Where All The Ladders Start Read online

  “Sir,” the woman behind the counter said almost inaudibly. Now the people in the line were studiedly “ignoring” the whole business, looking at the letters in their hands or at the WANTED posters on the wall by the front door, visibly shrinking into themselves where they stood. David looked at the young punk in the leather jacket, so full of his own outrage. He was only about five feet nine, but he seemed to take up the whole interior of the post office. He wasn’t that excited, but his eyes and his movements looked charged and alive.

  “You people are fucking hopeless!” the punk was saying. Then abruptly he left the line and walked quickly to the front door, saying, “We ought to nuke this place! Maybe that would wake some of you fucking sheeps up!” He was looking directly at the people in the line. Then he huffed out the door with what David thought was a too broadly exaggerated swagger.

  David wanted to give him a polite round of applause. Not a standing ovation or anything, just a polite acknowledgment. The punk had accomplished nothing, had actually changed nothing. But in his gesture he had stamped himself on his audience (“You know what this punk did today in the post office? You wouldn’t believe it!”), like a stone disturbing the stream of their thoughts. Tonight would he sleep the Sleep of the Just? David looked around the room, smiling. He baaa’d loudly once, like a sheep. Everyone broke up, but he immediately felt a sharp pang of longing as he remembered Ginny telling him, “Of course you’re shy: that’s why you’re a ham.” When he got to Lennehan's, Mollie let him in, saying, “He’s below,” pointing him down a flight of steps. At the bottom of these steps he made a turn, and there was Lennehan, standing in the middle of a low-ceilinged basement that ran the length of the house.

  “I never even knew this was here,” David said by way of hello. “What is this?” The room was strewn with boxes overflowing with sketches and cardboard barrels of rolled-up drawings and designs. Framed canvases leaned all along the length of the far wall, their painted sides mostly turned toward the concrete. David recognized a couple of figure-in-landscape paintings Lennehan had done back in the fifties.

  “Oh, this was one of the reasons we took the house. I used to call it the Morgue, but I guess now I ought to call it the Recycle Center. How’re you doing?”

  “Hanging in there.” He gestured to all the stuff in the basement. “All this stuff yours?”

  “Yeah, most of it. Let’s go upstairs and get a beer. I just can’t stand to throw anything away. I guess that makes me a closet conservative, huh?”

  “Well, an underground conservative.”

  David let himself be led up the stairs that climbed back toward the daylight. “I put everything I screw up on down here,” Lennehan was saying, “all the abortions. Rejectamenta. You know that poem of Olson’s? This way they’re out of sight but not out of mind. Then from time to time I need to look at something down here, and it never fails: Whenever I rummage around down here, I always end up either finding something I want to try again or getting a totally new take on something I’d thrown out. When I throw it out, it’s junk; when I rediscover it, it’s treasure. You don’t look so good, you look down.”

  From the kitchen window, while Lennehan was finding the beer in the fridge, David could see Mollie out in the garden. She was standing there with her hands on her hips, looking down at a bed of vegetables he didn’t recognize. He had not been able to name that red flower on the trail at Point Reyes, either, and then when he’d tried to cover up his ignorance, Ginny had seen right through him. “Oh,” he said, “you know.”

  “Look,” Lennehan said, handing him the beer, “if you don’t enjoy your life, who will? And whose life will you enjoy? Hey, we really liked that new piece you guys played—you know, the last concert. But Jesus, you played it flat.”

  David looked at him.

  “No, not out of tune. I mean flat, you know, uptight, without a whole lot of pizzazz, life. When you played me the tape, it sounded real loose and easy, enjoying itself. Still, it’s a lovely piece. I like that gamelan sound. You realize that was the last time we saw you? So what are you up to now?” He had led the way up to his loft-studio.

  “These whisper songs,” David started to say. A series of tall white canvases was lined up against the far wall, mostly white, with a lot of jagged metallic yellow across the bottom of them, like gashed-open sardine cans. “These have a nice rhythm,” he said, waving his beer bottle at the paintings. “Are they done?”

