You may have already read the original from 2016, but in a way I hope not. The initial version was a “Lit Special” – ginned up with all kinds of gratuitous nonsense that was ultimately offensive, even to that audience (and that’s saying something). The bare bones of the original version remain, but the plot line of this revision is not at all what it used to be. Yes, this is a long one, too, about 130 pages, so you’ll need a boatload of tea to see it through.

And I’ve added more illustrations along the way. And just for grins, I’ve spaced out the music recommendations near the illustrations. To get the ball rolling, try Fixing a Hole, off Sgt Pepper’s.

Hope you enjoy the journey.

OutBound

I’m sitting in my little Zodiac inflatable, the little outboard and I puttering through the mooring field off the town of Avalon, California, the little village nestled along a small beach-lined cove on the southeast side of Catalina Island. I am lost in time, perhaps because everything looks so familiar to me – yet at the same time it all feels so far away. So many things happened here, things that defined my passage through life and yes, all those things, all those people, also feel so very far away. Some mornings are made for thoughts like these. Then again, so is coffee.

The morning light is yellow, the sharply sloping beach not a hundred feet away is too, and I slip through a corrugated maze of sailboats tied to the sea, while the old casino still presides majestically over the harbor – just as it has all my life. Sometimes, in the still of night, you can almost hear the rum runners dancing to swing back in the day, when time was their time, back in the 1920s. You can close your eyes and hear their music over the wind, the waves washing along the rocky sea wall, just as it always has – and it’s a gay, inscrutable music playing against boulder strewn time. Infinite, and implacable, time – when the California we know today was little more than bungalows and orange groves. 

The water below me is clear and the deepest blue I have ever known – just as it was fifty years ago, the first time I sailed across from Newport Beach to this very same mooring field. The sandy white bottom is still visible forty feet down, as relentlessly clear and full of promise this morning as it was in the 60s. Nothing appears to have changed, and even my boat looks the same. I turn and look at her reflection in the water and to my eye she hasn’t changed a bit – at least not as much as I have. Troubadour is an Alajuela 38, and I bought her new from Don and Betty Chapman in Newport Beach now more than 50 years ago, and yes, she’s seen a few miles under her keel. So have I, come to think of it. Yet I think it fair to say she’s been in good hands all that time – even if they were mine. 

And I’ve been looking at my hands a lot recently, perhaps more than I should. Right now, lost in time as I putter through the mooring field off Avalon, I can see my hands have changed a lot. And though I hate to admit there are days I hardly recognize them, this is a truth so basic it cannot be refuted. Still, when these moments catch up to me I have to stop and wonder, wonder what happened to these hands, and to me, because Troubadour looks the same. Why did I have to be the one to end up with these hands? Time doesn’t seem fair, but when has time ever been so.  

I remember looking at my grandfather’s hands once and wondering what all those brown spots were, those blotchy things on top of his hands. Why were his fingernails kind of yellow and ridged. And the funniest thing about those hands, and his arms, too? He had little scars all over them, and most were from cuts he’d sewn up himself. He told me many times how he’d just dipped a needle and thread in whiskey and then sew himself up, and he’d never thought anything of it. It was what you did to stop the bleeding, so you did it and moved on to the next chore, which was what he did – more or less – all his life. Maybe I was simply following in his footsteps. Now, looking at my hand on the outboard motor’s tiller I recognized these hands for what they were. They were my hands now, yet in a way they were my grandfather’s, too, right down to the yellow ridges. I am an echo, I am his echo. I always thought I was just me, but now it’s easy to see how absurd that is. And how time has made it so.

I remember me and Pops sat and watched The Petrified Forest one time, that movie with Leslie Howard and Bette Davis – and some kid named Bogart – and when the movie was over he told me about his own trip west in 1919, just after the war. How there hadn’t been highways crossing the United States back then, and more often than not there weren’t even well defined roads. He had a car, and God knows how he had afforded the thing, but he and my grandmother made the trip out west together – from Brooklyn to Los Angeles. A few cities had paved streets – paved with brick, he told me – but by and large the roads that connected cities were primitive things, often little more than sandy tracks winding through wheat fields and scrub-filled forests and, yes, deserts too – just like the barren landscapes we’d seen in The Petrified Forest. With the hard, narrow tires that cars had in those days the wheels settled down in the soft sand, often so deep that drive shafts were worn down by the sand, and he’d had to replace two solid steel shafts between El Paso and Flagstaff. Just polished down to nothing, worn down by miles and miles of time. Took them more than a month to make the trip, and he admitted to me that night, once the movie was over, that they should have taken the train and bought a car once they settled down in LA, but that wasn’t my grandfather’s idea of life. He wanted to get out there in the world, smell the road, meet people along the way and have some fun – and maybe get in trouble too, because that’s what his life was all about. I guess he passed that on to me, for better or worse, because in the end I bought Troubadour and never stopped sailing to those sandy, out of the way places.

I didn’t plan things that way. Things more or less just kind of happened. The way life always happens. Unexpected things, like the kind of people you never thought you’d run into, not in a million years. Doing things you’d never thought you wanted to do, going places that held no interest to you – until you got there and started to taste a little of that life for yourself. 

Life for me, at least my life before Troubadour, had been like the first thirty seconds of a roller coaster, the part where the ratcheting chain hauls you up the first huge incline. I was in the lead car right about then, too, looking out at the world during that little pause at the top, just before the car takes off down that first steep drop. There is, I seem to recall, this flash of anticipation up there, then a little fluttering exhilaration in your gut as you slowly roll forward – followed by the dawning realization that life might be far more interesting somewhere other than on this roller coaster. Maybe I never felt that way, not in that moment before the fall, but about half way through my ride I began to develop an appreciation for smooth bicycles on warm country lanes. Funny thing, though. That was my fault, not the roller-coaster’s. But isn’t life always that way?

Which, I think, makes Troubadour all the more ironic. Troubadour was my very own nonstop roller coaster ride, yet she’s my oldest friend now. I know her aches and pains and her ups and downs as well as I know my own – yet to a few people I know that’s what makes her such an off-putting idea; she’s not flesh and blood so what am I talking about? She’s just a boat, these voices say, and how can some inanimate thing become your friend? 

But that’s not the right question, and I think they’ve missed something important. After so many years and miles together, my life with Troubadour became a reflection of my life. Motoring through this mooring field or listening to the music of life through the night in her cockpit, when I think of Troubadour I end up looking down a hall of mirrors at an endless series of reflections, but here’s the thing, the most important thing. What the journey leaves with you, in the end, is so much more than the effort required to make the journey. If you’ve done it right, if you’ve lived your life on your terms and taken care of her as she took care of you – when the wind was howling and the seas were crashing down all around you, when you look into that hall of mirrors you’re going to find that there was a whole lot more to the relationship than those other people will never know. Words like respect and trust come to mind but are as easily discarded. So too is a word like love. Maybe, just maybe, when you measure the span of time within an echo you might begin to understand where I’m coming from, but that word is respect.

Or, maybe not. It kinda depends on how truthful you are with yourself.

+++++

I started playing the piano in kindergarten, maybe a little before, but who knows, really; things are a little vague on that part of the score. I was pretty good too, or so I was told, at least for a five year old. My piano teacher, a grand old woman who kept a grand old Steinway in her grand old music room seemed to think I had a grand talent, but here’s the thing: I was always more interested in composing music than in playing. And not to make too big a deal of it, but from the beginning I hated performing in front of people. I could say that I hated the experience but that’s not quite true. I was terrified. 

Imagine you’re the only person standing on a stage. There’s a spotlight on you, and only you, and an endless sea of upturned faces awaits your every mistake, and every one of those faces is staring at you. But you’re naked, as naked as the day you were born. And about the time you realize you are standing there in all your naked glory, someone in that sea of faces starts to laugh. Then another nameless face starts to laugh, and pretty soon everyone is laughing – at you.

Some people call this a social anxiety disorder. Okay, slap a label on it if it makes you feel better about yourself, but it is what it is. Whatever it is. You have never seen the flop-sweats like mine. Take my word for it.

So my first recital was a sodden disaster, and that set the stage for many more disasters over the next few years, and yet I think, in the odd way anxiety splits like light through a prism, these first reactions to my first trembling moments paved my way very own Yellow Brick Road to Troubadour. I felt okay playing one on one, or even with one or two people looking over my shoulder, but if you dared put me in a venue with hundreds of people looking on, well, I simply came undone. I just couldn’t play, froze up like an ice cube and that was that – if you know what I mean. And it wasn’t stage fright…no, it was more like stage catatonia. I got over it once, for a while, anyway, but you know how such things go. The feeling comes back when you least expect it, and the experience ain’t pleasant when your turn comes ‘round again, no matter how many times you’ve felt naked and exposed.

Anyway, some time in junior high a bunch of really hip kids decided to form a band. Mind you, these guys were like twelve years old and had never played an instrument in their lives, but two of them got electric guitars for the holidays and started banging out the simple progressions of Louie-Louie, and my best friend got a massive Ludwig drum set – because that’s what Ringo played, in case you didn’t know – and they needed someone who could play bass. Well, I could. I was playing both the acoustic bass and guitar by that point, and my grandfather had a massive pipe organ in his house that I’d been playing for years, so I had that one under my belt too. You know, the kind you play with your hands and your feet. 

Again, some people said I had a talent.

At any rate, the hip kids convinced me to join their hip new group and I guess you could truthfully say that I taught them how to play their hip new instruments over the next year. One of the kids, my best bud Pete Davis, was a soulful twelve year old who liked writing poetry and was already decent on the drums, and we started putting music to the words spilling out of his head. Anyway, he’d share his musings with me and somehow real music started to take shape out of that hopeless teenaged morass. 

Hey, you never know, right?

