Nothing to Declare Read online

  In the trailer Jesse can see Henry shadowed by a pile of Michelin steel belts. The older man swabs the flat of his neck with a handkerchief, folds it slowly into a beautiful, lustrous square. “I’ll give it serious consideration,” Jesse says, moving past Little Mitch toward the dock. “Weigh all the pros and cons.”

  “Maybe you can keep the hair if you promise to comb it nice,” Little Mitch calls out.

  “I’ll think it over.”

  Jesse pulls onto the trailer bed beside Henry and squats to launch his first tire of the afternoon. He pauses, straightens up, and leans it gently off his body to the ground. Golden, he thinks. What would that feel like?

  On Fridays in my trusty Volvo, we rattled across the county from Boulder Creek to Watsonville, me and Isabel and Jesse, searching out dinners in the lowliest corners we could find, on the hunt for what was difficult or strange. In Half Moon Bay there was a Greek who roasted lamb tongues over grapevine twigs, sweet as candy, and one time in Capitola, we came upon a Navy SEAL named Huey Huge, large-size hombre who farmed sea urchins from pilings he seeded near the pier. We bundled up in blankets and convened by the water’s edge, gooey roe on sourdough ficelle. We ate while I recited the Balakian family history—our wealthy century of feuds and larcenies, our hundred thwarted loves. The urchin dinner made fine company for that extravaganza—a briny taste of tears and sex, a husk whose spines will shoot you to the trauma ward, you don’t look closely to your footing.

  Afterward, we’d tool up Highway 9, the three of us snug in the front, radio playing Rollins or Dolphy or Miles. I’d drive and Jesse’d sing out for turns and fallen scrub, while in between us, Isabel head-bopped with the solos, blood-warm and happy. The road bucked us through the fog but we slipped along with confidence as though tacking through the chop. Home in one piece every time.

  Jesse loved her. Who wouldn’t—her face transported by the music, her eyelids bruised by all the Southern Comfort she’d been nursing. The sweetness of oranges when she kissed you good night. He loved her, Christ, he doted on us both, but without a sign of resentment he gave us room to be what we were, do how we did.

  She loved him, too. Him more than me, I did the math the day we danced at Lulu’s. He might have given her a try—it would have bent me nicely out of shape, instructed me to mind my manners. They never took the dare, not then. Too bad. If property is robbery—and that was how we understood it in those times—then in my thinking, same’s fair for lovers.

  The letter from his dad lies unopened on top of the television where Jesse dropped it earlier in the week. It’s addressed in pencil in the seemly engineer’s script his father learned at trade school. Written after dinner, Jesse decides—pot roast, frozen peas with margarine, one scoop of lemon sherbet, a Lorna Doone. Written at Jesse’s student desk, in Jesse’s one-time bedroom, Dad twirling a mechanical pencil under the virginal light of Jesse’s gooseneck lamp. Here, in dependable monthly installments, Louis Kerf writes letters on Kerf and Co. stationery. Their arguments are as orderly as a toolbox.

  It’s thrilling to watch the man who once described a fine arts diploma as $20,000 toilet paper plead for Jesse to trot home to the studios on Huntington Avenue. There’s a world of boundless possibilities when the Hardware King of Somerville becomes dismayed because his boy has lost the urge to paint.

  Except he hasn’t. At night, staring into his bedroom mirror, Jesse has been at it with a box of Conté crayons, six colors—earth tones, grays, and blacks. Hard to say why it’s only self-portraits, but he’s been nudging this along for several months, committed to finishing one a day. The more Jesse works, the more the series has abstracted, and now it’s hard to say if anyone could recognize his latest as his face—or any face at all. He’s shown the drawings to no one, stashing them under his bed when done. All he cares about is the gesture—the movement of his fingers across seventy-pound vellum, the smudge of his tortillon against the page, the smell of fixative that settles over bedclothes, pants, and floor. Momentum is what counts, more than vision, more than imagination. Making paintings like rolling tires up a ramp.

  One evening in early November, Jesse waits on the front porch for Isabel and Marty, who’s scored them tickets to a sold-out concert by the Who. It’s been raining for a week and Escalona Court is shiny with runoff. Even boxed in under dense clouds, the Bermuda grass and jade plants smack the retina with an amazing green. So many separate greens: Coke bottles and dollar bills, the tarnished copper of a Revere Ware pan. At the bottom of the grade, he makes out Marty’s Volvo surging up the hill. Coffee-colored water spits behind its wheels. The California palette: color rampant. Landscapes next, he thinks, more colors, too.