  “I’m not sure yet. That’s why I envy you—you music guys.”

  “What? You think we know when we’re done?”

  “Sure, when you get to the end. No, but I know I can’t get into anyone’s paintings but my own the way I can get into a piece of music. You know, when you’re really inside it, where you can see the whole architecture of the music. And when you’re in there, the whole time, you know you’re always moving toward that end, that resolution. It’s carrying you with it or dragging you with it—in two or three directions at once, maybe—but all the time you know you’re moving toward that end. A picture—a picture just sits there, it’s always all there. So what’re the whisper songs?”

  “I’m sure I’ve told you about them,” David said. “I’ve been setting some of Keats’s poems—for various numbers of voices—twos, threes, quartets. Except that all the voices are whispering. Anyway, I haven’t been getting anywhere with them.”

  “Yeah, but at least you know when you’re not finished yet.”

  That night, after dinner, after his family had gone to bed, David came out of his studio and turned on the TV set. He kept the sound off. He went into the kitchen to fix himself a drink. Danny had left one of his hand-held video games on the counter, and as David sipped his drink, missing Ginny, he started to press the buttons that moved the little Mickey Mouse around the LCD screen, scurrying to catch the eggs that rolled down four different chutes from four nesting hens. When Mickey dropped three of the eggs, the machine went into a sort of tilt and, after flashing his score for a few seconds, went back to being a digital clock. It had been keeping time the whole while he’d been playing—11:30. He loved this game now. He took it into the TV room with him, thinking he would have to ask Danny what his high score was.

  He sat down with his drink in front of the TV set. It looked like some kind of docudrama, but he couldn’t tell for sure. The legend “Live,” in the upper left-hand corner of the screen, was corrected by the teletype-looking legend at the bottom that read, “Recorded Earlier.” In his hands Mickey dropped the third egg, and the machine gave out its little two-bar electronic chirp tune that signaled the game was over. On the screen now, someone was playing the piano. He thought of Ginny playing his “Preludes and Fugues” that morning when he’d gone over there. Oh, damn.

  This would come to an end soon. There was Danny’s concert the day after tomorrow, and the big Freezerock benefit the next night. That was Jane’s baby. Sunday was the die-in, and then this particular thing would be over, and on Monday he would go see Ginny.

  He was still thinking that the next night, with a darker, heavier feeling of resignation, as he lay on his back on the floor of his own living room, his eyes closed, his head in that hermetically sealed zone the headphones made. He had methodically drunk what seemed to him like half of Ginny’s bottle of corn liquor, and then he’d kicked off his shoes and put on John Cougar’s American Fool album and lay back watching himself hurt less. In the morning, he knew, he would feel awful—thick and headachy and nauseous. The record had played itself out, and now he just lay there, feeling the hardness of the floor through the rug under his head, feeling the headphones around his ears. With his eyes closed he could feel the walls and the high-beamed ceiling of the room around him. He could feel the tall windows with their many small panes. There was nothing to do now but wait till he could go into action.

  Monday he would go see Ginny, staking all this—his home, his family, his life as he’d known it—on that one act, throwing himself at her feet, sweeping her away. He would d
rive over there. They would have a cup of coffee together in the kitchen, looking out the window at that clear-cut geometry of backyard fences, back stairs and clotheslines. He would tell her then that he was still in love with her. Obviously she still loved him. Nothing had changed, really. He was as good for her as she was for him.

  Now, in his blurry sense of the room he was lying in, he felt that somewhere out there, high up in one of the walls, there was that little door, its outlines blending in almost perfectly with the lines of the house he lived in. He knew where he could get a short ladder to reach that door, and once he had gotten through it, all this pain would be over. It must be close to midnight, he thought.

  He’d been drinking too much. He knew he would have to stop. It had helped, though, and pretty soon now he would be able to put that crutch away too. These crutches. He had found other women to get involved with, and he felt okay about them. He had paid his own way, paid in casual affection for what they’d given him. What he missed was love, the love that doesn’t make any deals. He had tried to get things started again with Jane. She was into her own thing or her own space or whatever. And she had taken Danny with her.