I looked back on those first compositions of ours as a thick slice of life, the wonder of coming of age condensed into two and a half minutes of pre-pubescent wailings about acne, nocturnal emissions, and the pure, unadulterated lust that only thirteen year old boys have for the complete unknown, i.e., girls. We were at that age when sex becomes the center of the universe, in other words we were barely functioning morons, a time when sitting next to a girl in class, and I mean any girl, was pure torture. We knew we wanted to do something with them but I’m not sure any of us knew what the hell that meant. A quick, sidelong glance at crossed legs brought on waves of pure hormonally driven angst, a curious feeling given that this headlong rush into the netherworlds of the limbic system was defined by outright ignorance.

But here’s the thing, the one big thing. We were pegged to play at our school’s Big Spring Dance the last weekend of our last year in junior high. We had a couple of our own pieces to play but by and large we were set to grind out rough approximations of a bunch of Beatles and Stones songs, with me doing double duty on bass and keyboards.

I was, of course, terrified, and it is at this point in the tale I need to tell you about my grandmother. Her name was Terry McKay, and she was about ten or so years older than I was at the time. She was Pops’, my grandfather’s, third wife. The first two died on him, but that’s neither here nor there. Pops was a movie producer, and kind of a big deal in Hollywood, and Terry was, well, ‘about’ half his age. But let’s get this out in the open right now: I had this thing for my grandmother. She was an actress, by the way, and Life Magazine had called her The Most Beautiful Woman in the World in the year of our Lord 1963. So did I, in ‘63. Whenever she walked into my room at home I damn near had a heart attack. Yes, I had it bad. Sitting in a classroom full of crossed legs wasn’t even in it with what Terry McKay did to yours truly.

Anyway, I was talking to Pops and Terry about my stage fright one night before the Big Spring Dance and Terry told me she had been overrun by anxiety as a kid, even when she was on movie sets and sound stages, and it still happened just about every time she had to get out there and do a scene. Oh yeah, Terry was from London and had grown-up on the stage, and as the Beatles and the Stones were all the rage at the time, that whole British vibe had rubbed off on her. So, a few days before The Big Spring Dance, Terry worked with me, showed me a few tricks to make the terror a little more manageable. Some of these worked better than others, but c’est la vie. The fact of the matter was simpler than that: Terry was directing all her attention at me and I loved every minute of it.

So, not only were there several hundred people at The Big Spring Dance, I knew each and every one of them, too. I had probably chewed my fingernails down to stumps by the time we were set to take the hastily erected stage at one end of the boy’s basketball court, and I found that the only way I could function was to literally turn my back to the dance floor – so I did just that. For almost two hours we rocked and rolled and I had not have the slightest idea if anyone else was out there or not, and when it was finally all over I packed my stuff and ran out to Pop’s car – and vowed to one and all that I’d never do anything as stupid as that ever again.

We were, of course, and as a direct result of the strength of our performance at the BSD, invited to participate in a local ‘battle of the bands’ contest to be held in early July in Westwood, and we needed two songs of our own in order to be contestants. That being the case, we turned Pete’s lyrics and my first ‘rock’ composition into something really special – for thirteen year olds, anyway, and then I cobbled together something generic and altogether bland for our second entry. We practiced and practiced until we were blue in the face – then it was time to set up our instruments on what was indeed a Really BIG Stage on a grassy quad by the practice field at UCLA.

“How many people are out there?” I anxiously asked one of the promoters as Pete set up his drums.

“Oh, last year we had about two thousand, but we’ve sold five thousand tickets so far…”

My knees were knocking by the time they announced us, but once again I turned the organ so I faced away from the upturned faces and as such we launched into Pete’s soliloquy – a soothing, polished love song that just sounded silly when five by then fourteen year olds belted it out, but the girls out there loved it and they started getting into it.

Then we slipped right into ‘Lucy-Goosey’ – my hastily contrived fluff piece, and that brought the house down. We won, too. The contest, and we picked up a recording contract – with Lucy on the A side and Pete’s soliloquy on the flip side. The 45 sold a half million copies before we were in high school and as I was the songwriter listed on Lucy the lions share of the money went to me.

And that was the end of that, of course. Lots of bitter vibes because of money. Always. Yet Pete and I stayed together, he always stuck with me through thick or thin, and I never turned my back on him, either.

I haven’t mentioned my parents because, well, they died when I was young, like three years young. An airplane crash, a jetliner taking off from Mexico City, and really, I haven’t any memory of them, though I had a photograph of them on my dresser. I lived with my father’s father and his second wife, and I grew up in Beverly Hills. Then she died, and I don’t want to make too big a deal about it, but death was kind of defining my reality by that time. Things didn’t last, people died – and that was that. My parents were both show business types, too; Dad was a director and Mom was an actress of some repute, and I don’t know how to say this other than I grew up around Hollywood types, lots of famous people were always around the dinner table, so between my parents and grandparents my upbringing left me with, well, let’s just call it a different sense of proportion. If people saw glamorous stars and western heroes, I saw sullen, moody drunks sitting by the pool out back – most always fawning over Terry’s legs. I mention this only to add context to the sudden fame thrust on me after Lucy-Goosey went platinum, just as Pete and I showed up for class at Beverly Hills High. I also mention Terry’s legs because they truly were the most fantastic things on God’s Green Earth, and take it from someone who knows because it’s a bitch lusting after your grandmother.

I had, for my part, decided to concentrate on classical compositions after the band fell apart, which pissed a whole lot of people off, but I kept at it all through high school and into college, yet by that time what little fame Lucy generated had all but slipped away – and I was grateful, too, because by the time I went off to college I considered the piece pure garbage.

If I forget to mention it later, all musicians hate their own stuff. And the more they hate it the better it sells. Go figure.

The Beach Boys \\ Surf’s Up

So, anyway, I went to Stanford unencumbered by all that fame baggage, and I studied composition and philosophy with no job in mind – until a friend of a friend asked me to join a group being put together up in Berkeley. Once it became more widely known among those people that I had, once upon a time, penned Lucy-Goosey, well, they really-really wanted me to join their little group.

“I always wondered what happened to you,” Deni Dalton said, and that’s how we met, Deni and I. She had this smokey voice that seemed to seethe dark sexuality, and when she looked me in the eye I felt like a banana being peeled in the monkey house. Whatever protective layers I had on that day, say that look of smug condescension I liked to put on from time to time, she cut through that shit with a hot scalpel. 

Deni was Music wrapped in pure Sin. She was bigger than life. I was in love with her within minutes, but then again everyone who laid eyes on her fell in love with her. She always wore black, too, back in those early days. Black hair and black mascara, just call it heavy black makeup, even her lipstick – so she was pure Goth long before there was such a thing. If you remember the old Adamms Family show, the one with Carolyn Jones as Morticia, Deni projected that kind of vibe. Just add a guillotine and a microphone and you’ve got the complete picture.

But she had kind of a black heart, too, and I think that’s fair to say even now. Mercenary, some might’ve called her. Not exactly educated yet street smart, she came from a very poor family and she read people like professors read books, and maybe because of her upbringing that’s why she had a thing for money. She was always looking for the next angle that would lead to fame and fortune, and I think after she took one look at me she saw an irresistible opening. Turns out she knew more about me than I did, or maybe she thought she did. I was never really sure.

“Your Dad still with Universal?” she asked. Ah-ha…

“My father died when I was three.”

“Aaron Dorskin? He’s not your father?”

“My grandfather.”

“Oh, right. He’s still with Universal, isn’t he?”

“Last I heard.”

“Well, we’re looking for someone on keys, and Luke says we should give a listen. So, I’m listening.”

We were in the living room of this run down three story house in Berkeley, and all there was in the room, besides a dozen or so stoned-out people on a u-shaped, purple velvet sofa, was an old upright piano – and then, wouldn’t you just know it, one of the girls on the sofa went down on the guy sitting next to her.

So…I looked at this chick for a moment and started playing to her rhythm, then Deni caught where I was going and she stood and started swaying to the music coming from the other girl’s mouth. I was drifting between Bartok and Dave Evans until this chick hit the short strokes, then I just let the music flow for a while, a loose, swirling flow, and when everyone was finished Deni came to me and kissed me for the longest time. But that was Deni. When she felt like sex was the key to open the way, she played every note she knew.

And so began a very interesting period of my life. I like to think of it as my purple-paisley-patchouli-period, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Sorry. That happens a lot.

+++++

It was a funky house, of that much I was certain. If the Channing Way neighborhood was kind of like the Manhattan Project of seismic music going down in Berkeley, then maybe Deni’s purple paisley house was ground zero. Her background was coffee house blues-folk, kind of a dark California counterpoint to Paul Simon’s more upbeat New York vibe, and you might get that if irony is your thing. And if Simon had inherited a little bit of Gershwin, Deni had been mainlining Thelonius Monk for years – yet I came along when she felt she was ready for fatter, more complicated sounds. She wanted to create fat, epochal rock anthems for a new generation growing tired of Beatlemania. She didn’t want cool reflecting pools, she wanted steamrollers and wrecking balls. Most of all, she didn’t want to play small clubs anymore. She wanted to hit college campuses and then, maybe, if she got lucky, move on to bigger and better things, but she saw rock and roll as a doorway, an entry into something really big and bold.

To me, as a keyboardist in 1968, big and bold – and fat – meant Moog synthesizers and mellotrons. Yes, fat is a term – usually associated these days with Keith Emerson and the big, beefy synthesizer sounds he poured into the closing bars of ELPs Lucky Man. Those two instruments, I figured, might allow some of the more bombastic elements of classical elements to merge with the relatively simplistic progressions of rock – and like every other young, classically trained musician on the planet, I knew Sgt. Peppers had shown us the way move on, while Pet Sounds and Jim Morrison had given us the tools to break on through to the other side. George Martin and the Beatles began introducing classical motifs on Sgt. Peppers, but it was their Fixing A Hole that caught fire in Deni’s mind. The Beatles married the baroque and old English choral music and it was brilliant, but it wasn’t American. The Beatles were a Jaguar XK-E: think of something restrained and elegant, gorgeous yet full of barely restrained potential; what Deni wanted was a Shelby Cobra with glowing pipes, something untamed and unleashed, music that would overpower the soul and make people scream. In essence, she wanted to take people where raw elation overpowers sensibility, to that place in the mind that easily succumbs to unfettered emotional power.