  Jesse bolts into the downpour flapping his arms and hollering out a lunatic hello. The car swerves and collects him and they slalom up the hill toward San Francisco, his friends welcoming him with Marty’s Afghan hash and Isabel’s Jim Beam. Jesse draws in on the pipe and spends out the smoke with a shuddering laugh that whirls water from his matted head. “Faster,” he orders Marty. “I don’t want to miss a note.”

  “Lord, you’re a total wreck,” says Isabel. She slips out of her jacket and cloaks it around his shoulders. “Not me,” Jesse says, watching the rain burst against the windshield. “Couldn’t be better. Not if I tried.”

  The Who’s performance is a vital substance flung up from drums and laser lights and Peter Townshend’s windmill arm on his guitar. The volume is so profound, so large, it hauls the audience forward as if by pull of gravitation. Near the apron—or as near to it as the uniformed security will allow—dancers swarm to the music: an organism of jouncing limbs and Bic lighters propped overhead in communion with the band. If he closes his eyes, Jesse can feel the rhythms inhabiting the spongy cavern of his brain. A vertiginous sensation, as though he’s been inflated to the point of flight.

  Marty has brought them to the special real estate in sniffing distance of the stage. There was magic, Jesse recalls, how Marty worked his number in the parking lot before the show—converting their general-entry tickets into fifteen hits of acid, then acid into a rack of Day-Glo Frisbees, and Frisbees into press credentials, which greased them to the velvet-roped enclosure at the front. He snapped their passes gaily underneath the ticket-taker’s nose. He’s spent his concert climbing back and forth to the top bleacher rows in the rear, preferring the spectacle from above, he claims, but Jesse figures likely financing next week with the remainder of his stash.

  Isabel stands next to Jesse, hands on her hips, chin jutting toward the performance in a posture of sulky appreciation. The Who’s variety of muscle lacks the feints and subtleties of the Latins she loves, yet when Roger Daltrey slides to his knees near the proscenium’s edge and lassos his microphone around his head in a flash of glinting light, she unleashes herself at last. In one of her wilder spins, her elbow creases Jesse across the ribs.

  “Give her some room,” Marty comes over to yell in Jesse’s ear. “Once she cuts loose, Bel doesn’t know her strength.”

  “I’ll tough it out,” Jesse shouts back. “She’s having fun.”

  “Ain’t we all. We’re in the fucking United States of Fun.”

  There is a pause in the music, and the band retires in conference behind the banks of amplifiers stage rear. Isabel drinks from her pint bottle, glossy with the satisfactions of physical movement. She listens with Jesse while Marty ranks this concert against the one he saw at Suffolk Downs when he still lived in Massachusetts. There’s a catch in his voice, a stutter in the larynx, which might be psychedelics coming on—the mescaline that Marty likes is often cut with speed. To please his lady-love, Marty has shaved his beard and cropped his dyed-blond hair back to its roots. Below the grizzled forehead, his pupils dilate, a canny and opalescent black.

  “You never said you were planning to trip tonight,” Jesse says.

  “A few mics floated my way. You want?”

  Jesse attempts to focus on his watch—fourteen hours will plunk him in the belly of tomorrow af
ternoon. “I better not. Happy trails, though.”

  Marty shakes his head mournfully. “Listen to him, Bel: ‘I better not.’ The working hump’s lament.”

  “Most of us have jobs,” Isabel says. She tucks her fingers within the crook of Jesse’s arm. “I’d hate to think of him tripping at the factory.”

  “Cool,” Marty says. A grin trembles across his face. “Always another day.”

  “It’s not so bad,” Jesse finds it necessary to insist. “Anyhow, I’m truly ripped behind your hash. How can I put it—less is more.”

  Marty pinches Jesse on the cheek. “Little Brother, less isn’t more. More is more.” He lunges off into the crowd, parting the bodies before him as though striding through the corn.

  There is a lengthy stall waiting for the concert to resume, and a party atmosphere ping-pongs from wall to wall, echoing war whoops and, after a while, clapping in building unison. Isabel’s face flushes in drunken yearning as she applauds and stamps and cheers.