  He had never talked to Danny about his own problems, his anxieties. Eventually he would have to tell him about Ginny. He hoped the boy would understand, because he was good company, and David missed now the times when they jammed together, or the times when they had just sat around and talked—about what Danny was doing in school, about Star Wars or the Forty-Niners. He had actually tried to set things up. He had brought home Xerox copies of the lead sheets Kurt Campbell had done for his group, Sudden Death, and challenged his son to sight-read them along with him. No, he had a date with Kathleen. They had to rehearse.

  His toe was being shaken. Someone was shaking his toe, not hard but strongly enough that he could feel the pressure as it pulled on his leg.

  He opened his eyes and lifted his head, feeling again the weight and gentle pressure of the headphones. Crouched over him and grinning from ear to ear, Danny was still casually shaking his toe. The grin on his face was sly. He was saying something, moving his mouth. David pulled off the headphones.

  “You been drinking that moonshine again, eh, Dad? Your eyes look like two cherries in a glass of buttermilk.”

  The boy looked elfin to David as he crouched over him, except for his cropped hair: an elf at boot camp. “You wouldn’t know anything about that, though, would you?” David asked, grinning as broadly as his son. They were down on the floor together, he and his son. He wanted to give his son a hug.

  Danny was still smiling. “Burnt beyond recognition,” he said. “When I first walked in and saw you laying here burnt, I thought about possibly getting into mouth-to-mouth resuscitation with you, you know. But I figured you were too far gone for that, right? Where do you want us to send the body?”

  The idea of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation made him think of Ginny blowing her dope smoke into his lungs, taking him to Quantum World. “I tell you,” David said, pushing the thought out of his mind as he sat up and straightened an imaginary necktie, “I tell you, I get no respect.”

  “You get this burnt, what’re you going to do with respect? Where’s Mom?”

  “She’s over at Leah’s. They’re getting ready to meet their maker. Or makers, as the case may be. They’re practicing for the big die-in. Dying takes a lot of practice. They do it right on Sunday, they’ll take their show on the road. They practice enough, they’ll end up at Carnegie Hall. I mean, how much practice does it take to do a die-in, for chrissake? You walk in, you fall down. Obviously this is an excuse for all of them to get together and gossip, right? Dying-in—”

  A gleam came into the boy’s eyes. “Jesus, you tonight and Mom on Sunday. I’m going to be an orphan.’’

  “Yeah, you’ll have to go to the orphanage. Who’ll give you your allowance? Do you know why she wants to go through with this, this die-in? Does she talk to you? It’s ridiculous.”

  “What?”

  “It’s embarrassing, it’s like playacting. What’s it going to accomplish, this little Not-Ready-for-Prime-Time routine of hers, this die-in?”

  Danny had stopped smiling. “You’re totally contradictory, you know that? You’re all into Change and Innovation and Revolution and Do Your Own Thing and stuff, and then when somebody actually goes out and does it, you get all righteous and embarrassed and pushed out of shape.” He had started to get up and walk back toward the kitchen, going on, “And how come you’re getting all superior? She’s been doing something she, like, believes in, you know. What have you done lately,” he asked his father as he was walking away, “for what you believe in? What do you believe in, Dad?” And he gave a little snort of a laugh.

  The next day he met Jane on the front steps of Danny’s high school, and she more or less followed him to the auditorium, which was already starting to fill up with students. He waved at Danny up onstage, but the boy only cocked his head back for an answer. A few feet away from him on the stage, Kathleen was bent over her amplifier. They were both wearing shiny warm-up jackets. Jane was telling him about how Danny had wanted to do this concert as a Freeze event, “And this guy Matsumoto … ?”

  “He’s the Dean of Spanking or whatever,” David told her.

  “Well, Matsumoto flat out refused him. Too political. So Danny told him, ‘Okay, so at least let me announce the Freezerock benefit to this audience.’ No way. Too political.” She went on while David sat there, surrounded by several hundred distracted teenagers, watching his son and Kathleen tune up so professionally. “These are the people in charge of educating our kids,” Jane was saying, “preparing them for the future. Peace is too political for them.”