Deni had some ‘cred in the music business, credibility that had probably grown out of her street smarts, but she didn’t have real credibility where it counted. Not the kind I had, anyway – because what I did have was Pops, my grandfather, and I had Lucy-Goosey. Pops was fairly high up on the food chain at Universal, and their MCA Records division wanted to cash in on the exploding pop/rock market that Capitol had cornered. So, we retreated into the house on Channing Way in February ‘69 and didn’t come out again until May, and only then did three of us hop in someone’s old VW Microbus and slither down the 101 to Burbank – and we went straight to Pop’s office.

He was old by then, but he was also sharp as a tack and still had good instincts. We walked in and he looked at us like we’d just crawled out from under a rock, which, I have to say, wasn’t too far from the truth.

“Aaron,” he asked when he quasi-recognized me, “is that you under all that hair?”

You see, by 1969 my hair was hanging down somewhere around my waistline, and George Harrison’s beard had nothing on mine. Well, his was probably cleaner.

“Hey, Pops,” I said, ‘Pops’ being my characteristic greeting. “We need a recording studio. I want to cut an album.”

I am not, you understand, one to waste time on idle chit-chat.

“Oh?” he said, with one raised eyebrow. One eyebrow meant he was listening. Two meant you needed to start running for the exits.

So I tossed our boxed demo reel on his desk, a big Tascam reel-to-reel spool, and he looked at it, then at Deni. And you have to understand this about Pops: he was only interested in her tits at this point in the process. If she could sing, great, but she had great tits and I could see that working over in his mind – as in: she’ll look great on an album cover. He had no interest in her physically, only in the commercial appeal of her tits.

Like I said. Instincts. Great instincts.

So he picked up his phone and dialed an extension.

“Lew? Aaron’s here, and he has a demo. Can I send him over to you right now?”

So off we went, off to see the wizard. A dozen people gathered and listened to our demo and we walked out an hour later with a recording contract. We hopped in the VW and drove back up the 101 in a blinding rainstorm, got back to the purple paisley house a little after midnight – and Deni attacked me then. In a good way, if you know what I mean. We came up for air a few days later, and the really interesting thing about that torrid affair was that we finally realized we were like heroin to each other. We were dangerously intoxicated when we mixed, so much so we knew we were in real danger of losing ourselves, each inside the other. We stepped back after those two days, afraid we’d found the key to spontaneous human combustion.

Yet after those two days and nights wrapped up, Deni dropped the whole Black Goth thing and went in for the deep purple paisley look then rocking the East Bay scene. Flowing silk capes of purple, and then the house began to reek of patchouli. Patchouli incense was burning 24/7, and she put patchouli oil on everything, notably the polish she used to wipe down her rosewood furniture. The scent wasn’t quite overpowering but it came close, and the whole patchouli thing became indelibly linked to those months. I can’t not think of her when I run across that scent.

Anyway, by that time Pete had transferred from UCLA to Berkeley and suddenly we had two percussionists, but hey man, that’s cool. We loaded up all our gear and ambled back down the 101 to Burbank a week later, and we had several days booked to get the sound we wanted down on tape. I’ve since read books on musicians of that era, these being little more than monographs of artistic egoism run amok, and I shudder to think what would have happened to us if that had been the case. Instead, it seemed as if Deni and her mates knew this was their one big shot, and they had to get the job done this time or prepare to wait tables for the rest of their lives. In the end we came together, Pete and I  and her friends, and the results were something else. We called ourselves Elektric Karma.

Slick, huh? The ‘k’ in Elektric was all Deni, and pure Deni.

We ended up spending a month in the studio, yet before we were finished MCA released a single that shot up the charts into the top-10, and on the strength of that alone they booked us to play three nights at the Universal Amphitheater later that summer – and I didn’t think anything about my anxiety issues at the time, maybe because I was so wrapped up in the moment.

Deni was the lyricist now, and she was a good one too, but she wasn’t quite what I’d have called an original. She listened to other recording artists all the time, listening for inspiration and ideas, but she was a natural born plagiarist – always looking for a new way to spin an old phrase, or slightly altered transitions between sections of a song – yet she couldn’t read or write music, what you call notation. She had good instincts, an intuitive grasp of the inherent order within a musical phrase, but she couldn’t see structure when expressed in notes and chords on a piece of paper. This wasn’t a big deal as I looked at the innate phrasing of her lyrical constructs and went from there, and as she wrote new stuff she’d come over to me and sing variations as I tried to parse her phrasing. Not a big deal, and most pop music was and has been created that way, yet it was a big move away from the classical paradigm – where arias are derived from the inherent structure within a specific passage of supporting music.

An unknown named Elton John showed up while we were in the studio and he listened for a while before he disappeared, and I dropped by one of his sessions a few days later and was blown away by the exuberance of his showmanship – even in the studio. And it hit me then, my ‘lump on a log’ stage presence was not a good thing at this level. And I knew I was not and would never be an Elton John. He was an impressionist masterpiece and I was an old Dutch still life – destined to reside on the edge of the stage, the edge of the world, my back always turned to the action – and I knew there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. As soon as the lights on the stage went up I began to freeze inside, like my mind had suddenly and completely been encased in brittle ice.

So, our album was released and it was a bigger hit than even Pops thought it would be. And yes, there was lots of cleavage on the front cover. Purple paisley and cleavage. My God, Deni did have canyons of cleavage. We played a few small gigs around Sunset and Hollywood, a few parties in the Hills of Beverly too, and we started mapping out our second album during that time. Then our first night at the Amphitheater came up and everything inside me just kind of snapped. I couldn’t even walk out on stage for our practice session that afternoon, and for the first time what had been kind of a modest idiosyncrasy turned into a real liability. I looked at my mates looking at me and I knew they couldn’t understand…hell, I didn’t understand…but this was something that could seriously fuck up their chances of making it. 

Pops called a doc, some Beverly Hills shrink, and she came out and gave me a shot in the hip, told me to rest for a half hour, and she sat with me and we talked about the roots of my anxiety. About my parent’s death, my fear of being abandoned, everything I could think of in an hour and a half.

She looked like Faye Dunaway, if you know who I mean. About fifty, blond hair and seriously gorgeous. Smart? Dear God. It was like she had this ability to look inside souls, take an inventory and figure out what was wrong. Me? Sure, it was all about losing my parents when I was a kid, that was obvious. My dad was an actor and he had gone down to Mexico, to Acapulco, to receive some kind of award, and their plane crashed on the way back, so yeah, separation anxiety lead to more and more anxieties and Pops never had any idea. Hell, neither did I. 

But Terry did. 

She’d had me pegged since the first time I froze on stage for a piano recital. She knew from bitter experience.

America \\ Keith Emerson and The Nice

Anyway, understanding did not lead to catharsis and by the time we were called on stage I was no better. The doc’s magic potion helped, but Terry was there and just seeing her helped me keep it together long enough to do the show, and while it was magic, the ovations and the wild applause were like a new drug, but as I walked offstage I passed out. Down like a sack of potatoes, right on the edge of the stage.

Or so I read in newspaper accounts the next morning. Despite not having diabetes the episode was ascribed to hypoglycemia and that was that. I spent all that next day working with a studio musician who would be on standby, a kind of understudy, in case I cratered that night – and of course I did. 

I watched from backstage as this stranger played my music, and in fact he played better than I had, a subtle fact not lost on Deni and her bandmates. I didn’t even show up for the third night’s performance, and when we returned to Berkeley the next day everyone tried not to make a big deal of it – but I knew something had changed between us. We all did, Deni most of all. I felt like damaged goods, a broken doll that not even all the king’s men could put back together, but we started writing music and pretty soon all was forgotten – if not forgiven.

I leaned a lot on Pete in those days, of course. He’d been with me since middle school and he knew the score. I can’t overstate this, because there were rumblings about ditching me after we returned to Berkeley, but Pete kept everyone in line. He was my behind the scenes advocate, and the best friend I ever had.

We went back to Burbank a few months later and had started laying down tracks when word came that we were going to tour North America in the fall and Europe the coming winter – and I started going to that shrink in Beverly Hills more often. Maybe she could help, or so I told my mates. 

‘Yeah, maybe,’ they said.

Then a funny thing happened. The shrink invited me to go sailing with some friends of hers one weekend. I accepted the invitation, too, if only because I wanted to get to know her better, and I ran out and got a haircut too. Bought some boat shoes, of all things, and some natty red sailing shorts to go with them. Oh, I looked so Beverly Hills in my Polo shirt and Ray-Ban aviators. So not me.

The boat, a huge racing yacht that had been famous in the 30s, belonged to her husband, a billionaire property developer who apparently owned half of LA, and they had a professional crew sailing the boat so all I had to do was sit around and look interested in my boat shoes. Yet the truth of the matter was I did indeed find sailing interesting. In fact, the idea of sailing away from all my anxiety seemed enticing, more so by the minute. I talked to the skipper about boats and sailing for a while and I learned a lot that afternoon.

There was another couple on the boat that day, a property developer from Newport Beach who had brought along his wife and daughter. The girl looked a little younger than I, and she had been studying some kind of psychology at UoP up in Stockton. And hey, she loved our single. Her name was, of course, Jennifer – because every other girl in OC was named Jennifer, and probably had been since the beginning of time.

