Where All The Ladders Start Read online

  The day Danny had come home with that punk haircut, David had wanted to laugh and cry and get furious all at the same time. He felt betrayed. The boy knew how he felt about punk music. Then immediately he’d had to slam on the brakes, wanting to make Danny understand. “I’m not rejecting you, you understand, just the haircut.”

  “You’re totally contradictory, you know,” the boy had said, flapping his arms as he walked over to the sink and then back to the fridge, opening the door and then standing there, holding the door open, leaning on it, his back to them. He had ripped the sleeves off his sweatshirt, and to David he looked like a street kid, some stevedore’s son who was in love with big cars and big trucks. The boy was sporting a little red stud in his left earlobe now—something else David had never anticipated he’d have to “adjust” to. “You’re the one who kept bugging me to get a haircut,” his son went on. “Well, I got a haircut. You’re totally contradictory, you know that? First you tell me to be me and do my own thing, and then when I do it, you get all geeked out because you think it looks like some people who are just different from you, that’s all. What do you want me to be—another you?

  “I just didn’t want it down to your shoulders.”

  “Well, you got what you wanted, right?” He had pulled the juice pitcher out and turned back toward them. “It ain’t down to my shoulders anymore.”

  His hair—no more than half an inch long anywhere on his scalp—looked like it had been brushed back to stand straight out from his skull in tufts of irregular length. It looked like a stubble field. “A friend” had cut it for him, Danny had told them when he’d come home from school and practice and hanging out that day.

  “What the hell did he cut it with,” David asked, “a trowel?”

  “Well, I got it cut, right?”

  “I just didn’t want you to look like a punk rocker!”

  “You think this looks punk?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Whatever!” He flapped his arms again.

  “You know,” Jane was saying, “I really don’t think it looks that bad.” She was looking over at Danny as she pushed the pieces of chicken around in the pan with a wooden spatula.

  “You want to see punks,” Danny went on, “you should come down to school and check out people like Tipton and Gajdusek. They’re punks. This one dude’s got a six-inch Mohican dyed green—Calvin Restani.”

  “I guess I really ought to feel relieved then, huh?” David asked.

  “I really don’t think it looks that bad,” Jane said. “It really brings out your eyes.”

  David looked at his son. The boy’s face, not framed by hair anymore, looked open, vulnerable, his acne painfully apparent, almost raw. But he did have gorgeous eyes.

  “Hear that?” Danny said, gesturing at his mother and beginning to smile. “Besides,” he went on, pouring himself a glass of juice, “what have you got against punk rock? That’s where it’s all happening now, Dad. You don’t want to get left behind with all the other old-fogy stick-in-the-muds when the New Wave hits the beach, right?”

  David threw back his head and laughed. Still laughing, he said, “You fill up on juice, you won’t have room for dinner.” Jane was laughing too. “Do you think you could walk away from the cutting edge of contemporary music long enough to set the table?” she asked the boy. “I’ve got to get out of here right after dinner tonight. I’ve got to pick up Jack on the way to the reading.”

  “Sure,” Danny said. He took a pair of Devo-style sunglasses out of the pouch in the front of his sweatshirt and put them on. Jane shook her head, smiling, but the best David could manage was a weak chuckle. As soon as the boy had gone into the dining room with the dishes, Jane gestured to David to “cool it.”

  “I hate to say it,” she said, lowering her voice, “but you were starting to sound pretty classist there.”

  “Classicist?” he asked, totally mystified.

  “No, class-ist. You know, class ist.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” he groaned aloud, checking himself before he could ask her where the hell she had picked up such politico-babble jargon, Of course it was from her Freeze-freak friends. But where the hell had Danny picked up this whole new punk thing? Before the haircut, they had joked about punks. Driving down Divisadero one day they had seen a kid leaning up against a bus-stop sign. The kid’s orange and green hair stood out from his head in tufts. He was wearing a lot of black leather and zebra-striped pants, with a dog chain wrapped around one boot.

