A Possible Life (31 page)

Weepah Way was a steep, precarious kind of trail with a drainage channel down the centre that someone high on acid thought it was a good idea to flood one summer, so you could surf down it on inner tubes.

‘And how old were you, Freddy?’

‘Maybe twenty-five?’

‘Going on eleven.’

‘Hey, look, this is it. Evie’s house is down there.’

‘And they don’t know about you and me?’

‘I guess not.’

There was a dirt-road dead end. Most of the houses in the Canyon were pretty ordinary, but Evie’s place had a nice wooden palisade and a view over the Kirkwood Bowl. When we went through the gate, I felt anxious that people should like Anya. It was my old life and my new life in collision. Jeff was in a bad way, unshaven and suspicious; he didn’t look that ‘clean’ to me. He disappeared midway through dinner and when he came back he talked non-stop for twenty minutes about the glories of the sandwiches at Canter’s, a drab after-hours deli on Fairfax. He made you feel you were missing out on one of the great experiences of living and somehow doubting his word by not going there at once.

‘And the pastrami,’ he said. ‘Wow.’

‘Wow,’ we said.

Pete and Robbie were suspicious of Anya when she refused to sing. It was like a tradition that anyone would perform if they were asked, but I didn’t want to be seen to be hawking her round to build up some sort of reputation before the record came out. Also, I wanted her to reserve her voice for the studio.

Anya and I left before midnight, and although there had been all the usual talk of the band getting back together it didn’t feel likely.

I put the disappointment out of my mind. My life had changed, it was as simple as that.

The recording was going fine until we came to ‘I’m Not Falling’. I had this marked down as a possible final track because it would end the album on an upbeat. I wanted drums, organ and some tenor sax. Anya wanted just piano. Larry Brecker was with me, Tommy thought Anya had a point and Joe the drummer was keen to play on anything.

I went into the vocal booth so I could speak alone to Anya.

‘I’m not trying to bury the emotion,’ I said. ‘We can mix it in a way that you and the piano are in the spotlight all along. But it’s got such a good beat to it, I don’t want to just throw it away.’

She earnestly grasped my wrists in her hands. ‘Listen, honey, this is my life. It’s not just my song, it’s part of my experience of being alive.’

‘Maybe you’re too close,’ I said. ‘I guess we all need someone outside the creative moment, someone who’s not so emotionally involved.’

‘Do you really think you’re not emotionally involved, Freddy?’ Her voice had risen. ‘With my life, my work, my body, my every living breath?’

Until this moment our intimacy had led only to exhilaration. Now I could see how such weird closeness, this connection of body and mind, could go the other way.

I saw how far we’d penetrated one another’s lives. I didn’t know what to say. We just kept staring. In her eyes there was anger, love, pride and desperation. God knows what she saw in mine.

She said, ‘And if by any chance you
don’t
feel that involved with me, my darling, don’t sleep with me tonight.’

There were tears in her eyes as she spoke. Then the conflicting emotions seemed to resolve themselves. She reached up and kissed me on the mouth.

‘You’d better be right, Freddy.’

‘Do you trust me, then?’

‘I trust you. But you’d better be right.’

Once Anya had committed herself to doing it with other musicians, she did let them play. Even Old Irongloves was allowed a look-in, though he was pretty far back in the mix. Stephen played a short tenor solo as well as some fills on the last verse, Anya was on piano and I thought it best for me to stay out of it altogether. It was a painful few hours, going over and over the arrangement,
but
Anya sang with conviction. Maybe she was thinking, If this is a fuck-up I can blame Freddy.

The last two days were spent on two Anya-only songs, and we were able to send the other musicians on their way. ‘Thunder Bay’ was about her mother leaving; ‘Boxcar Days’ was about watching the trains coming in and out of Devils Lake. It wasn’t my favourite song, though it had some nice touches in the lyrics.

The final running order was this:

We felt the album had a balance to it. It kicked off and ended with the most obviously crowd-pleasing numbers. The slighter songs were hidden in the middle of either side. ‘Julie’, the album’s masterpiece, had a good position. The second side opened strongly.

