T. Boyle - T.C. Boyle Stories II - Volume II

What followed, beginning with the first entry for January 1, the day after the band had performed for a New Year’s Eve party at a place called the Whisky, alternated between descriptions of random sexual encounters (groupies), drug use (cocaine, Percodan) and recording sessions for the group’s first album, which apparently was being released that May by Warner Brothers, one of the big companies of the time. It was the usual sort of thing, the rock and roll cliché interlarded with detailed descriptions of various sex acts and demeaning depictions of the females involved, forays into new pharmaceutical experiences, visits to the doctor for burns, contusions and sexually transmitted diseases, set lists, the names of cities, restaurants, venues. I have to admit I began to skip ahead. What was I looking for? Introspection. Connection. Some sort of insight into a life, this life, a life lived coevally with my own. And pain, of course — the sort of pain and hurt and trauma that defines and delimits any life on this earth.

I wasn’t disappointed. In May, once the band went on tour, the entries began to shrink away to virtually nothing, a single line, the name of a city ( Cincinnati, encore “Hammerhead” & “Corti-Zone,” vomit on shoes, whose? ), and then in June the pages went blank altogether. What happened — and this was revealed in the first long entry for July, the longest entry in the journal thus far — was that Carey Fortunoff, mad genius of Metalavox or no, had quit the band in mid-tour, kicking out the windshield of the van they were traveling in after a dispute with the drummer over credit for a song he (the drummer) claimed he’d co-written.

Carey was uncompromising. He had a temper. And no matter how his bandmates pleaded with him, or the drummer (Topper Hogg, another name to look up) prostrated himself, Carey walked away from the whole thing. Just crossed the road, stuck out his thumb and spent two deprived and miserable weeks flagging rides west, sleeping rough, haunting Dumpsters outside fast-food restaurants and listening to every sort of country western and pop atrocity his thumbed rides inflicted on him, till he finally made it back to L.A. And his wife. His wife, Pamela, mentioned now for the first time, as if she’d been supplied by a casting company, as if she’d carried no more weight in his life than one of the Cindys and Susies and Chantals he picked up after every gig, as he called it. ( Lost 22 pounds by the time I got back to Pamela, my head splitting open like a big ripe cantaloupe. Why didn’t you call me? she said. And what’d I do? I just shrugged, because how you could you even begin to put it into words?)

Imagine my surprise. But then, of course, I didn’t have access to the earlier volumes, which for all I knew might have portrayed an awkward first meeting, a tender courtship and a marriage as deep and committed and sweetly strong as the one Chrissie and I have been able to make together. So give him credit. If anyone’s at fault here, it’s me, for having entered his story at random, for hovering over it like some sort of vulture, for being a thief, an expropriator — and yet as I look back on it now, everything I did, even if it was questionable, even if it was ultimately futile, was for a reason. For the better, that is. But I’ll let you be the judge of that.

The next surprise was his daughter. Two lines after he mentioned the wife, in trotted the daughter. A three-year-old. Terri. And whether she was a prodigy or autistic, tall or short or fat or thin, dark or blond (and here something clicked: the pouf-haired toddler in the photo?), I couldn’t have said, not yet, not without reading on. I looked up. My coffee cup was empty and the plate before me held nothing but crumbs, so I closed the book, slipped it back into the newspaper and went home to my wife.

—

That night I took Chrissie out to La Maison, the new restaurant in the village that was so popular you couldn’t get in the door unless you had connections, but, of course, I always had connections. I walked her the long way around, avoiding Carey Fortunoff’s street, making up some excuse about wanting to stop off at the ATM for cash, when, in fact, I had more than enough with me, not to mention half a dozen credit cards, all fully paid up. The maitre d’, who was fooling nobody with his simulated French accent, practically went down on his knees when we came through the door, and we were soon sitting at our favorite table on the patio, where we liked to watch the evening light mellow over the village and cling to the mountains beyond till everything was in shadow but for the highest peak. Our daughter, Patricia, was away for the summer on a fellowship in Florence, studying art restoration, and though we both missed her, it was nice to be free to come and go as we pleased, almost as if we were dating again. When the waiter poured out our first glass of wine, I took Chrissie’s hand and raised my glass to her.

We were on our second glass, Chrissie as ebullient as ever, her voice rising and falling like birdsong as she gossiped about this neighbor or that and filled me in on the details of Mary Ellen Stovall’s marital tribulations, when she suddenly glanced up and said, “Oh, you remember that house? The one on Runyon?”

“What house?” I said, though I knew perfectly well what she was talking about.

“The one where the guy died? The musician?”

This was my chance to come clean, to tell her about the leather-bound volume I’d secreted in the garage behind a shelf of old National Geographics , but I held back, and I still don’t know why. I shifted my eyes. Broke off a crust of bread and chased a dollop of tapenade across my plate.

“Mary Ellen says there’s no way they can ever get the smell out of the house — it’s like that boat in the harbor, remember, where the seal climbed up and then fell through the skylight into the galley and couldn’t get out?” She gestured with her glass. “And rotted there, for what, weeks, wasn’t it? Or months. Maybe it was months.”

“So what are they going to do?”

She shrugged, her bracelets faintly chiming as she worked her fork delicately in the flaking white flesh of the halibut Provençal, which was her favorite thing on the menu. Mine too, actually, as neither of us eats much meat anymore. “I don’t know — but it’s got to be a teardown, don’t you think?”

—

There had been problems with Carey Fortunoff’s marriage almost from the start. Pamela was one of the hangers-on, one of the original groupies, when the band had first formed and was still rehearsing in somebody’s mother’s garage. She was nineteen years old, shining like a rocket blazing across the sky (Carey’s words, not mine), and she had musical ambitions of her own. She played guitar. Wrote her own songs. She’d been performing in a local coffeehouse since she was fourteen (this was in Torrance, from what I could gather, the town where Carey had been raised by a single mother with a drinking problem), and for a while she’d sat in with the band during rehearsals and they’d even covered one or two of her songs. But then she got pregnant. And Topper Hogg joined the band and felt they should go in a different direction. So she stayed home. And Carey, a self-confessed sex addict, went on the road.

All this came out in the July entries, this and more — how she’d refused to have an abortion, how she swore she’d stick to him till the seas boiled and the flesh melted from her bones no matter what he threw at her, whether he gave her a dose of the clap (twice) or chlamydia (once) or whether he loved her or not. It came out because he was back with her now, living in a two-room apartment in Redondo Beach and trying both to shake off the uneasiness — fright — of having burned his bridges with Metalavox and forge on with new music for a solo album. He was feeling introspective. Or confused. Or both. At any rate, this was where the journal became something more than a compilation of trivia and deepened into something more — a life, that is. I was hooked. That night, after Chrissie had gone to bed, I went out to the garage and read it through to the end.