  “Why don’t you get an outfit like that,” David cracked. “Hey!” Danny said, “that’s a friend of mine!” And he waved out the window, yelling, “Hey, Ché!”

  At that moment a gaggle of thirteen-year-old girls walked past the punk, who turned to track them at the same time that he called out to Danny, jerking one thumb over his shoulder at the girls. “Tender Vittles!”

  The punks he’d seen were always dressed in black, all painfully thin, as if their hatred of the world consumed them from the inside. They radiated a hostility that didn’t even pay you the compliment of being directed at you personally. It was just a zone of menace, and if you happened to pass through it, you felt it, the way a tin can would feel it as it got kicked out of the way, just because it was there. Of course, they tried too hard to be outrageous, and that tended to make them silly (their groups had names like The Dead Kennedys and Crib Death), but as often as not, they really were outrageous, like the group the Kaplans had told them about seeing one night when they’d decided to check out the Mabuhay Gardens. The leader had sneered into the microphone, “Okay, you Jews, get the hell out of here. We want to sing some Nazi songs.”

  “He’d hit just the right tone,” Kaplan said. “It sounded like he was talking to children, as if he were saying, ‘Okay, kiddies, toddle off to bed, the grown-ups want to talk grownup talk and tell sex jokes.’”

  “He must have been imitating his father,” David said. “I hope you threw a beer bottle at him.”

  “Are you kidding? We’d just spent two hours in there watching these mutants slam-dancing into each other, and I mean really trying to do each other bodily harm. And that’s just what they were doing to each other with their pogo-dancing or slam-dancing or whatever. I didn’t want to think about what they would do to people they actually didn’t like. We got the hell out of there without making a peep. Silent as little church mice.”

  These were not the terms in which he wanted Danny to define himself.

  But he was being silly. All the boy had done was get a haircut; he had not joined the Nazis. For chrissake, he knew Jews whose kids had haircuts like that. Still, he felt betrayed. The haircut signified allegiance to a kind of robot rebellion that saw machines as the highest value. David could hear this techno-worship in the rhythms of punk songs, he could see it in their dances and in their movies that deified cars and motorcycles and armored personnel carriers. Danny didn’t realize he was saying yes to mechanical anger. It wasn’t the anger that bothered David, it was the mechanical.

  He leaned back against the sink and drank off the last of the bourbon and water. “You’re right, of course,” he told his wife, “but I need to talk to you about this.”

  “Absolutely,” she said, handing him the colander. “Can you drain the spaghetti? I should be back by—Oh, hell, I promised Jack I’d give him a ride home. It’ll be midnight before I get back. What about tomorrow night?” She moved aside as he got the platter out of the oven. “Or are you guys rehearsing tomorrow night?” she asked.

  “You got it,” he said, dumping spaghetti and steaming water into the colander.

  They never did have the talk. The year—the whole previous year since they’d gotten back from the Hudson Valley—had gone like that. He woke up every morning, every morning, with a curse on his lips, a goddam that tasted even more bitter as he realized that he could no longer remember a time when he did not wake up damning his life, nor even imagine a future when he would not. He had somehow been drawn into this desultory traffic
jam or parking lot where none of the cars moved and nobody cared and nothing ever changed except to get worse, and everything felt like it was coated with a greasy fur of dust, like the things in the church basement he’d found for the rehearsals that by day was used as some sort of recycle center—bins and boxes of old bottles and old cans sorted by color or by metal; cardboard barrels of old clothes, mostly pretty raggedy; and stacks of old bundled newspapers stacked against the far wall. The acoustics were poor and the piano was impossible. It was beyond tuning (“I don’t expect a Bosendorfer, dammit, but we do need something we can tune by, something that will play all the notes”), and eventually he’d paid to have it hauled away and replaced with a rented baby grand.

