Inventing Memory (23 page)

The guilt Sally felt about what she did with Gaiter was all mixed up with stealing the bizarre toy baby bottle and not being the best dancer but going on TV anyway. The pain and anxiety were so great she had to ease them somehow. Music shut them out for a while, and so did pot. The problem was, you needed more and more and more to exit the panic and pass into the smooth concentric waves of feeling. Sally always
felt
too much. Some people do drugs to feel
more
, but she did them to feel
less
. When she was straight, people were hideous. They looked like gargoyles by Goya. When she got a little high, their features smoothed out. They were prettier. They stopped being grotesques.

And sex was also a way of exiting the panic. Sex was a way of smoothing everything out. But then you became dependent on it. And that was dangerous, because sometimes the one you depended on would go away. It was unpredictable. It put you at the mercy of men.

If only there were some way to get that smooth, soothing feeling without being at anyone's mercy. That was what Sally wanted. She didn't know how to get it. She would have done anything to learn the secret.

Later in her life, whenever she got sober, she would remember all too clearly why she had drunk and done drugs. To make the ugly world less ugly. To take the sharp edges off everything. To pretend that people were nicer than they were. People in the Program talked about "being present for your life." But what was so great about being present for your life? She never got to that point. She would dry out, sober up, the world would get these ugly edges, and there was nothing to soften anything. Conversations were endless and dull. People at parties were grotesque, stupid, disappointing. Life lacked all sweetness. For we must admit that the sweetness of intermittent oblivion is as necessary to human life as sleep is to waking. Without illusions, we are lost. There is vinegar, not honey, in the rock.

Then, just when things were bleakest, Sally would fall catastrophically in love, hoping for the chemical endorphin high of loving but forgetting how much love put you at the mercy of the one who could give that release. Love led inexorably to drugs. The looseness of love required the looseness of drugs. And then she was back on the roller coaster again.

There was nothing Sally liked better than the beginning of a love affair. Long lunches spent gazing into each other's eyes. Imagining all the qualities you longed for in the other person. Imagining the perfect sexual union, all needs fulfilled, all contact points meeting so the juice of love could flow right through your bones. Sally could fall in love so easily. And out of love so easily. Sally lived to fall in love. And she always fell in love with the wrong person. Her music was inspired by it. And so was her madness. Were the music, the madness, and the love all somehow the same?

The pulse of the music went through her body like an orgasm, making her feel that
she
was an instrument and the whole cosmos was playing her song. "Dear God," Sally would say, "make me an instrument for your music. Play through me what the universe needs to hear. Make me a conduit for your message." She promised to sacrifice everything for that. She had made her pact with the devil. (But a pact you make with the devil at twenty may not be one you want to keep at thirty.)

Sally was capable of doing anything onstage. She didn't feel her separateness from the audience. She became their spirit, screaming, singing, moving to their rhythm. She was in a trance, entranced. It was only offstage that she had a problem.

She thought that everyone else knew how to live but she did not. Secretly she thought she was broken inside. Or missing some part. "The balance wheel is missing," was how she put it to one of her many therapists. And she felt that literally: broken inside. "Teach me to live, teach me to love," was how she put it in one song. "Teach me to balance on my heart."

If Sally always fell in love with the wrong person, it was because she wanted transformation from love. Between her mother's dogged bohemianism and her father's suicidal madness, she was often left to be mothered and fathered by her grandparents. And they were ancient. They had grown up in a different century. Naturally they wanted her to make them young. They wanted immortality, as all progenitors do. They had left their parents and struck out into the world when they were just teenagers—though that word did not exist then. But they were horrified to see the same impulse in her. They coddled her. They tried to hold her too close.

