Deborah Shapiro - The Sun in Your Eyes

“Actually, you power-walked off. I remember thinking you needed, like, a fanny pack.” Andy laughed. I laughed too, as if it didn’t sting. “ I’m sorry. I’m just pretty embarrassed by the whole thing now. It was getting so skeevy. You were right to run off. I was glad you yelled at me that day. I must have seemed predatory and weird.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Well, I’m totally done with it, so please don’t let that worry you about moving in here. If you think you want to?”

My dad’s voice in my head said, “Tell them you’ll give it some thought and be in touch.” I wondered if Andy and Lee consulted their fathers before moving into this place. Did they even have fathers? They seemed beyond parents. At least, Lee did. They were only two years older than me but I felt exponentially younger. The house was no more than a ten-minute walk from the main campus, but I had never come this way.

Three days later I moved in.

I quickly grasped the existing dynamic of my new household: Andy had feelings for Lee and Lee knew it and they both went about being sibling-like to each other.

If it wasn’t my first night there, it was my second or third that Lee went to meet up with Noah Stone.

“As in chiseled from,” she said.

“Just like the Mount Rushmore presidents,” said Andy, saliva flying out of his mouth.

Lee wiped her face.

“Sorry,” said Andy.

“It’s okay, I liked it.” She gave him a lewd look and the lovelorn part of him no doubt wished she were serious. “Bye, Viv. Hey, are you sure you don’t want to come with me?”

I noticed that she didn’t “get ready” to see Noah Stone, she just wore what she’d been wearing the whole day, black cutoffs and a gray T-shirt, an outfit that seemed to be the result of a) feminist principles, b) laziness, c) self-assurance, or d) all of the above.

“I don’t want to intrude on your date.”

“It’s not a date date. There are always like ten other people over at Noah’s. Always.”

“Thanks, really, but I don’t have a bike.”

“Okay. See you guys later, then.” Before she left she fixed me with her eyes, transmitting a message: Fair enough. But we’re going to work on this. We’ll get you a bike or whatever it is you need not to make excuses. You’ve gotten this far, don’t back down now. It’s going to be great. You’ll see.

From folding aluminum lawn chairs on a little porch off the kitchen, Andy and I watched her ride away for the evening. There was a gallantry about her.

“You don’t like Noah Stone?” I asked Andy.

“I like him. Everybody likes him. He’s perfect. He’s like a ten-year-old. How can you not like a ten-year-old? He’s pre-analytical. He’s so fucking full of childlike wonder. You know what it is? He’s so literal about everything more cerebral types have covered in layers of abstraction and meaning that he seems, in his simplicity, like a revelation. Like, he would maybe make a giant cigar out of Hamburger Helper and everybody would clamor to find all the meaning in it and they’d ask him and he’d just say something like ‘I don’t know, I was wondering how much Hamburger Helper it would take to make a ten-foot-long cigar.’ People eat that shit up. There’s no intellectual remove for Noah. That’s what gets him laid. I’m sure that’s what’ll make him successful.”

“It’s your intellectual remove that keeps you from getting laid?”

“It must be. I mean, I think girls look at me and they’re like, damn, I want a piece of that fine man-flesh, and I’m like, okay, take it easy, there’s plenty to go around, and then, you know, things progress, as they will, and I’m about to get with her and she’s like, Andy, I don’t just want your supremely hot body I want your mind but I can sense this, like, intellectual remove or something — what’s that about?”

He had taken my hand and placed it against his chest to demonstrate what the girls were like with his man-flesh. He let it drop. When he let go, I didn’t know quite what to do with it.

“Noah’s artsy without being pretentious. Which makes it hard to despise him. So, I get it. I can see why Lee is into that. He’s guileless. Like, I’m sure Noah has no idea who her father is and she likes that.”

“Who’s her father?”

“Jesse Parrish.”

I knew enough about Jesse Parrish to know I should be impressed by this but nothing else. You know who knew about Jesse Parrish? The boy who loved the willowy cross-country runner. He’d put on a Jesse Parrish record that afternoon in his room but I couldn’t get past the fact that it was the same one my parents had in their meager collection, alongside their Anne Murray and the soundtrack to A Star Is Born. I suppose I was afraid, if one thing led to another musically, I would have had to admit to liking it when my parents turned up the hi-fi and swayed in each other’s arms to “Could I Have This Dance?”

A lot of people owned that album, according to Andy. The one with the cow on the back cover. Motel Television, his first solo record. It should have established him as one of the major talents of his era. Only it didn’t. To own Jesse Parrish records now, especially his subsequent ones, required curiosity and effort, knowledge of a secret handshake.

I followed Andy into his room, where he pulled out several records from a crate and proceeded to play “Always Lately,” the first track on Motel Television . Melancholy strumming of an acoustic guitar and a voice: boyish and bell-like but one that easily slipped into a gritty, growling lower register, occasionally within the same phrasing. The song, about the empty space between two lovers, made you feel you were somewhere just off the highway on a rainy morning, after driving most of the night, with nothing to do but contemplate the flat landscape outside your motel room window. The last line, “Remember this?” seemed less of a question than a request made by someone who had already come to a decision, who was already gone. The stripped-down opener gave way to a string arrangement and an echo-y second track; it sounded romantic and sweeping but the lyrics were about ice buckets, vending machines, and a lie.

The album’s sleeve, when opened flat, showed Jesse standing alone in a field one misty dawn, looking downright foxy, his mouth slightly open, about to break into a rakish smile, and to the right of the fold, in the distance, the random Holstein.

“Brian Reiger produced it,” Andy was saying, “and he was just — you hear the guitar? How it just rings ? You don’t hear that on the CD or other versions of the album. You have to listen to the first pressing, which is what this is, and then you really understand how great of a role Reiger played in the sound. He could hear things nobody else could, which eventually drove him crazy. Like, certifiably. Jesse never went that far off the deep end, but he kind of had his own breakdown. This is what it sounded like.”

Andy put on The Garden of Allah, underappreciated and even alienating when it came out in 1974, he said, but now hailed as a masterpiece. The first song was harder, struttier. The yearning melodic voice had a raw, sarcastic leer in it. For a song or two. Then the sound was all over the place, berserk, plunking piano, sloppy vocals, a gospel choir at one point. Courtly strings, orchestral arrangements, a celestial Mellotron, steel drums, and bongos. A glockenspiel. At the end of the LP’s closer, you can hear Jesse snarl, “Stick a fork in me.”

“Basically he got loaded on Quaaludes, went into the studio, recorded some stuff, and then abandoned it in disgust. But there was enough there for Reiger to come in at the end and work his magic.”