  Now the main crossroad through the park lay empty of traffic under the streetlights, and he barely needed to slow down to make the sharp left turn into the dark little path he knew, far from any traffic, far from the lights, where he pulled over to the side of the road and turned off the ignition, sitting there in the darkness, listening to the sporadic night sounds of the park and the clicks and groans of the cooling engine. The creaks of branches and the rustling of leaves, the far-off hum and whine of an occasional car passing on the main road—they all seemed like snags and flaws in a fabric of silence that would otherwise have been perfect. He closed his eyes, wanting to hear the silence underneath those sounds.

  One evening last September he’d gotten to rehearsal early. The first concert of the season was only two weeks off, and they still had a lot of work to do. He’d found himself wandering around the deserted church basement, absently fingering the old clothes piled loosely in the cardboard boxes stacked against the wall behind the piano and sometimes spilling over the edge of a box—the velvet sleeve of a “party” dress, the cuffs trimmed with lace; a “dressy” pin-striped shirt with impossibly long collar points; a pair of tweed knickers; a slinky woman’s blouse in some material that was supposed to feel like silk. He felt the droop of his shoulders and tried to straighten up. The musicians would be coming in any minute, and he did not want them to see him this down. The fact that he was here at all added to his depression: he had just signed his second one-year lease on the damn place. Would he have to rehearse his group in here forever? Would he have to take up residence down here? Who had worn these old clothes? How long had they lain on the shelves or floors of closets, in the darkness of bureau drawers, half-abandoned before they’d been taken out and put in cardboard boxes for the trip down here? The refuse of anonymous lives, relics of nameless people. The toe of a shoe peeked out of a tangle of empty sleeves.

  People had actually wanted these things. They had seen this suit in a store window, they had seen this nightgown on a mannequin in the lingerie department, and they’d been excited with desire for them. These people, whoever they were, had imagined themselves wearing these clothes—at work, at parties, in bed. These articles of clothing had become part of some vision of themselves-in-some-future, a future that admired and wanted them, a future that regarded them with respect.

  You’ve got yourself in a hell of a bind, he thought as he fished a shoe out of what seemed to be the shirt barrel and dropped it into another box filled with shoes, if you can’t even let yourself get depressed without feeling guilty about that. Give yourself a break! Why couldn’t he just admit it? He was disappointed and pissed and envious as hell. Lennehan had screamed bloody murder when the NEA fellowships had been announced the week before and neither of them had gotten one. “It’s the goddam buddy system,” the man had growled.

  “Of course it’s the buddy system,” David said. “In art, what the hell else is there?” He hated it, too, but he couldn’t complain out loud: he was implicated in it. He’d just been invited to the La Jolla Music Festival next February, again, but as an “honor,” it was hopelessly compromised: he knew the invitation was Michael Harrison’s doing. Again.

  “Look at this list!” Lennehan went on. “Twelve people—these twelve people! David, that’s all but one of the music winners in California. These people are all either students of Millsap’s or former students of his or buddies of his. I mean, Hochfield’s stuff is good, but do you really think for one minute that any of the jurors would have had any idea where the hell he was coming from without Millsap on the inside, lobbying for him, setting picks for him?”

  Why the hell, David asked himself now, couldn’t he let himself bitch like that—openly? Why did he always need to be “above that sort of thing”? He was furious at Millsap, yet when he’d seen him at ROVA’s concert at the Art Institute, he’d smiled and waved at the man from across the hall. He just wasn’t going to give the sucker the satisfaction. The man had said nothing about Les Champs Magnétiques. Three different people had seen Millsap at the installation the night after the opening at the Dance Collective’s loft on Twenty-fourth Street, and yet the man had never said a single word to him about the piece. In eight months not one word. Praise? Criticism? Nothing. Silence.

  He felt as if he had somehow gotten stalled, sitting beside the road while all the new kids in their new cars zoomed past him. He’d been a thirty-three-year-old wunderkind when he’d taken over the orchestra from Ulrich ten years before. At the time everyone had wanted to make bets on his career. He shook his head. Somehow he’d managed to go from a “brilliant prospect with a glittering future” to some kind of has-been—without ever having gotten there. There, he thought, was the place where people listened to your music, where they listened to you. It was important, he told himself now, to be good just when no one but yourself is listening. Ultimately that was the only satisfying thing.