She looked like one of Southern California’s very own home grown Hitler Youth so common to Orange County back in the day: rich, privileged, blond haired and blue eyed, yet she was sweet in a troubled kind of way – and she loved sailing. Well, I thought I might love sailing too so we had something in common, right? Anyway, we talked boats and I figured out pretty quick she knew a lot more about boats than I ever would. She’d grown up around boats and knew the lingo, which was cool. And while that was nice, she also really, really liked the first single off our album. She even had an original 45 of Lucy-Goosey, bless her heart, and we went out for a burger after we got back to the marina, then I drove her down to Newport, to her parent’s place on Little Balboa Island, but when we got to the 55 she pointed me towards the beach and we went down to the Peninsula instead. We talked through the night, watched the moon disappear just before the sun decided to show up for a return engagement. She was sweet and I got into her way of talking real fast, thought it was kind of cool.

There was a boat show in Newport, she told me, usually in April or May, and she wanted to know if I’d come down and go to it with her. I said ‘sure, sounds fun’ before I knew what had happened, and we looked at one another when I dropped her off at her house like we were not quite sure where this was going. I wanted to kiss her, and I could tell she wanted me to, but I couldn’t – because I was afraid, of course, and I told her so, too. I told her about seeing the shrink, about my looming performance anxiety and she seemed to understand. Anyway, I gave her my number at Pop’s house and she leaned over and kissed me once, gently, then again, not so gently, and then she told me I didn’t have anything to worry about where she was concerned and everything kind of slipped into place after that. Right there in the car, as a matter of fact.

We finished the second album over the next few weeks then took a break, our first big tour not scheduled to begin for a month, and I went to Pop’s house to unwind. Everything seemed pretty much the same, except Pops seemed to be slowing down, and suddenly, too. He said his back hurt more than usual, that the pain had worsened recently, and Terry and I talked him into going to see his doc. 

And Jennifer called that night, said she was going to be at the marina Saturday and wanted to know if I wanted to go out on a new boat. Sure, I said, and we set a time to meet up – and after that I couldn’t think about anything other than her – until my next appointment with the shrink, anyway. Pop’s internist was in the same building as my shrink so I dropped him off for his appointment then ducked in for mine, but when I came back for him an hour later he was still inside – so I sat and waited.

And waited.

And a nurse finally came out and asked for me, led me back to some sacrosanct inner cave – where I found Pops all red-eyed, an old internist handing him tissues. Prostate cancer, advanced well into the spine was the preliminary diagnosis, but biopsies would be done early Monday morning and we’d go from there. We left and he was pissed off because the same doc had told him a year ago the pain was probably related to a fall he’d taken a few years before. Maybe if the doc had been more thorough he might’ve had a chance now, because if the cancer had moved into the spine that was it.

“What do you mean, that’s it?”

I understand my parents died when I was three, but since then no one I knew had kicked the bucket – and now, all of a sudden, the most important person in my life was telling me he could die, and soon? That this was it? The ride was over?

I had an emotional disconnect, I guess you might say. I was a little more concerned with my own well being than his in that moment, a little more than afraid – for me and my future. No, let me rephrase that. I fell apart and we held on to one another there in the lobby for a long time, then we walked over to Nate ‘n Al’s for bagels and lox. He called some of his buddies from the studio, told them to come over for a few hands of poker that night – which was code for ‘the shit has hit the fan,’ and then we sat there watching the ice melt in our glasses of iced tea, neither of us knowing what the hell to say to one another. Terry would surely come apart at the seams tonight, he said, then this lanky gentleman walked in and came over to our booth and sat down next to me. 

Jimmy Stewart, in town between shoots and an old friend of the family, looked at Pops and sighed. “Aaron, you look awful. Now tell-tell me, why-why-why the long face?”

So Pops lays it out there and then Jimmy is all upset, the ice in our iced tea is melting along with our world, then Stewart finally turns and looks at me.

“Heard that album of yours. It sure isn’t Benny Goodman, is it?” he said with his trademark chuckle.

Pops broke out laughing at that. “It sure isn’t, but that lead singer of theirs sure has great gonzagas. World class, if you know what I mean.”

Stewart rolled his eyes, shook his head. “All he can think about at a time like this is tits. Aaron? You’ll never change.”

“Amen to that, brother,” Pops said. “What do you have in that sack, James? Another model airplane?”

“Yup, yup. Me ‘n Hank, you know how that goes?” Hank being Henry Fonda, in case you were wondering.

“Did you ever see his model room, Aaron?” Pops asked me.

“Yessir, been a few years, but…”

“I was building that B-52 when you were up there, wasn’t I?” Jimmy recalled. “Wingspan this big,” he said, holding his hands about a mile apart, and we all laughed. He got up and patted Pops on the shoulder, told him he’d call soon, then he ambled over to a table where Gloria was already waiting and I could see the expression on her face when he told her. Small town, Beverly Hills. Good people, too.

I got up early and drove down to the marina, met Jennifer at the anointed hour and she took me down to a slip below an apartment building and hopped aboard a brand new Swan 4o. There were two other girls onboard already and they slipped the lines, let Jennifer back the boat out of the slip while they readied sail. We motored out of the marina after that, then raised sail as we turned south for Palos Verdes – but with barely enough wind to fill the sails the girls soon gave up and turned the engine on again. Seems they were delivering the boat from the marina to it’s new owner down at the LA Yacht Club and I was along for the ride, but by the time we cleared the Point Vicente lighthouse we had enough wind to raise sail again and had a rip-roaring nine mile sleigh ride after that. Feeling the motion, the wind through my hair – and the power within the wind – was almost a religious experience. I was hooked, big time.

There were differences, of course, between 40 feet and 130. The smaller boat felt almost alive compared to the much older J-class boat I’d sailed on the week before, and I found myself mesmerized by the brisk sensations of the Swan. I didn’t know it at the time, but Jennifer studied my face that day, told me she was reliving her earliest sailing experiences by watching my reactions to the shifting winds. She was very dialed into me, you could say. But there was always a hard edge to her, to the way she studied people, and I was in no way dialed into her enough to catch that. Not then, anyway.

We turned the boat over to her new owner and drove down to Newport Beach, stopped and had a late dinner at The Crab Cooker, and after we dropped off the girls she drove me back up to the marina, and I told her about Pops then, about what my grandfather really meant to me, and she remained quiet all the while, let me ramble-on until we pulled into the lot where I’d left my car. She parked and turned to face me, leaned the side of her face on the seat and stared at me.

“What are you going to do now?” she asked. “Try to go on tour?”

“I don’t think I can do that. I need to be here now, to be with him.”

She slowly nodded her head. “I think so, too. You need anyone to talk to, just call me. Any time, day or night. Got it?”

I looked her in the eye. “What happens if I fall in love with you?”

“If?” she said, grinning.

“Okay. When I fall in love with you?”

“Are you sure you haven’t already?”

I can still feel that moment, even now. Like it was the most important moment of my life, and those precious feelings are still right there with me, wherever I go, despite the gathering storm.

“I know exactly when I fell in love with you,” I said – still looking in her eyes. 

“Oh?”

“About a minute ago. Before that I was fighting it.”

“I know.”

“You know?”

“I think you’ve been fighting it all day. I know I have.”

I smiled, felt palpably relieved, so I asked: “You want to go meet Pops?”

She nodded her head again. “Yeah. I think that’d be a good thing.”

So we went. She met Pops and he loved her too, which was, yeah, kind of a good thing. It was the first time I’d ever come home with a girl, and the moment wasn’t lost on us, either. Terry was a little coy about the whole thing, a little too reserved one minute then effusive the next, but by the time we left I felt she’d come around too. Back then I could never quite tell what was on Terry’s mind. I still can’t.

“So, you’re the one?” Pops asked her as he walked us out to the driveway, and Jennifer didn’t know what to say just then, but I did.

“Yeah, Pops, she’s the one. You mind if we run off to Vegas and do the deed, or did you want us to do it here?” 

“Let’s all go to Vegas,” he said. “I can hit the tables after, and who knows, maybe I’ll get lucky.” This he’d said for Terry’s benefit, his way of popping my grandmother lightly on the tail-feathers.

And we all laughed at that, even Terry, but we weren’t fooling anyone. Not by a long shot. Life’s never as simple as it seems, especially when the slippery slope is staring you right in the face.

“He’s kind of cool,” Jennifer said as we drove back to the marina. “He’s like old school Hollywood, I guess. At least that’s what comes to mind.”

“He is that. Not many like him left in this town.”

“Thanks for letting me meet him. Even if you were joking…”

And I looked at her just then, like maybe I had been joking, or – maybe I hadn’t. And she looked at me, too. Anxious, maybe? Or was she hopeful?

“You were joking, weren’t you?” she finally said.

“We’ve known each other a week,” I shot back. “Maybe it would be nuts, but I haven’t been able to think about anything else for days.”

And when she nodded her head she also looked down, obviously thinking about the implications of my choice of words, yet she didn’t say a word. There were a million unheard cries for help in that look, too, only I wasn’t dialed in enough to understand all that.

“What about you,” I asked. “Am I too late? Already spoken for?”

She looked away and I could see a wave of pain resurface, then as suddenly pass. “I was serious about a guy in high school,” she said – and I thought maybe a little too evasively, “and we kept dating after graduation, and even after I went to Stockton. He went to SC and I think he decided it was time to move on. We broke up a few months ago – well, just before Christmas.”

“Do you know what happened to him at SC?”

“I heard he met a girl. ‘Someone less complicated than you,’ was the way he put it.”

“Jeez. What a nice guy.”

“Yeah, you could say that.”

“No one since?”

She shook her head, growing more uneasy as she skirted around the real cause of her pain. “He messed with my head, Aaron, and I’ve been having a hard time getting over it. We’re seeing the same shrink, you and me. Did you know that?”

No, I didn’t, but it kind of made sense now. “Jenn, did something bad happen?” I asked.

“Pills,” she said, tearing up a little. “I took a bunch of pills. My roommate found me in time, and the RA got me to the ER. They pumped my stomach, that whole scene, and I came home after that. I’m not real sure I want to go back, ya know…?”

“You’re not going to finish your degree?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Anything else you want to do?”

