of us, including Lennehan. And we were all pretty loaded. We’d been drinking pretty much all day, and along about dusk we stumbled across a vacant booth or stall that the festival people must have been using for temporary storage or something, because there were tables and chairs and any number of wooden pedestals of various sizes. Well, we liberated that booth and turned it into a kind of spontaneous Dada exhibit. Lennehan had been eating a turkey drumstick from the deli up the street, and he put the picked-clean bone on one of the little pedestals and then made a little title card for it that read, IN THE DARKNESS, WHERE SAD ANIMALS BREED, and then the price—$500. It was the most wonderful satisfaction just to stand there with a straight face when these people would walk by. They would look at that bone, and read the card aloud, and then say, in total disbelief, ‘But that’s just a drumstick! A turkey drumstick, look.’ Somebody else put a folding chair on one of those pedestals and titled it SEATED NUDE—$1500.

  “We sang—I forget who made up the words, but we sang, to one of my tunes: ‘Dada will remember what IBM forgets.’ We had the biggest crowd of any booth in the festival.”

  He looked across the table at her. She was smiling. He had started to make some point to her about her nervousness and the rehearsal tonight, but he had gotten so involved in his anecdote that he had completely forgotten what the point was.

  “What you guys did,” she said, “is really close in some kind of way to the spirit of a lot of the punk and New Wave style, you know, that has the same kind of Dadaist thing.” She looked him in the eye for a long time, and then, shaking her head to indicate the restaurant, the park across the street, the Chinese theater across Columbus Avenue, the whole day—and the twenty-years-ago art festival too, she said, “This is all you, isn’t it? This is what goes into your music.” It was a moment like that first time she’d called him honey. She was immersing herself further, giving herself to him the way a child gives itself to sleep.

  The rehearsal that night turned out to be a kind of get-acquainted-with-the-piece session, especially since Ginny had given up the flute part to another musician so she could concentrate on the keyboards and percussion that would drive the piece. She hadn’t quite allowed for the shifts required in her own musicianship as she moved between the two sections of the orchestra in an actual performance. When she’d made the tape, she’d had the luxury of overdubbing, going back and laying down the percussion track on a tape that ran parallel to the keyboard track. But live, it all had to be done now. At the break she told him, “I feel like a Swiss Army knife!” But she reassured him that he did not need to get a separate percussionist: she could handle it. And by the end of the rehearsal she was handling it. She got rid of the stool, trimmed her movements and set up her equipment and sheet music differently, and in the last fifteen minutes or so she was moving smoothly and confidently.

  Afterward he drove her up to the top of Twin Peaks. How could she have lived in the Bay Area for three years and not gone up to Twin Peaks? Obviously she had not yet met the right people. Below them, in the windy, blustery darkness, blown across by gusts of heavy fog, the city lay mapped out for them in patterns of streetlights, house lights and moving car lights, interrupted by squares and splotches of blackness, which he pointed out as Dolores Park and Buena Vista Park. Market Street was a gaudy, almost painful yellow. The Bay Bridge was a leap of faith, reaching out into the dark grayness of the fog till it dissolved. The headlights of the cars blipped out the same way, about halfway across to Yerba Buena Island.

  After a pause she said, “I know I was really messing up tonight, especially in the beginning. But I never had any idea what kind of a rush it would be to hear what you made yourself—live like that. Oh, honey!”

  “You better get a rush like that,” he told her, “it’s your baby.”

  “Oh, honey.” She grinned back at him. “It’s our baby. Let’s celebrate!” She reached into her backpack and handed him a wineglass. She pulled another one out for herself. Then she pulled out a big fat bottle of something spumanti, some heavy Italian version of champagne that turned out to be a little too sweet and not really cold enough. Then she did a magician’s flourish and reached into her backpack again. She pulled out what looked like a small dark green plastic flute at first—until he recognized it as a bong. It surprised him. He asked her, “Can I see that?” He held it up. It was just a plastic tube, about two inches in diameter, with a pipe-bowl stuck into it at an angle at one end.

  “That’s nice,” he said. “Simple, clean lines. Pure functionalism. What key is this thing tuned in?”

  “It gets the job done.” She grinned, reaching for it.

  She poured about two inches of the spumanti right into the water-chamber part of the bong, and then loaded the pipe-bowl with something out of a plastic Baggie. Then she lit it, demonstrating how to keep one finger over the little hole while she inhaled.

  He watched her taking her hit, her lovely little mouth sucking on the end of that tube. He needed to keep his cool, and he looked instead out through the windshield at the undulating grids of the city’s streetlights blinking in the darkness below them while one of Mozart’s quartets for Haydn played softly on the tape machine—it was the dissonant one. “Do you know that letter,” he asked her, “of Leopold Mozart’s from Vienna?”

  She shook her head, holding her breath.

  “Yeah. He was writing home to his wife. He had taken the kids—Wolfgang and his sister—to Vienna, trying, again, to get them a job at some court or another. And there was nothing shaking in Vienna. So he writes home this incredible letter about getting back to Salzburg and walking around all night through the streets, which were evidently sporting recently installed gaslights, and the letter goes on and on about walking around all night under the streetlights that light up the empty streets, even though no one in this brilliantly lit-up city will give his son a job. Whenever I get really depressed, I try to think about Mozart. You know that story about Mozart dancing with his wife?”