Delirious with pride, our quarrel buried beneath an avalanche of sex, Anya and I spent happy hours in room 289 roughing out album cover designs, drawing up the credits, making sure we left no one out, including ‘Produced by Jack Wyatt at Sonic Broom Studios West Hollywood, Calif. Engineer: Larry Brecker. Assistant Engineer and sandwiches: Russ Gibson. Joe Aprahamian appears courtesy of A & M Records. Special thanks S. Davis, Jr., S. Cooke and all the staff of the Pasadena Star Hotel. This record is dedicated by Anya King to “Mom, wherever you are”.’

As for the title of the album, there were plenty to choose from among the tracks. Anya liked
Boxcar Days
, I liked
Boulevards of Snow
, but when I called the people at MPR they’d already fixed
on
Ready to Fly
and you could see their point. For a first record by a still-unknown artist it was hard to beat. Anya, uncharacteristically, gave way at once. She did want to sell records.

We said goodbye to Larry Brecker and sent a tape back to John Vintello in New York. We’d have to go back to listen to an acetate on lots of different speakers – plastic bathroom radio, automobile rear shelf – and fiddle around with sound quality on the master, but we could leave that for a bit.

It seemed like a good idea to get out of the Pasadena Star, though we’d come to love it in its crummy way. Your choices from LA are: south to Mexico, east into the desert or north to San Francisco. We flung two bags into the back of the Ford and started up the coast road with Anya singing ‘Let’s Go to San Francisco’ in a high, mocking voice that made us both laugh so much I swerved into the wrong lane and was almost crushed by a giant trucker.

I grew up in a normal house in a normal street. My father was a sales rep and my mother was what most mothers were then, a housewife. There were five children. I was number four in a running order of boy, girl, boy, boy, girl – Ray, Susan, Simon, Jack, Gabrielle. As positions go, four out of five is as near invisible as you can get. My elder sister, Susan, used to mother me and dress me up in girl’s clothes and my little sister, Gabrielle, looked up to me with open adoration. Ray and Simon shared a room, so I was put in with Susan. When she started having bras, I was switched to sharing with little Gabrielle, and this made girls familiar to me. For the first fourteen years of my life I roomed with one.

The sister thing was good, the brother thing was tough. Ray and Simon didn’t want anything to do with me, and in an effort to get into their gang I started to stay late and practise music at school. We didn’t have much money, but my parents were
ambitious
for us in their way. They pushed me through the eleven-plus so I got to a grammar school with a real music department.

I took up guitar as a way of impressing my brothers. The school provided an instrument and free instruction from the history teacher so long as I promised to study the piano as well. I sang in the choir, which I didn’t like except when you did descants. At home, when Ray and Simon were strumming together in their room, I’d offer a harmony, but they wouldn’t take me along to the pubs until my voice had broken. I think they were hoping it would go out of tune as well as dropping, but it didn’t. By then, the revolution was coming from Liverpool. I never did my exams at school. I left at sixteen to be a musician.

These are the kind of drab life facts you tell on long journeys, with the Pacific slumped against the coastline to your left. The girl is on your right, the Santa Ana winds going through her hair, the radio struggling to make itself heard over the engine. Later, there are signs to wineries in San Luis Obispo. You wonder if you should stop and taste. You persuade your girl that it’s her time to take the wheel and in return you’ll find her a great salad and home-baked bread somewhere in Zinfandel Creek. She’ll have to go easy on the wine, it’s true, but she drinks only gin these days.

It doesn’t matter, anyway. Nothing matters. You’ve just completed the most intense work of your life. Recordings that will be stamped on vinyl and reach a generation in their college rooms, in their cars, in their apartments, in their married houses. You’re a king. You have a talent, not a great one, but by your determination and your work you’re surfing on a twenty-foot wave of luck. You’ve done a great thing and enough credit will be yours, but most of it will go to the girl you love, who’s sitting beside you.

The café at Chardonnay Gulch isn’t quite what you’d hoped for, just an OK steak with field greens, and the waitress isn’t a California girl but a heavy guy in overalls who generally services
the
machinery, but the wine stays good all the way down the bottle. You’re burning the days, you’re a millionaire of time, and the sun will never sink on the county of San Luis Obispo, where there are only two seasons, 4 January and summer.