“I like sailing, that’s about all though. Dad put up some money to help get a sailboat company up and running, and I’m going to start working in their marketing and sales department this summer. I guess we’ll see how it goes.”

“Sounds kind of fun. Not a lot of stress, anyway, and doing something you love.”

“What about you? You going to keep playing?”

“I don’t know. Composing, anyway, or maybe producing. I like working in the studio. We have a session player, a musician who’s preparing to go out on the road if I can’t handle our next concert.”

“Where’s it going to be?”

“San Francisco, at the Fillmore. Some cook people will be there, too. Hendrix is going to play, and a new British group, too. Should be a scene.”

“Wow…sounds kind of crazy, in a cool kind of way…”

“You wanna come up?” I asked, treading carefully now.

“You sure you want me to?”

“You know, we were talking about getting married a few minutes ago. Nothing we’ve talked about has changed, as far as I can tell.”

She looked at me again and I could see it written all over her face, in the cast of her eyes. Not quite shame, but maybe a real close cousin. Something deeper than embarrassed, anyway. Something like fear and regret. Trying to kill yourself – and failing – had to be hard to deal with by yourself, but to lay it all out there like she just had? She either had guts or she wanted to see how real I was. The thing is, I wasn’t running. Maybe it was my own anxiety issues, the whole thing with being abandoned, but I think I started to understand her better after she opened up a little. I don’t know the how or the why of these things – at least I didn’t in those days – but understanding where her pain came from made me feel closer to her, like the connection we’d made somehow got deeper. And by that I mean a deeper kind of falling in love, but also like I wanted to take care of her. I know that seems a little off, but when I saw her vulnerabilities I wanted to be stronger for her, so I could help her carry the load. 

And I think that was a turning point for me. Seeing myself as someone strong, someone other people could depend on. Like tumblers clicking just before everything falls into place, suddenly things seemed more clear to me.

Jimi Hendrix \\ The Wind Cries Mary

Anyway, we drove to the marina and walked around for a while, and a clinging fog rolled in as we looked at boats and talked about sailing – and at one point she took my hand in hers and I remember how good that felt, though maybe we were in a fog of our own making. I remember that the thought of letting go of her in a minute or two, and then watching her drive away to Newport Beach without me felt disconcerting. It was damp out, a soggy kind of damp, and we stopped in front of a hotel in the marina and looked at one another, then we took each in our arms and we just held on. I know I felt like I wanted this moment to go on forever, but then she kissed me, told me that she loved me and suggested that maybe we should go get a room.

I remember those eyes of hers. Looking up at me deep inside that moment, how hesitant they were, yet so full of lingering intensity. She was so insanely gorgeous, probably the most beautiful girl I’d ever known, and if that asshole boyfriend hadn’t fucked with her head so thoroughly I thought that maybe she could pull out of her depression – or at least I kept telling myself that over and over during the next few weeks. And hell, who knows, maybe I really believed it, too, but she was fragile, real fragile. And yes, she’d had a real breakdown, but most everyone takes a rough breakup hard. To be honest, I think I knew there was more to her state of mind than just a breakup, but then again I always thought I was seeing just was the tip of the iceberg. I felt that way right up to Honolulu, but I’m getting ahead of myself. But that other truth remained: I liked the idea of taking care of her, though the reason was a little less obvious to me. Of course, my flawed reasoning is easy to see now, in hindsight. Our mistakes are like that, I reckon. 

Years later it hit me. Feeling stronger about myself was motivating me all the time – because, even as a little kid, and maybe especially because I was a kid, when you lose your parents strength is usually in short supply. Pops was a great surrogate, don’t get me wrong, but in those days what little self-esteem I had seemed to rest on shaky ground.

Or maybe all that shakiness came from living near the San Andreas fault.

+++++

I drove up to Berkeley a few days after that encounter, as it was time to start rehearsing for our Fillmore gig. The ‘feeling stronger’ vibe I’d run across with Jenn stuck with me, too, and I felt good about going out on stage for the first time in my life. Deni picked up on that new vibe, too, and as a result she was almost ecstatic about the whole Jennifer thing. Rehearsals went great and I picked Jennie up at SFO the night before we were set to play, and we went straight from the airport to The City to listen to The Nice. 

There really weren’t many keyboardists trying to bring new technology out of the studio and to the stage, but Keith Emerson was creating quite a storm with his stage act, and everyone was hanging around the Fillmore in this haze of expectation – waiting for him, of course, but Hendrix too, who was coming on after The Nice.

Hendrix was the current Rock God du jour, but for any keyboardists watching that night, Keith Emerson was a revelation. Here was someone, finally, bringing classical structure to rock, and while his rendering of Bernstein’s America was electric, what caught me was a piece called the Five Bridges Suite, which fused classical with both jazz and rock. About halfway through that piece I started to look around at the crowd and found a kind of swaying trance had taken hold. People didn’t want to dance now, it was more like they’d been transported somewhere else, someplace deep within Music, and deeper than I’d ever thought possible. Even Jennie said “Wow!” when those guys wrapped up and drifted off into the crowd…

But when, finally, Jimi came out the place erupted, and when The Experience started in with Fire you could understand what all the electricity was about. I hung on ‘til they finished up with The Wind Cries Mary, and when I looked around the place I could feel something else passing through the crowd, something that was initially hard to put a finger on. What first struck me was the power such music held over the crowd. Something awesome and huge lurked in the shadows, a force I’d never reckoned with before, yet as good as Hendrix was what got me most of all was Emerson’s fusion of styles. I watched him for a while, long after their set was over, and he was watching the crowd too. I felt a sudden surge of empathy for him as I watched, because like me he was lost inside the wonder of the moment, and he too seemed a little confused. 

One other thing that hit me just then, too: the amount of pot hanging in the air. From fifty feet back the air was literally purple, and with the multi-colored stage lights bathing the area around Hendrix the atmosphere was otherworldly. I knew a couple of cops were working the back of the crowd, but I wouldn’t have wanted to be them. After the ‘free-speech’ demonstrations across the bay over the past few months the sense of anger and purpose was palpable in that crowd, so there was another ‘something’ hanging in the air apparent that night, and it wasn’t exactly empathy for cops, if you know what I mean. And that vibe was quickly becoming the raw underbelly of the acid rock scene at the Fillmore. That ‘other’ something in the air. It was beyond revolution, more like anarchy waiting to be unleashed, and when the raw power unleashed by Hendrix washed over that crowd, you could sense a new undercurrent of anger growing by the minute.

And both Emerson and I were not just feeling it, we were beginning to see that power as an untapped force. And music was a key to unleash that power.

Sure, a lot of the music in the late-60s was all touchy-feely, ‘peace and love,’ but there was an awful lot of anger in the air after Reagan and Meese clamped down on protests at UC Berkeley, so there was also this Hell’s Angels vibe going around the Fillmore, too, an undercurrent of outlaw violence rooted in the desire to burn everything to the ground. That was San Francisco in ’68, yet I suspect powerful music has always been like that. Like the way Wagner lived through and inspired European revolutions in 1842 and 1848, and how the pure unbridled force of his music became the soundtrack for the Third Reich. 

So yeah, Jenn was there and she was a part of me, and that too is something I remember thinking about a lot these days. But there was something else there. I felt there were more than a few people working the fringes of the crowd who were there to stir the pot, who wanted to create something new out of this new force, but it also felt like this Fillmore fringe didn’t really care who got burned along the way. So, yeah, I think there was real anarchy working inside this audience, like this new fringe wanted their parent’s world to dissolve within that purple haze. A few years later it hit me that most of these emotions were rooted in infantile rebellion, like the tantrums of spoiled children.

Yet, you know, sometimes even children are right.

That spirit was in the air, too. Even in the music. Our parent’s forms and structures, subverted and inverted, creating something new and anarchic, yet inclusive. Like the Beatles opened the doors to polite society and now the riffraff were pushing their way in – burning babies in Electric Ladyland. Music was, right before our eyes, becoming more political than it had in a hundred years, just like Wagner politicized opera in post-Napoleonic Europe. If you think that’s trivial stuff, just consider for a moment that Marx grew out of Wagner’s music, and yet so did Darwin. They were contemporaries, and each in their way was a revolutionary, but Wagner’s music was like a match around a powder keg.

So yeah, something was stirring deep inside the underbelly of that crowd. Something big and noisy, but that new creature was ugly, too, and I could feel it stirring in the shadows. There was a glowing meanness in that purple haze, and fires were starting to burn along the fringes.

Those fires defined my generation. Just as they defined our music.

+++++

We were the first gig up the second night, so we set up early and I looked around the place while Pete helped hook up my stuff, my Moog and Mellotron, and my backbreaking, 400 pound ‘Silvertop’ Fender Rhodes. The air inside was clear now, and the room didn’t look all that big – much less like a place full of wild magic. Just a room, I thought, not unlike the other gigs we’d played around this city, yet I had felt those forces the night before. Emerson had too. We talked after Hendrix left, talked about the vibe we’d discovered, and we talked in epochal terms about music shape-shifting to the needs of the moment. About the politics of music. We talked Nixon and Vietnam and John Wayne and about the image of a girl who had put a flower down the barrel of a National Guardsman’s rifle. Everything was linked, he said, but the links weren’t easy to see – unless you knew where to look. Music had to become the fabric that joined a lot of disparate factions, yet only a few musicians had tried to claim a place as leaders of this movement. Heady stuff, and even Jenn seemed caught up in the moment. Emerson was a philosopher-king if ever there was one. But then again, so was Wagner.

Yet standing up there on stage looking out over that empty room it was hard to see music as anything other than a diversion. Maybe we were just a sideshow to the real action. I’d just read Jerry Rubin’s ‘Do It!’ – a true Bay Area anarchist’s manifesto – and I wondered: could music really carry the weight of so much revolutionary zeal, shoulder such a fragile burden? Or would music fragment the way society seemed to be fragmenting?