  He had spent the whole afternoon with Valdez and Blanchard in Blanchard’s studio in Oakland, arguing about the Caldwell Prize in composition. They had stolidly held out for a couple of pieces that sounded professional enough but—and David kept insisting on this—didn’t do anything except die-stamp out all the permutations of their original twelve-tone rows. He kept telling them, “I’m just as crazy about Schönberg as anyone, but these two pieces don’t do anything new. They could have been done by computers. They are not going to keep anyone’s soul alive.”

  He had argued instead, with a ferocity that surprised him, for a piece called “The Queen of Pentacles.” The night before, he had played the tape for Jane, along with some other entries (including one of the serialist pieces Blanchard thought was so hot), and she had agreed with him completely. “This one puts the others in the shade,” she had said, “but now I’ve got to go to bed.” David was intrigued by the way the piece mixed all its modes so comfortably—the sweet intricacy of a Lou Harrison-like gamelan treatment and the straight-ahead drive of rock. “Whoever this is,” he kept telling Blanchard and Valdez, “he’s genuinely innovative, yet he’s obviously got a solid grounding in theory. Listen to these cross rhythms: the whole piece unfolds like an embryo out of these first eight bars.”

  Blanchard had looked at Valdez and hunched his shoulders, asking rhetorically, “What’s so hot about cross rhythms?”

  “For chrissake!” David was about to say, “that’s what makes music music: it shows you that everything goes on while something else is happening.” But before he could speak, Valdez had zeroed in on him.

  “David, the piece is pleasant, but it doesn’t go anyplace, it doesn’t develop any of its material. It just seems to go around and around.”

  “But—” he wanted to say. “That was maybe the best thing about the gamelan style, especially in this piece, where the incremental repetitions created a pattern that dissolved time, in which it was always now.” But Blanchard cut him off.

  “David”—his tone was patronizing—”do you really want us to give the first prize in the Caldwell to someone who uses bubble-gum rock instrumentation?”

  “You mean the electric guitar? Jesus, I don’t know when I’ve heard a piece that organizes all its vocabularies as intelligently, as wittily, as this. It’s a little romantic, but for chrissake, at best this guy’s still a grad student.”
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  “Play it for Bill Graham,” Valdez had taunted from his chair in the corner.

  They had ended up giving “The Queen of Pentacles” the third prize, which was the equivalent of an honorable mention: it would win fifty dollars, but only the two top prizewinners would be performed at the Spring Festival Concert at Mills next April.

  He wondered, picking up a rag of a jacket out of one of the clothes barrels, about the possibility of having his own group perform “The Queen of Pentacles,” say, at the last concert of the season in June. He would have to talk to the composer about that title, which sounded awfully—what? Romantic? He could call the crazy lady who ran the Committee on Prizes or whatever it was called at Mills. Now that the prizes had been decided, she could tell him who Contestant Number 21 was.

  He decided to talk to Jane about it that night when he got home. Well, it would probably have to be the next night. He thought of calling Lennehan, too, just to kick the idea around. Jane would say, “Go for it. If you want the group to do it and it’s okay with them, go for it.” Lennehan would be cannier about the politics involved and would talk about “going for position.” Since the winners of the first and second prizes would be announced as such at the Spring Festival Concert, David thought of listing “The Queen of Pentacles” as a prizewinner on his group’s programs and announcements. The composer would get his piece performed and his prize acknowledged; the audience was sure to go for it (most likely for the wrong reasons); and the players—if he knew them at all—would enjoy the hell out of doing it. But there wasn’t very much in it for him, except for a few more enemies, or some old enemies with new grudges. “Valdez and Blanchard,” Lennehan would probably say, “would feel like you’re giving them the finger.”