  The picture comes to Jesse of one of Paul’s cartoon kitty-cats tumbling past a cliff—its optimistic smile as it bicycles its legs midair to stay aloft. Under Jesse’s sneakers, the parquet quakes and shifts, raising a mucky scent of mud and dope and dancers’ sweat. Hope, Jesse thinks, joining his stamping to the rest. We live in the expectation of a kind and boundless future.

  In a burst of sonic thrust, the Who return to center stage. Pete Townshend announces that Keith Moon’s gone off ill, he’s dosed himself on veterinary medication, he can’t stay upright on his drummer’s stool. To take them through the last two songs, they’ve found a volunteer whose chops aren’t halfway bad, a ballsy sod who promises the stuff to make it with the Who.

  A spotlight paints the drum kit pearly white. It’s Marty—has to be—drumsticks spread high for the downbeat, his knobby skull flashing scarlet and emerald green from spinning side-stage fixtures. Impossibly at home behind the drums. He scowls gravely, and at the cut of Pete Townshend’s strumming arm, lays on the attack. He wields a competent, simple, aggressive hand during the first two numbers, and if he falters a bit with the complexities of the finale, the Who don’t seem to mind.

  Isabel pounds on Jesse’s back, straining to see over the taller heads in front, so he hoists her onto his shoulders where she remains through the bravos and the bows. She is sturdier than he imagined, heels dug into him and waving her arms, more than once close to toppling them down. After the closing curtsies, Marty dogs the band into the wings.

  In the parking lot, Jesse tries to find a route past the hired muscle who bar the backstage door. They have the surly appearance of schoolyard bullies; it will take all the bravado he can muster. The rain has ended, leaving a chill transparency in the night sky. Radiational cooling, he remembers from a class he took at Northeastern. Nothing to bind the warm clouds to the earth.

  Isabel will wait by Marty’s car. She tells Jesse, “Enjoy yourself to your heart’s delight for half an hour. If you’re not back by then, I’m thumbing home.”

  “I can’t believe you’re passing up a party with the Who.”

  She indulges him with a goodbye kiss. “If there’s anywhere a girlfriend is extra weight, it’s got to be a party with the Who.”

  He watches her departure through the line of traffic, a skipping quality to her step as though she still hears music.

  When Jesse returns to the Volvo, Isabel is bent atop the pavement in the Warrior yoga pose. “You’re limping,” she says and comes to him with an instinct to push her touch on every hurt: his torn shirt pocket, a banged-up knee, three scratches on his face. “They beat you up, those creeps.”

  “Just shoved. I was urged to stay outside. I’ll tell my grandkids I got my ass thumped by the henchmen of the Who. I’m not unhappy.”

  Isabel stares past him toward the Cow Palace, where the exterior lights are clicking off. “He’s going to be impossible, you know,” she says. “We’ll be listening to his folderol till Christmas.”

  “He’s earned the right. I don’t believe his luck, can you? To be there when they were choosing drummers.”

  “I didn’t know he played that well,” she says.

  Jesse dusts his pant legs and gravel showers the ground in a lively clatter. “Hey, I never knew he played at all.”

  Isabel yawns. “Okey-doke,” she says. “Let’s book, if you don’t mind. Marty’s probably warming himself with a teeny-bopper from the band’s collection. His new friends can worry how to get him home.”

  “We don’t have any car keys,” Jesse tells her, but Isabel worms her arm through the front vent window. Grunting, she pops the lock and slides on her back under the dash. The engine warbles into life.

  “Wow,” Jesse says.

  Isabel touches two fingers to her brow. “I’m lucky, too,” she says. “Keeping me company?”

  Along the Felton Highway switchbacks, the headlamps ghost light against the redwoods, tree trunks vanishing almost as rapidly as they appear.

  “It doesn’t make you mad?” Jesse says.

  “What’s that?”

  “About Marty and whoever, his teeny-bopper for the night?”

  Her expression recedes into the general darkness.

  “Might as well get mad about the weather,” Isabel says.

  ELEVEN

  AFTER EIGHT DAYS OF INCOMMUNICADO Marty surfaces at Escalona House before daybreak, a Sunday morning. There’s a howling from the shrubbery, a pounding on the latched front door that herds Jesse out of bed and down the stairs. It’s a gusty morning, mule-gray with fog, yet on the doorstep Marty is barefoot and dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and matching shorts in tones that call to Jesse of the cherries in a drink at Trader Vic’s. His friend’s blinking, sun-chapped face sways beneath a bright Panama hat.