  She shook her head.

  “Mozart’s landlord comes over one day in the middle of winter and finds him dancing in the kitchen with his wife while he whistles one of his own tunes. ‘Are you teaching your wife the latest dance step, Herr Mozart?’ ‘No,’ he says—this is Mozart!—‘No, Herr Landlord. We have no money for coal: we are dancing to keep warm.’”

  He looked at Ginny, he looked at the lights of the city. “God! Do I love you!” he said.

  She leaned across to kiss him, doing something he couldn’t quite understand at first, feeling only a vague pressure in his mouth. When he figured it out, the realization itself startled him, and he blinked his eyes open, beginning a sharp little intake of breath. She was blowing softly, insistently, into his mouth, and he held her, their mouths sealed together, while she blew her marijuana smoke into his lungs and he inhaled deeply, hungrily, breathing this young woman’s breath, his member beginning to stiffen, her breath surging through his body, enlivening all his limbs, the skin of his face and hands tingling. When she uncoupled her mouth from his, the Mozart swirling around them, she pulled back to look at him, her dark hair tousled around her head, smiling that wonderful pleased-with-herself smile of hers, and he felt a momentary tug of impatience. He had not wanted it to stop and for an instant felt like a child suddenly deprived of some sweet treat. He had wanted it to go on forever.

  “There’s more where that came from,” she said, mimicking a wicked smile.

  “Oh, yum,” he said after a pause.

  She did it again. It was like the first time, except that now he knew what was coming and hungered for it in advance, seeing her holding her breath as she began to lean toward him again to kiss him, her lips full—-so that when her mouth did close over his and he began to inhale, to breathe her in, he had the pleasure of anticipation added to the pleasure of fulfillment. And again he felt that almost petulant tug when she pulled her mouth away.

  He took a
sip from his wineglass, tasting the bubbles swirling thickly in his mouth, feeling a subtle excitement sliding along the surface of his skin. Out the windshield, the city no longer looked like a map of lights laid out in a flat grid below them. It was a gigantic crystal, a three-dimensional schematic diagram of itself in which he was always getting lost, its intersecting volumes and planes of light shifting and merging unaccountably, the double-blips of car headlights winking out as they ducked behind buildings, and then coming on again instantly on the other side. This was Quantum World, he thought, very pleased with himself. He was on the point of deciding to share this insight with her when the whole crystal somehow softened before his eyes, and in the next instant began pulsing organically, was an organ, its circuits now become vascular. He was inside a crystalline organ of cathedral spaces and grandeur, the rhythms and cross rhythms of its circulation holding him fast in a timeless moment of awe.

  When he could speak at all, after a few moments, he said, “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, Toto.”

  There she was, her eyes shining out to him from the darkness of her lashes, her white, freckled skin in the shadows. “You know,” she said, sounding as if she’d just drifted back to him from some immense distance, dreamily, “I was just flashing on all the music he must have made”—tilting the bong in her hand toward the tape player and the Mozart coming out of it—“all the music he made that … you know, the music he must have made that’s just gone. Forgotten. Lost forever. I mean, you know, not just lost scores but all the music that never got written down, all the jamming and improvising he obviously did, with his friends and family and stuff. It all just went out into the air, into the world. And now it’s just gone. Gone forever. As gone as it can be. It might as well never have existed. And it must have been, you know, how could it not have been as good as what he actually wrote down?”

  He looked at her. He reached out his hand to stroke her face and was amazed to see his hand move—or appear to move: the gesture itself felt smooth enough—in herky-jerk stop action. Old-time movies. The strobe-light room at the Exploratorium. The lizard at Point Reyes. He could see his hand at about a dozen precisely frozen intervals of one continuous motion, reaching out to stroke her cheek, both where his hand was and where it had been, the trail of its own immediate past etched somehow in the air in 3-D.

  “Quantum World,” he whispered at her, pointing out the window, realizing he was whispering and wondering why.

  “Boy, are you burnt.”

  A pause.

  “Aren’t you?”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said. “Isn’t this neat dope? It’s tie-dyed.”

  “Tie-dyed?”

  “I didn’t say tie-dyed,” she giggled. “I said Thai.”

  “Oh, I thought you said tie-dyed.”

  “Tie-dyed dope?”

  “Well, that’s why I asked. I thought it was pretty bizarre too. I thought it was a little bit decadent, actually.”

  “Boy, are you burnt,” she said.

  He was stroking her cheek in short, tender movements. If he kept his motions short, he could keep them in the present tense, but with any longer motions he found himself looking at the present through a stuttering series of frozen, immediate pasts etched somehow into the dark air inside his car.

  “This is pretty amazing dope,” he said. Her cheek, under the skin of his fingertips, felt luxuriously soft and smooth. Had he ever felt skin this soft, this smooth? The way her mouth was half open as she grinned at him out of those dark shadows, her eyes shining and intense. “But I only wish,” he went on, “that one of us, at least, had thought of one thing before we went and got ourselves into this condition.”