  Up onstage, Danny and Kathleen and the band were “ignoring” the audience, Danny with his haircut (he’d gotten it cut—or hacked—again, as if to spite his father) and Kathleen with her ringlets held back from her face by a red plastic headband. (Why were these kids so attracted to plastic?) They’d finished tuning up, and now they stood or sat behind or held their instruments, looking only at each other, wrapped up in a silence that sealed them off from the babble of the audience. The distance between himself and Danny seemed unbridgeable now: the boy’s haircut, his Devo shades, his stovepipe pants, even his yellow Converse All-Stars that he had meticulously covered with a checkerboard pattern in black Magic Marker. Every element of the boy’s appearance and his manner, even the way he stood, was an embrace of some thing that David had rejected years before.

  Now Danny slipped his Devo shades down on his nose so he could see over them and got his group up on the launching pad. He and Kathleen took one look at each other, and then Danny stomped out the tempo and Kathleen bent over her Fender Strato-Caster and they counted down together, looking straight into each other’s eyes, the two of them, and David knew exactly what his son was feeling, standing up there surrounded by all that equipment and an audience that didn’t know yet that it was about to get blown away. But when they counted down, David made the mistake of glancing at Kathleen just as she mouthed two, pursing her lips the way Ginny did when she played her flute as he’d watched her over her music stand. He felt himself try to choke off a sob.

  After sixteen bars of real gut-kicker heavy-metal chord work Danny and Kathleen dropped their guitars in unison, and in unison—to a drumroll and a cymbal crash—they both ripped open their shiny warm-up jackets. They were both wearing identical tank tops that announced in great block letters: FREEZEROCK—HERBST—FRIDAY.

  Tears were streaming down David’s face. His hand was being squeezed. All around him the audience erupted in applause, teenagers smiling and clapping, and then Danny stepping up to the mike and leading them in a rhythmic chant—“Freeze! Rock! Freeze! Rock!” And then the boy bounced back to the band with a let’s-take-care-of-business air, and the drummer got his foot into the beat and the group took off.

  Jane, sitting next to him, was holding his hand and squeezing it and looking at him now with eyes that
were also filled up with tears. She was holding her hand up to his ear and then leaning over to yell into her hand, pointing up to the stage, yelling and grinning and crying, “We made that!” He could not stop crying. He could not speak. He nodded. Oh, damn.

  Danny had taken off, he had broken free, free in the rhythm of the band driving him from behind. He was leading that band with his body, just the way David had shown him. The boy had all the fundamentals down; he had broken free of the fundamentals, thinking now with his fingers and his body, with both his feet, hacking out his own melody with his own guitar. He and Jane had made that, allright, but the boy had broken free, gone beyond what David had taught him. His band was in tune and on the beat, but Danny might just as well have been all alone up there. In his close-cropped hair and his Devo shades, hacking his lead line out of the band’s rhythms. He was making this solo out of bits and pieces, out of all his little rebellions over the years. How long had the boy been working on the confident angularity of this lead line that sounded so harsh to David’s ear, strident and jagged, a sharp anger in it, repeating itself, he thought, too often? Danny was doing—deliberately—all the things his father had told him not to do.

  It was the haircut all over again—only fortissimo. The boy was hacking out his own different self with that guitar, repeating himself the way his father would never do, indulging and asserting himself the way his father would never do. And he was making it work, breaking away and burning his bridges. He was spectacular. It was glorious to see and hear. But oh, damn. Would he lose this, too, for Ginny? Would Ginny end up costing him this much? Or had he lost the boy already? He needed her now all the more. Oh, damn.

  Backstage after the concert Danny was riding a crest of adrenaline (and who knows what else! David thought), barely able to stand still. David had tried to give him a high five, but he would accept only a “regular” soul-brother handshake. Jane refused to put up with any of that and gave him a proper hug. Danny even gave it back, and Kathleen got into it, the three of them hugging one another as David stood there watching.