Predictably, she bolted. But what she ran
to
proved worse than what she ran
from
. The music business was a harsher family than the family of her birth. She discovered she hated the road. It smacked of abandonment, and abandonment was what she feared most. The hotel rooms smelled of someone else's cigarettes. Nicotine on the phone receivers, nicotine in the ashtrays, burns on the tabletops. In the diners, the eggs always had a thin film of grease floating on top. And the grits all over the South were either runny or lumpy. And the "home fries" all over the West had brown bits that looked like fried cockroaches. Cups of watery coffee were served with supper in the Midwest. And there were huge bloody steaks that looked like miniature abattoirs. Sally hated the food you got outside New York and California. It was a barbaric diet, a diet for cannibals. She became a vegetarian early (for the sake of the animals, she said), would carry dried fruits and nuts with her and buy bananas on the road. For a long time, she lived on banana-and-peanutbutter sandwiches washed down with screwdrivers or cranberry juice and vodka. She lived on vitamin pills and fruits and nuts and vodka. Lots of vodka. "My Russian roots," she used to say.

Later, much later, when she formed her second group—Nobodaddy's Daughter and the Suns, she bought a bus. A big silver bullet that resembled a dirigible on steroids and was outfitted with everything a traveling band might need—even a water bed in the back, which, of course, leaked. The silver blimp was painted with psychedelic designs in Day-Glo colors. Day-Glo daisies and Day-Glo sunflowers bloomed above Day-Glo dahlias and Day-Glo tulips. The bus always had an aroma of cannabis and an infestation of ants (no roaches, thank God). On its side was painted NOBODADDY'S DAUGHTER AND THE SUNS, in livid pink. It was photographed a lot. But the smell. Nobody could photograph the smell.

It was the sixties, and jealousy was not cool, so everyone slept with everyone. Sally slept with her main man, the drummer, Peter Gootch, and with the keyboard man, Harrison Travis, and with whoever else she fancied on the road. She had expanded from her pure folk roots into a hybrid sound the diehards thought a sellout but the record-buying kids adored. The money rolled in and rolled right out. Money managers sprang up like weeds, talking tax shelters, four-for-one write-offs, oil and gas, cattle futures, the lot. Only by the good sense of her grandfather Levitsky was Sally saved from the brink of perpetual tax trauma, since he had had the
sechel
to set up the Sally Sky Trust to catch her songwriting royalties. Thank heaven for that—or she would have been at the mercy of the IRS, whose agents could no longer be bought off with "hats"—as was her grandfather's old habit.

The truth was that Sally remembered almost nothing about the touring years. She was that stoned. When people asked her: "Was it fun being famous?" she said: "I don't know." And she didn't. She wasn't conscious for most of it. What she remembered might as well have been a shadowpuppet show. Auditoriums full of screams and sweat, buses rocking in the night, and always sleeping off some high with low companions. That she was able to go on singing at all was a miracle. It was also a miracle her heart didn't stop. She certainly gave it every opportunity to.

She was twenty-two in that miraculous year 1969, and her voice was heard from Tin Pan Alley to Haight-Ashbury, from SoHo to the Casbah, a sweet soprano sound singing of peace, love, and the danger of trusting anyone over thirty. Sally Sky was more than a singer; she was a symbol of her generation—and you know what happens to symbols. They are likely to be trampled in the mud.

After her third album,
Listen to Your Voice
, went platinum and she was on the cover of
Newsweek
, looking beatific in sky blue—her signature color—she had all kinds of offers from Hollywood, but she chose instead to disappear. She had an accomplice in this disappearance—the first of many.

He was someone whose writing she had loved throughout high school. When she first saw the letter, she couldn't believe it. Max Danzig was her hero. His novel,
A Girl Called Ginger
, about a bohemian Jewish girl growing up in the Village, was the novel she identified with most, of any book she had ever read. She had kissed the misty author picture on the dust cover over and over again. She believed Max Danzig was the only man who could understand her. He was known to be a recluse. He never gave interviews. And here he was, inviting her to come and visit.

And signing his name "Max." It had never occurred to her that anyone called him Max.

Dear Sally Sky,

I listen to your music and think you are the saddest and most beautiful girl in the world. You remind me of my heroine, Ginger. Like her,
you deserve happiness. Will you let me help you give it to yourself? If
you ever find the world is too much with you, you have a friend and fan
in the Northeast Kingdom.

The invitation came at just the right time. Sally hated the road and she hated the way she was being preyed upon in the wake of her platinum record, and Danzig miraculously seemed to know this.