You may as well head back to the car so you can hit San Francisco in time to find a good hotel. The girl sings ‘Do You Know the Way to San José?’ and you make the car hooter stand in for the Bacharach flugelhorn.

Up the coast road, with a stop, it’s ten hours. You’ll be in by eight o’clock. Maybe find a place on Russian Hill, where you stayed before with the band, or call that couple who said you should look them up. What do you think?

‘I’d like a very clean hotel, Freddy. Sheets so white and starched they almost scrape your skin off.’

And by chance you find the very place on Powell and California, not far up from Union Square. A handsome building with shutters and tall windows. They have one room in the back with a balcony overlooking a yard of oleander and acanthus trees. The room price includes parking or breakfast.

Your girl, exhausted by her hours at the wheel, has barely time to phone down a hefty order to the front desk before disappearing to the bathroom.

You knock the hotel pen against your teeth. Parking or breakfast.

The man who rolls your food into the room looks like Henry Fonda. Salads, fresh rolls, grilled shrimp, butter discs on ice, vacuum flasks of almost-frozen juice and water, frosted white wine, fresh fruit with stiff cloths and napkins.

Henry Fonda is gone by the time your girl comes out, wet-haired, in a towel that falls to her ankles when she stretches up to open the window onto the balcony. She picnics naked on the bed, drains half a pint of wine and falls asleep at once on the starched, fresh sheets. You pull a light cover on top of her. How hard she’s
worked
. God, she deserves to sleep. May her vast creative energies be knitted up, replenished. You think how much you love her. You can’t wait for her to wake.

The next day, while Anya was at the drugstore, I called Lowri with a sick feeling in my gut. I told her the recording had gone as well as we could have hoped.

‘You still on speaking terms?’ she said.

‘What? I … Why do you ask?’

Lowri laughed. ‘I guess it’s pretty intense. Someone’s personal songs and someone else telling them what they’re all about and how to sing them.’

‘Well, we had our moments,’ I said. ‘But we’re still talking. We’ve come to San Francisco for a couple of days. Then we’ll fiddle around with the sound before they make the master.’

‘What do they think in New York?’

‘We’re waiting to hear. How’s the farm?’

‘Lonely.’

‘I’ll be back in a week, ten days at the outside.’

Would I? Why had I said that? To make Lowri feel better? Was I going to leave Anya in LA? Or in New York, in the apartment on East Seventh Street that wasn’t even ours? I wasn’t going to risk losing Anya, but I didn’t want Lowri to be unhappy or alone. I loved her and she’d done nothing wrong. So what was my problem?

I loved two women; that was all. It was hardly a sin. In the world of the Canyon it was considered pretty cool. Lowri and Anya were sophisticated modern women; they would understand. Oh God. Like hell they would.

‘We had these awful rooms in LA I told you about,’ I told Lowri, hitting the ‘s’ on the end of ‘rooms’. ‘It’s much better here in San Francisco. My room’s got a balcony and a view.’

The ‘my’ wasn’t quite a lie. It was mine as much as Anya’s.
We
talked on for a bit. Lowri had a beautiful manner on the telephone. Her voice was melodious, all concern for me and innocent good wishes. It made me feel terrible.

There was only one thing to be done. Go and find Anya. Re-engage with her.

We got back to New York in December, and there were still three months on the lease of the Seventh Street apartment. We eased out a couple of Rick’s friends by giving them $200 towards a deposit on a new place, and I moved into what had been Anya’s room with her.

John Vintello and the people at MPR were happy with the record. Based on the way the acetate had sounded, Brecker had done some tweaking at the mastering stage so the sound was neither shrill at the top nor muddy at the bottom, and would come through OK even on student record players. Anya didn’t tell them we hoped for people in their thirties and even forties too.

Then I took the train up to the farm to see Lowri. I felt like an executioner as I watched the woods slide by the window. Like a hangman paid to travel up by train to some remote village and kill someone. I remembered a Methodist hymn my mother used to sing when we were kids, whose last line went: ‘For this our task today we thank you, Lord.’ Thanks a lot.