  “Hi-de-ho, Little Brother, Salaam Alaikum.”

  “You know what time it is?”

  “Don’t fuss.”

  He bumps past Jesse in a vapor of beer and what might be suntan lotion past its prime. In the living room, Marty trails his fingers on what he passes: stereo speakers, the construction spool he and Jesse liberated from a U.C. building site, some Santa Cruz Whole Women’s Catalogs that Natalie is hawking from a kiosk up on campus.

  “Plus ça change,” Marty says. He widens his arms into a loving O. “Give Daddy a squeeze. It’s great to be home.”

  Jesse shakes his head. “No thank you. When was the last time you had a shower?”

  “Ah,” Marty says. “It hasn’t been a shower kind of week.”

  “No? I kind of pictured you sharing a bathtub with a pair of groupies like Mick Jagger did in Performance.”

  Marty falls on the couch, spreading out against the corduroy with an elaborate groan. “Expand your imagination,” he says, and knocks his hat brim over his eyes. After a bit he snores. His slumber is a mixture of athletic snorts and contortions. Dreams, Jesse guesses. What dust does traveling with the Who kick up into the subconscious?

  Outside, the fog is lifting and the sky is colored by an insistent wash of wintry blue. It’s a day for running distance, Jesse decides—the wind ramming on his back, pushing him faster than he can do on his own.

  The weak sunshine shafts into the room. Lord, Marty’s body is streaked with party glitter, patches of it twinkling from his instep to his knees. His friend squirms in sleep. The specks toss up a multicolored mess into the air.

  At Sunday breakfast I told the Escalona roommates about my week out on the road. We were in the kitchen eating pancakes. Perfect silver dollars. I was flipping them directly from the pan onto the plates. The action’s in the wrist—a little confidence, they goddamn sail.

  I was bug-eyed with exhaustion and semi-drunk on Bloody Marys, but I loved how my subject bopped along my tongue. Life with the band. You should have been there—the smell of scorching butter, Jesse and the others bouncing round the stove like kittens after cream. We were eating with our fingers, licking syrup off our skin.

  God is in the details, so the man says. The qua
ntities of what was snorted, dropped, or smoked; the sundry contortions of the rock stars and their pals. Natalie, the true believer, built up a Marxist thesis: that rock-and-roll is agitprop and nurtures solidarity among the working class. Roger Daltrey’s skinny body got her wet, I’d wager cash.

  How it flowed, my little drama. First we boogied on a tour bus from the Cow Palace to concert dates in Isla Vista and L.A. and San Diego. I made myself essential to the band as Keith Moon’s backstage keeper. I was the tender shepherd of his stash. Doled out downs and ups and joints and shots of frozen Stoli. I logged the calculus on whether Moon could take the freight.

  Keith was a motherfucking superman of impulse. Shy sort who’d toss a hotel TV set eleven stories to the swimming pool to watch it splash. No matter what complexity of chemicals the dude absorbed—and let me say, he was prodigious—he’d drive the music in a rigid fury every night as if the tunes were masonry he had to smash. I kept him vertical, drumsticks wailing. I knew my place. I merited my keep.

  After the San Diego gig, the band took R & R in Ensenada where we lunched on marlin tacos at Hussong’s bar. We slugged mescal from the bottle, we lost pesos by the thousands at the jai alai fronton up in Tijuana. The pelota hits the wall at 180 miles an hour, it’s in the Guinness Book of Records, did you know?

  This was lush territory, the Brits and me in Baja, until Isabel came in the kitchen. She’d biked the fourteen miles from Felton and her face exuded virtuous pink effort. There was a blood-red ribbon tying up her braid, as I recall. I should have hustled her away for a private greeting, but I was liquored up and Paul was taking notes; I couldn’t stop.

  Night before last the band and I swam alongside leaping dolphins in the Gulf of California. The waves were veined with glowing plankton, we were terrified about the things that might come chomping up at us from underneath. There’s nothing quite like porpoise love, their blunt, brutal adoration. If they could appreciate what animals we humans truly were, they’d drown us all in twenty seconds flat.