Even when I worked with Deni the tendency to fragment was there – this impulse to fly apart, to head off in uncharted new directions, and I’m pretty sure there wasn’t some unseen political hand pushing us towards a grand unified theory of musicians leading a movement. Most of the kids on stage were just that: they liked to play the guitar or the keys, and yes, egos got big under that tent. We got off on making music together, yet I can’t recall ever sitting around and saying “Wow, did you see those riots on campus today! We gotta write about that!” Nor did I ever hear anyone claim to write music to incite violence. Like I said, those people were working the fringes, playing the shadows, and – usually – not on stage.

Yeah, yeah, but there was one anthem out there that contradicts all that vibe, and I loved it. For What It’s Worth, by the Buffalo Springfield – and maybe that’s the vibe Emerson was channeling that night as we watched Hendrix play the crowd. We were in our own purple haze, inside his creative creative haze – and maybe that’s why the idea hit the way it did: that I had always seen music as a reflection of events, not a means to change things. But standing up there looking at the empty room one of those creative impulses hit, and it hit me right between the eyes. Maybe music could be both. But then, and maybe because I’d never really seen my music as such – I had an idea. I wanted to do something unexpected – and out of character – something like an experiment in real time.

I hadn’t played Lucy-Goosey in years. My first hit song had already dissolved into the receding fog of early Beatlemania songs like of I Wanna Hold Your Hand and She Loves You, Yeah-Yeah-Yeah, yet my song was still out there, buried somewhere in our collective unconscious – so the thought occurred: what if we…as in Elektric Karma…played with Lucy-Goosey. Turned her prepubescent bubblegum into something tinged with just a hint of insurrection. 

Deni was immediately entranced by the idea, too, and she came up with a few bridges to make the pop refrains seditiously relevant again. Lucy was going to go from bubble-gum chewing sycophant to radical anarchist on stage that night, and the whole thing was taking shape in a burst of creativity that had come out of – where? You tell me. You want to go all Jung on us and tell the world that yeah, there really was something to this whole collective unconscious thing?

Anyway…

When the lights went down a slide was projected on the wall behind the stage, an image of that girl sticking a daisy down the barrel of a national guardsman’s rifle, and I walked out and got behind the keyboards – then turned and looked at Jenn standing in the shadows backstage and we exchanged hopeful smiles, then I turned to face the sea of faces and raised my fist – but as the room went black – and all that remained was a single bright spot shining down on me, with that image of the girl and her daisy hanging back there, back behind the purple haze.

I started with the simplest piano refrains from Lucy-Goosey and the sea of faces went silent as curious expectation replaced hyped anticipation, my piano playing almost in chopsticks mode: simple notes even a child could play, deliberately awakening something lost in memory. Something innocent and childlike. Our lead guitarist stepped out and another spot hit him, and he started echoing my simplistic melody. Deni came out next and the crowd erupted, then as quickly shut down as she started into an even simpler, quieter version of Pete’s original lyric, and she picked up a small harp and echoed my childlike notes as the lights faded, leaving only the image of the girl with the daisy – which soon faded to black as my piano grew softer, then silent. In the darkness the rest of the band came out and when the lights flared we turned Lucy into a molotov cocktail throwing radical with what I’d say presaged a grungy-heavy metal infused sound – raging dark music that no one in the audience had ever heard before – and the surge of energy out there was cataclysmic. I kept the simple piano melody going, but that was echoed by soaring, dark chords on the Mellotron, and with Deni’s inverted lyrics Lucy’s transformation was complete.

And I felt that transformation in my soul, too, like Lucy had just grown up. Like I’d just grown up. The insecure teenager died out there that night, and when we walked offstage an hour later I fell into Jennifer’s arms and held on tight, because I knew the ride ahead was about to get real intense.

+++++

Pops was a lot sicker than he let on, and he kept everything wrapped up and put away in a dark corner out of sight, so out of mind. Every time I called he was ‘fine, doing great’ – and Terry, my went along with this charade, and it worked – at least until we came to LA to play several concerts around town. I went home after our first night and when I saw him I started crying. I couldn’t help it.

“Do I look that bad?” he asked.

He looked like an orange scarecrow, only worse – because his mane of thick white hair was now a ragged mess. 

“The color,” he added, “is from liver failure. I kind of like it, too. Like a walking traffic sign, don’t you think? When I walk out of the doctor’s office everyone stops and stares, waiting for the light to turn green.”

I felt sick, too, just looking at him, and then Terry told me he had at best a month I kind of fractured. Like I didn’t know what to think. Pops was my last link in the only chain I had to an almost invisible past, and without him I would be well and truly alone. There weren’t any brothers or sisters or aunts and uncles to fall back on, there was just me and Pops. I was going to be, if I remained alone and childless, the last of the line.

And that was the big question hanging in the air between us. In the air, apparent, you could say.

“What’s with Jennifer?” he wanted to know.

“We’re good,” I said, but there was something else hanging in the air. That whole fragile thing. She was depressed more often, and when she started going down that hole she turned to dolls to pick her back up. Dolls, as in The Valley of The. Pills, in other words, Uppers. And here I need to digress a little. I didn’t do pills. I didn’t smoke – anything. I didn’t drink much either, because I didn’t like the whole idea of losing control. I know, like the idea we have some kind of control is an almost comic thought, but the point is we do have the ability to control some things, and losing what little I had was to me a Very Bad Thing. I tripped all I wanted when I disappeared inside my music, but I could come out of it intact and lucid. I had seen Deni disappear down the LSD rabbit hole and not come out for days, and that scared the shit out of me. We’d been through two lead guitarists over the course of a year simply because one drug or another had taken them someplace they just couldn’t come back from, and I’m sorry, but I wasn’t going to go down that hole.

So when I saw Jennifer headed down the same road I told her it worried me, and she angrily told me to fuck off. So I did. I took her out to SFO and put her on a plane back to her father and told him what was going down, and what I heard back from him wasn’t worth mentioning, because he’d thought he was done with her and wasn’t at all happy to have her back under his roof.

I started spending more and more time in LA, spending as much time with Pops as I could, and my understudy started filling in more often as Pops started his terminal decline. I had previously agreed to go on our next gig in Cleveland; I was there when Terry called my first morning there, and she told me to come home right away, and it was just hours before the show that night so I called Deni and told her. She came to my room and we talked, and she told me to take my time, that they’d manage without me and I held her for the longest time. We’d been together as a group for more than two years by then, and I realized she was about the closest thing to family I’d have left – and I told her just that.

“I never wanted you to be my brother, Aaron,” she told me then. “All I know is we fit, ya know? We work well together, like I always imagined a husband might, ya know?”

“Those two days, you still think about that?”

“Yeah. Love heroin. I’ll never forget. I’ve never loved anyone like I loved you then,” she sighed, and before I knew it she was crying. “God, I don’t want you to go. Something’s going to happen to you back there. Something fuckin’ big’s coming, and I feel like it’s going to crush you, man.”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do without him, Den. I’m scared, and with Jenn gone? I don’t know, man, I don’t know…I mean I really don’t know what to do…”

“I’m here. Don’t you forget that.” She looked at me and we kissed, I mean like the last time we’d kissed, and that kiss was full of all these bizarre kinds of electric charges flickering on and off like lightning all over my skin, then she looked at me again. “I love you, ya know,” she sighed, then our eyes met, and this time we were hovering over the abyss, ready for the fall, but then she pulled back and ran from the room.

I got my bags together and made it out to the airport in time to catch a one-stop to LAX, and made it to the house a little after midnight. I went to Pop’s room and we sat and got caught up while Terry left to put on some tea, but she came back a few minutes later, her eyes full of a different kind of grief. She turned on the TV and there were news reports of an airplane crash, a flight from Cleveland to Buffalo, and a hundred and fifteen people, including all members of the rock group Electric Karma, were feared dead. 

Can you flash back to when you were three years old?

Because I blinked back from the waves of fear washing over me, recoiled from the very idea Deni and all my mates were gone, and that the sum total of their existence had been wiped from the slate in the blink of an eye, yet the pictures on the TV told a very different story. A midair collision about a mile out over Lake Erie, and the 707 had burst into flames and fluttered down to the waves, then all that we had been simply slipped beneath the water and was gone.

Pops died the next day. 

I wasn’t a three year old that day, but it hurt just the same.

+++++

Jennifer thought I was on the plane, that I’d died that night, and she came undone. Razor blades this time, and she’d meant to take herself out, no doubt about it. By the time I called their house the next morning the damage had been done, though I didn’t find out just how bad that damage was for a few more hours. When I talked to her father later that day he sounded both relieved and furious, and I told him I’d be down as soon I could. He said he understood and we left it at that, and Pops slipped away from his morphine induced coma before I left. We didn’t really say goodbye, but when I held his hand I could feel him respond to my words. When I told him he meant the world to me, and that I’d miss him he squeezed my hand, and I could hear him talking to me through the years. All the talks we’d had were still right there, and Terry was with me, holding on to me, when he finally slipped away.

She was English, our Terry, and she’d had a good run in Hollywood for a while, made a half dozen romantic comedies with the likes of Cary Grant and, yes, Jimmy Stewart, so when Pops moved on it was a big deal in Hollywood circles, yet the death of my bandmates cast a long shadow over the whole affair. Everyone knew about Pops and me, how tight we were, yet Terry was the big surprise – to me. I’d never really appreciated how close they were, but one look at her and you knew it wasn’t an act. She stopped eating for a month, literally, and wasted away to nothing – and then I had to admit I really felt something for the woman. She wasn’t just Pop’s third wife: she, too, had now become the one last link I had to him, one I’d never even realized existed, and all of a sudden I was scared she might leave me too.

And let’s not forget Jennifer, lying in restraints in a psychiatric hospital tucked deep inside the hills above Laguna Beach. I started driving down to Laguna every other day, then every morning, and I spent hours with Jennifer before I drove back up to Beverly Hills, back to Pop’s house, where I tried to pull Terry out of her funk.