She drove to St. Johnsbury, Vermont, and asked the owner of an antique teddy bear shop where Danzig lived. The owner pointed to a ridge where a red barn peeped out of the birch trees, surrounded by wilderness. She gave Sally directions. To her amazement, Sally found Danzig's barn.

What she later remembered was how
old
he'd looked when she first saw him outside his house. Slight, small, long white hair. (He hardly looked that old on the dust jacket.) Tufts of white hair curling out of his ears. It must be the hired man, she thought, her entire knowledge of Vermont being Robert Frost's poems. For a moment, she thought he was her grandfather's age, and she had the impulse to get back in her car. Then she imagined how wretched her mother would be if she vanished, leaving no trace, and she made up her mind to stay.

"I knew you'd come," said the writer, looking at her in the most penetrating way. "Am I much older than you expected? I must be. The book picture was taken long ago."

Sally was astonished that he knew what she was thinking. She wanted above all to be known, and he knew her. And there was another moment of panic when she saw those white hairs curling out of his ears, but after a while, she didn't see him or his white hairs at all.

His barn was filled with books and heated by a woodstove. Cats patrolled the rafters. A husky named Nanook guarded the door. Danzig made her a marvelous vegetarian nut loaf for supper that first night. She stayed two years.

Danzig got letters from all over the world. His books were published in languages Sally had never even
heard
of—like Serbo-Croatian and Macedonian. He had foreign editions of his books lining the walls of the barn. The letters Danzig received were heartbreaking. "Dear Mr. Danzig, I am a boy in India who is just like your Ginger. What shall I do with the rest of my life?" Or: "Dear Mr. Danzig, I would like to come and study with you. I have enclosed my first novel in the hopes that you will be able to persuade a publisher to take it on." Or: "Dear Mr. Danzig, You are my sister's favorite writer. She is dying of leukemia. Would you be kind enough to visit her in hospital in Leeds. It would mean the world to her. If you cannot, I understand, but would you please sign these firstday covers?" And then there would be envelopes featuring other writers—Mark Twain or Carl Sandburg, for example. Danzig never signed anything.

It was Sally's job to read them and devise answers—answers that were kind but not too encouraging. Danzig had found over the years that tooencouraging letters promoted more demands, which, when unmet, provoked sheer rage and hatred. It was an impossible task. The misery and heartbreak of the world was in those letters, and no response seemed adequate. Danzig was the Mr. Lonelyhearts of the world's adolescents.

"The saddest thing I have learned is that the line between fan and assassin is perilously thin," Danzig told Sally. "The world is
full
of people who never got enough love, not ever, and all of them write to
me
. If I write back too enthusiastically, they want more and more and more, until eventually I disappoint them. Then they want to kill me. I can't fulfill their dreams. I wonder if God feels that way."

The event that had caused Danzig to stop publishing took place when a prisoner to whom he had written for many years was released from prison and came immediately to Vermont, wanting to move in with the writer. When, after a month, Danzig tried to explain to this fan that much as he empathized with him, he needed to be alone to work, the prisoner felt betrayed and tried to strangle him. In the scuffle that followed, Danzig accidentally shot the man.

"I decided fame was a fraud," Danzig told Sally. "You write to seduce the world, you make it your best friend, but then when the world comes, you have no time, because you are too busy
writing
. And writing requires shutting other people out. More honorable not to build up false expectations."

So instead, Danzig meditated. He wrote haiku, which he taught Sally to copy in calligraphy.

"Only what is not for sale can be uncontaminated," Danzig said. "Poetry is free because publishers do not want it. It remains a private, noncommercial, thus consecrated, act."

His was a philosophy that a twenty-two-year-old who had been traumatized by sudden fame in the music business could find solace in. And Sally did.

Max Danzig read Sally poetry—Dickinson, Roethke, Rukeyser. He encouraged her to write it—a habit that lasted the rest of her life. Sally sang him folk songs, taught him to play the guitar. For a long time they slept in the same bed and did not become lovers. This was a novelty to Sally after the compulsive drugged fornication that went on in the music business. Max understood that Sally trusted no one, and he wanted to win her trust.