  “What?” she asked, still grinning.

  “How the hell are we—and this car—going to get down off this mountain? Neither one of us can do a whole lot more than touch each other and giggle—” She had turned her face into his palm and was kissing it. “How the hell are we going to drive this machine down off this mountain?”

  “We don’t have to go right away,” she said, shifting her weight. “We can park for a while.” She reached across and cupped his genitals softly. She leaned over and kissed him hotly on the mouth. He was, he now realized, necking with a young woman in a parked car. He was suddenly seventeen years old again. Except that now she was actually unzipping his pants as he sat there behind the wheel of his car, a glass of spumanti in his hand, looking out at one of the most beautiful cities in the world metamorphosed now into a multidimensional crystalline organ of science-fiction depth and magnitude where motion somehow magically preserved itself in the air. He wanted to say to her that they had to get down off this mountain, they had to get back down to reality. “This,” he started to say to her. “This has nothing to do with reality,” he wanted to say. He could hear how, in a minute or two, when he spoke it, it would sound. But he heard himself actually speaking only, “This. This. This—” waving at the windshield. She kept on kissing his face.

  “Ginny,” he finally said, pushing her away as she looked up at him with a wet-faced pout. “Ginny, let’s get out and walk around for a minute. Get a little fresh air.”

  Out in the blustery wind, sharp with dashes of cold rain, he walked around and opened her door. He reached in; she gave him her hand and stepped out, immediately going a little rubbery in the knees. “Someone,” she intoned ominously, “has snuck in here and removed all of my leg bones.”

  After five minutes of walking around in the shivering cold he still did not feel straight enough to drive, but she insisted she was okay.

  “How you going to drive without leg bones?”

  “Check it out,” she said.

  They got back in, trading places, and she inched her way down the road, the brakes on all the way, hunched forward over the wheel. He sat there in the passenger seat, staring into this world the headlights were making—a world of white fog and a white guardrail, the only thing between them and the night. He could not see more than thirty feet or so ahead.

  “You know,” he said, staring straight ahead into the white light, “I’m putting my life in your hands.”

  She looked at him with a great cockeyed grin, and crouched forward over the wheel and the dashboard lights, doing a Halloween Witch parody: “Chortle, chortle, foolish mortal, I’ll take you to my den. And den—” She was making it up as she went along. “And den I’ll have my will of you.” He sat there trying to see the road ahead. The white guardrail and the dotted white line materializing out of the night fog into the headlights. The harsher-looking neon-lit gas stations across the intersection from the juvenile detention center. The Forest Hills station of the Muni tunnel, looking like something out of the nineteenth century now, on the other side of its lawn. She parked the car in front of her house. In her plant-filled room she swept the three John Cage books off her quilt, saying, “Get John Cage off our bed!” She went around the room lighting candles, and before she was done, she had transformed her tree-house bedroom into a kind of grotto. She came up to him now with an elfin gleam in her pale green eyes, which he kissed shut, twice each.

  They made love for what seemed to him an expanse of time that spread out in all directions, more like so many thousand cubic feet of volume—the volume of her bedroom—than a linear length, like an hour. As they began to approach the outer reaches of that time he could feel his thrusts and her thrusts slide together, his rhythm and her rhythm sliding into focus, and he was being with her in a way that was different from any other being he had ever known, and then they had become a tree, the same tree, their thrusts the trunk and their limbs and movements now the leafing and the blossoming branching out toward which all movement reached. He lay in her arms, in the clustering, Ginny-smelling tree-dimness for a long time, feeling her arms around him, feeling her firm young body bearing him up.

  “Somebody sneaked in here,” he told her, “and removed all the bones from my body.”

  She started to laugh. “Well, they left one in mine!”
r />   “Oh, boy, do I love you!”

  “Oh, boy, you sure do! Honey, I think we ought to give Mr. Rourke and Tattoo a bodacious big tip!”

  As he showered hurriedly he figured he would tell Jane that he’d given Marty a ride home from rehearsal, the kid had invited him in and turned him on. Then, when he’d started to drive home from Marty’s, he was only able to get about halfway through the park before he realized he was too stoned to make it, so he pulled over to the side and crawled into the backseat. Some cop from Park Station had woken him up and told him to head home. Evidently lots of weirdos prowl the park at night looking for cars parked like that—you know, couples making out or whatever. Then they mug them, rape the women, terrorize the men. Fun, huh? He’d had a beer with Marty, and then they had split the joint. It was incredible stuff. It was Thai. He did not know where Marty had gotten it.

  When he got home, Jane met him in the kitchen. She was still pulling her robe on over her flannel nightgown, and her face was a combination of angry, anxious and relieved. “Where the hell have you been?”

  “I was at—Hey, don’t use that tone with me.”

  “Shh! You’ll wake Danny! Where have you been?”

  “I’m not raising my voice. Just don’t talk to me like that.”

  “David, what’s going on? Where have you been?”

  “Look, I got stoned, all right?”

  “Stoned? David?”

  “Look, I’ll tell you what happened. Just don’t give me the goddamned third degree.”