Yes. There’s a pattern here. You’d have to be blind not to see it.

And so, yes, of course I missed it.

About three weeks into this routine I decided to take Terry with me down to Laguna, to try to get Terry to see what the contours of falling into a really deep depression looked like, and it worked. Yet that day also marked a big turnaround for all of us, because she reached out to Jenn and they connected. 

Like a lot of people around that time, I’d seen 2001: A Space Odyssey, and to me that moment in Laguna felt a lot like one of the key passages in the movie. When Hal goes bonkers and cuts Frank adrift, and Dave goes after his tumbling body in the pod – helmet-less. I wasn’t sure if I felt more like Dave or Frank, but I knew everything was tumbling out of control – yet as I was the only one who could set things straight I had to be Dave.

Like Pops had set me straight after my parents died, I knew it was my turn at the controls, and I didn’t want to let either Pops or my old man down. Hell, by this point in the game I didn’t want to let Jennifer’s father down. 

Yet whatever was wrong with Jenn, I was also beginning to see that her old man was behind a lot of her anxiety – so when I’d put her on the plane back to OC I had, in effect, sent her back into the snake pit.

Nope, I was not going to do that to her and then just walk away. When you tell someone that you love them, you don’t treat them like that. It’s a simple proposition, really. Either you mean what you say or what you say is meaningless, and now I took that to heart. I was starting to take a lot of things to heart. Simple things like love and duty, and most of all, truth. Simple things like that suddenly seemed more important, more in my face. Death can do that, you know? Make hard things easier to see, easier to understand.

At least I liked to think I understood what was going on.

So, let me tell you a little more about Terry before we visit my own little snake pit.

She met Pops when he was in his sixties. They got married when she was, well, let’s just say thirty-ish – maybe. She was forty-something now – maybe, and every bit the Hollywood starlet she had ever been, and in the aftermath of her decision to rejoin the living she decided she was either going to move back to London and take up work on the stage again, or make another movie. Or maybe a bunch of movies.

And she wanted to know how I felt about her moving back to London. Specifically, did I want to her remain in LA, to remain a part of my life, or did I want her to move on.

Mind you, I barely in my twenties so I wasn’t a rocket scientist as far as people were concerned, nor was I exactly a babe in the woods, but recall that I’d never found it easy to think of Terry as my grandmother. She came into my life when I was not quite a teenager, a time when she was widely considered one of the most beautiful women in the world, and not just because Life Magazine had proclaimed her so. Let’s just say I’d spent a few sleepless nights over her and leave it at that, and I think you’ll grasp the contours of my own little dilemma.

So, I told her in no uncertain terms that I didn’t want her to move on. I told her she was an important part of my life with Pops, and that she would always be important to me. The problem I didn’t quite wrap my head around was that she didn’t see us that way. She’d spend ten plus years married to a man who hadn’t been able to perform his marital duties for a long time, and she was just entering her prime. The biggest part of the problem was the simplest, most elemental part, too. I still found her deeply attractive, and devastatingly so. And she knew it. Hell, everyone was attracted to her.

There was a part in a new movie coming up, the role just being cast, where she’d get prime billing next to some very big names, and so she’d gone to the audition at Fox dressed to kill. When she came back she was elated; she’d gotten the part and shooting began, in France, in three weeks. She wanted to celebrate and so we went down to The Bistro – where her landing the part was all the buzz. Everyone came by our table to congratulate her – and offer their condolences vis-a-vis Pops – and everyone looked at me like ‘who the devil are you.’ 

Why, I’m her grandson – didn’t you know?

Oh, the look on her face was priceless.

What followed was three of the most regretfully confusing weeks of my life, and I’ll spare you the details. Sex was not involved, thankfully – or regrettably, depending on your point of view – but the whole thing was an emotional hurricane that left me drained. After the services, I had Pop’s estate to settle, cleaning up the house to get out of the way, and helping Terry with her lines. And so for almost three weeks straight everywhere I went Terry was by my side. And when I visited Jenn, she began to pick up on a new vibe, too.

“Are you sleeping with her?” she asked me one morning after I’d just walked into her room.

“What? Who?”

“Terry.”

“G-a-w-d! Geez, no Jenn! Are you kidding? No way!” And…I wasn’t lying. Not exactly.

But I guess the way the word ‘no’ came out implied an air of finality, because Jenn never brought up the subject again. And, a few weeks after Terry left for Avignon, Jennifer was discharged and moved in with me, in Pop’s house.

Because he’d left it to me. In fact, he’d left everything to me, and that included a not insubstantial sum of money, too. When Electric Karma’s lawyers told me that as I was the only surviving member of the band, and there was no one higher up on the food chain in that world, all our royalties were now mine. In perpetuity. In other words, I was suddenly filthy rich, and all I’d done was write a couple of songs and nearly shit my pants in stage-fright.

One of the principals of A&M Records was, literally, my next door neighbor, and I talked him into a tour of the recording studio he’d just finished in his house. After seeing what he’d done I decided right then and there I was going to do the same thing, and a few weeks later architects and engineers were finalizing plans while contractors swarmed the house on Foothill Road. 

And so of course that was when Jenn decided we needed to buy a sailboat.

So we went down to the Newport Beach Boat Show and looked at one yacht after another…Challengers and NorthStars and DownEasts were a few of the local names that stood out, but in the end I put money down on a Swan 41, a new Sparkman & Stephens design that had not even been officially launched yet, and wouldn’t, as it turned out, for a few more years – which left us without a boat for the foreseeable future.

But there was a new company just starting up in Costa Mesa, the company being called Westsail, and they had a 32 at the show that really struck a chord with us. Once we boarded her and poked around down below we just looked at each other and nodded – and I bought her right then and there. Right after the show Jenn and I sailed her down to Little Balboa Island, to the dock in front of her father’s house – which was probably a mistake – but it was convenient. Pretty soon we were driving down there almost every other day, taking Soliloquy out for a sail. We started hopping over to Catalina, grabbing a mooring off the casino and snorkeling for so long our skin started to look like mottled white prunes. So we started taking Scuba diving lessons…

Sailing kept me away from the house, and the construction project, but when that work wrapped I went to work on another project. I had all Elektric Karma’s master tapes delivered to the house and I got to work re-mastering the original cuts, adding some keyboard tracks I’d always wanted here and there, then I took them over to MCA for a listen. They reissued both our albums, and I put together a gratuitous “Best Of Retrospective” just for good measure, and before you could say ‘Money in the bank’ I’d “earned” so much more it was truly obscene.

So, I had a house in Beverly Hills, at least one sailboat in Newport Beach, and a pile of cash in banks everywhere from California to the Cayman Islands, not to mention a seriously crazy girlfriend who had an affinity for razor blades – and sailboats.

And with all my work finished in the recording studio – it took all of six weeks, too – I was now out of things to do.

Ah, Terry. What about her, you ask?

Well, she had more money than God before she married Pops so that was never an issue, and I was soon reading about her secret marriage to a co-star in the film she was shooting, so presto, problem solved.

Yet within a week I was bored out of my mind.

“What about forming a new group?” Jenn asked.

And all I could see was Deni in that hotel room, telling me that she loved me, and that she always would.

“You know…I don’t think I’m ready for that.” And I wasn’t. Too many ghosts down that road. 

But then: “You know, I can record an album myself – if I really wanted to. I can play all the instruments, do everything but sing, and I can get someone to lay down a vocal track and do the rest on my own.”

She frowned, shook her head. “That’s not the point. Working with musicians on a common goal, that’s what you need right now.”

“No, it’s not.”

“Okay. What do you think about sailing to Hawaii?”

“What?” I cried, flabbergasted. “You mean, like, as in you and me? To Hawaii?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“That sounds fuckin’ bogus, man!”

Keep in mind that in 1972 ‘bogus’ meant something similar to ‘awesome’ these days. ‘Bogus,’ by the way, had replaced ‘bitchin’ in the California beach lexicon of the 60s, so ‘bitchin’ was now a close cousin of ‘far out’ and ‘groovy.’ We clear now, Dude?

I had a million questions, the first being ‘could we do the trip on Soliloquy?’

“Fuck, yes,” Jenn said, talking down to the dunce on the stool in the corner. “This is exactly what she was made for.”

“Oh?” Keep in mind about all I knew concerning sailboats was that the pointy end was supposed to go forward. Next, consider that Soliloquy had two pointy ends, so I was already seriously confused.

“Yeah, we could hit Hawaii, then head south, to Tahiti.”

“Tahiti?” I cried.

I’d heard of Tahiti, of course. Once – maybe. I think I could even find it on a map, too.

“Sure. What do you think? Wanna go for it?”

So, my suicidal girlfriend wanted to get me on a 32 foot long sailboat a thousand miles from the nearest land. To what end, I wondered? 

“How long would it take to get to Hawaii?” I asked.

“Depending on the wind, two weeks, maybe three.”

“Weeks? Not months?”

“Yachts sailing in the Transpac Race do it in eight days. It’s not that big a deal.”

“Have you done it?”

“Twice.”

Of course she had. If it had sails, Jenn had done it before she was out of diapers.

“But this would be just you and me, no pressure, no finish lines,” she added. “We could really get to know one another, you know?”

“When?” I asked, still dubious – but I could see the pleading look in her eyes, too.

“Best time to leave is mid-June, get there in July.”

“So…a month or so from now?”

“Yup.”

“And you would really like to do this?” I finally said, surrendering to the inevitable.

“With you? More than anything in the world.”

“Well, maybe we’d better get to work. My guess is Soliloquy isn’t geared up for this kind of thing.”

She looked at me and grinned. “I already have.”

“Ah.” Of course she had. Probably before she was out of diapers, too.

And so the worm turned.

+++++

I never considered myself a sailor. Never, as in ‘Not even once.’ 

Never, as in ‘Not in a million years.’ 

I’d never been on a sailboat until the day my shrink invited me out on News Boy, her husband’s J-boat, and the day I met Jennifer, and yet I was hooked from that first sail onward. If you’ve ever looked at an eagle or a seagull and wondered what it’s like to bank free and easy on a breeze, well, sailing’s about as close as you’ll ever get to feeling this in life – and unless you happen to believe in reincarnation. Bottom line: after that day I began to consider myself a sailor – and I know that sounds pretentious – not to mention ridiculous – until you consider that sailing, and being a sailor, is a state of mind, so not simply a reflection of one’s experience.

So far, sailing had for me been heading out the Newport Bay jetty around eight in the morning and dropping anchor off Avalon 5-6 hours later. I felt like Magellan if we sailed up to Isthmus Cove instead, and dropping anchor instead of grabbing a mooring ball was the height of daring. Yet Soliloquy was a heavily built, very sound little ship, and so weather was never a factor when we chose to make the 25 mile crossing; in forty knots with six to twelve foot seas she just powered through the channel with kind of a ‘ho-hum’ feel about her, like – ‘you’ll need to throw some heavier shit my way to make me sweat.’ She imparted a confident feel in bad weather, something I came to appreciate later that summer, but something that I was still clueless about those first few months sailing.

No GPS back in the day, too. Navigation was simply old school. That meant learning your way around a nautical chart, and how to use dividers and course protractors. I bought a shiny new Cassens & Plath  sextant, a German made beauty, and Jenn taught me how to use it so we could share celestial navigation duties. I’d always been strong in math; I guess that’s what carried me through music into composition, so sight reduction tables and the spherical trigonometry involved in celestial navigation wasn’t much of a stretch. Still, the first time we motored from Avalon to Newport in a pea-soup fog – and nailed it – I was proud of Jenn for being such an accomplished navigator – not to mention an excellent teacher.

Anyway, we stocked the boat with provisions, including everything we’d need to bake bread at sea, and a few other basic sea-going necessities, things like a life raft and a bottle of rum – because sailors only drink rum, right? – and then I went to my favorite guitar dealer in Hollywood and picked up an small backpacker’s guitar, an acoustic beauty made in Vermont, and so equipped we were good to go.

We left Newport on the 15^th of June, 1972, and of course we sailed to Avalon and baked bread that evening, but when the sun came up the next morning we pulled up the anchor and stowed it aft, then, once we cleared the southeast end of Catalina, we set a course of 260 degrees and settled in for the duration. Call it twenty-five hundred miles at an average of 125 miles per day, and though we racked off 150 most days, we had a few under a hundred, too. The stove and oven were propane, most lighting came from oil lamps, and we had an icebox – not refrigeration – so we went about a week with things like fresh meat and milk then switched over to canned goods and Parmalat for the next two. And the thing is, I found I just didn’t care. We figured out how to make things we liked using the things we had on hand, and we made things like rice and homemade curries that were really something else. And then you have to factor in the sunsets out there…a million miles from nowhere. Sitting in the cockpit with the aroma of freshly baked yeast bread coming out of the galley, while I played something new on the guitar and as the sky went from yellow to orange to purple. Well, that first crossing was kind of like magic, the kind of magic that only two people in love can make.

One day the seas went flat, turned to an endless mirror, and the only ‘things’ we saw that day were the passing fins of an occasional blue shark and the endless procession of United DC-8s overhead on their way to and from Honolulu. I’d never felt so utterly at peace in my life. We’d brought along what we needed to rig a cockpit awning so we put that contraption up as the sun started to burn our skin, if only to keep from being roasted alive, and I think that was one of the most surreal days I’d ever experienced. Pure solitude, cut off from everything else in the world. Just the intent focus of two souls lost in time.

I didn’t know Jennifer, not really, not before those hours and days, and I’m not sure she knew herself all that well, either, but we never looked at one another the same way after that day. We were reduced to pure soul out there, and not one false, pretentious emotion remained. Soliloquy was hanging out there on that flat water, no wind stirred the sea. We dropped a cedar bucket into the crystalline water and washed ourselves from time to time, but other than that the day melted away – leaving the pure reality of infinite solitude in its passing.

And that night the wind picked up, so our speed did as well, then the wind really started blowing, the seas building and we sailed for three days under a double-reefed main and staysail, the steering handled by the Monitor wind-vane self-steering rig installed at the factory. And still Soliloquy just powered through the seas, and never once did we doubt her ability to carry us safely onward.

But then, and unbelievably, a few windy days later our journey was at an end.

Jenn’s father had shown up a few days before our expected arrival in Honolulu and he’d secured a berth at Kewalo Basin, near the city center, and it turned out he was almost as excited as we were about the crossing. The fact that our trip across had turned out so peculiarly uneventful was icing on the cake…and because I think he had it fixed firmly in his mind that the crossing would be something like making it to the summit of Everest, he’d never considered making such a trip himself. Now he was on fire to do it, and was itching to make the trip back to California.

I was not, however, at least not with him onboard, and especially not on a tight 32 foot sailboat.

Yet Jennifer was less reluctant. She thought it would be a good time for she and her father to mend some fences, and of course she wanted me to come along.

As what? A referee, perhaps?

And I didn’t know exactly how to tell her this, but I didn’t want to be a part of that whole thing, and after the second time she brought it up I let her know just that in no uncertain terms. So of course she got mad as hell and in a huff she told me to fly back to LA by myself, that she and her father would bring Soliloquy home to Newport without me. And it was the way she said ‘home to Newport’ that seemed to hurt the most. I wasn’t home, at least not her home. Her father’s house on Little Balboa Island was home, and it always would be. I was just passing through.

It was suddenly all so clear. So clear it hurt. What I called love had been misplaced. Call it an anxiety related issue and be done with it.

And then there I was, on one of those silver-bellied United DC-8s we’d watched arcing across the naked sky. Back to LA. Alone. And I do mean alone.

The thing is, there’s no easy way back from Hawaii to Southern California by sailboat. The prevailing winds and currents make it much more doable if you arc north towards the Gulf of Alaska and British Columbia, then ride the currents south past the Golden Gate to LA. It’s a much longer trip, and it takes a lot longer, too – as long as 5-7 weeks. Another drawback? You have to go much farther north, well into colder, arctic influenced waters where both storms and fog are the norm, so the trip can be tough. Just like the Everest expedition Jenn’s father didn’t want to experience, as a matter of fact.

So, I flew to LA and took a taxi home, and like that it was all over. The trip, the deep affinity we felt for each other – all of it over and done with, like the whole thing had been a fever dream. And like a dream, it had never really happened. More to the point, what had been revealed after the trip was this ongoing thing she had going on with her father. He was a toxic alcoholic, a manic-depressive beast, and like a lot of abused kids Jenn had convinced herself she was at fault – and so she always had to put things right. She had to fix that one toxic relationship and she didn’t care who or what got in her way, and that was why her impulse represented a pathological condition. And a new reality was now very much apparent to me: fixing that busted relationship held a much higher priority for her than any kind of relationship she had with me, because she experienced empathy only when no threat to her primary goal existed.

Some old friends in San Francisco wanted me to help out on a new album they were working on so I flew up north a few days after I got back, and we worked in the studio for almost a month. By the time I left the studio I had it in my head to work on a solo album of my own, and those sunsets came back to me as I dreamed this new music to life. I had been playing that little backpackers guitar while Jenn baked bread down below and I could still feel that sun-baked day, the buckets of cool seawater washing away the heat. I spent two weeks in my studio laying down tracks for just one song, but when I finished I carried it over to MCA – and everyone who listened to it said it was the best thing I’d ever done. Could I carry on, they asked, and create an album out of the experience?

Hell yes, I said. That’s exactly what I had in mind.

But when I got home there was a message on my machine. It was from Jenn, and she was in Victoria, on Vancouver Island. She and her father had finally had their gigantic falling out and he’d left her there; could I call her at the marina? Please?

I called the number she left on the machine and some dockmaster ran down to Soliloquy to fetch her while my fingers drummed away on the kitchen counter, and when she finally got to the phone she was breathless and in tears.

The whole trip had been a nightmare, she sobbed.

Was I surprised? No. As in, Hell No.

And when would she learn? How many more times would she let that asshole tear her apart. How many times would she run home and start the whole process all over again? What was I missing, beyond not understanding the nature of her psychosis?

“What do you want, Jenn?”

“Could you fly up, help me bring Soliloquy back to LA?”

“Then what?”

“What do you mean?”

“Just that. What happens next?”

“We get on with our life. Together.”

“Really? Until the next time you need to run home to Daddy?”

“What does that mean?”

“Maybe you two were meant for each other. Maybe I’m just getting in the way, ya know?”

“Aaron…no. It’s not that way and you know it.”

“All I know is what I see.”

“Is that what you see?”

“Yes.”

She hung up on me.

The dockmaster called me at six the next morning, and he was upset. 

Jenn, it turned out, had found some more razor blades.

+++++

I was up there later that afternoon, and her psychiatrist at the hospital was convinced this attempt had been a classic ‘cry for help,’ that her cuts were superficial, hadn’t been deep enough to damage even the tendons. But there was another complicating factor.

Yup. Jenn was pregnant. 

The timing worked out, no doubt about it. Our sunbaked idyll had been more than musically productive, but I could tell by the look on her face that this wasn’t an altogether happy development to her. No Champagne and strawberries, no more elated anticipation about the future.

No, because it turned out she wanted to abort the fetus. There was no point, she’d told her docs. She’d destroyed her last chance for happiness, just as she always had, so why bring a kid into that world? Why not just kill everything about us? Take care of business – once and for all time.

Maybe I was beyond caring that day, but it was beginning to feel like she had learned to use suicide as a weapon to not just hurt everyone around her, but to manipulate them while doing so, too. Me, certainly, but her mother and father, too, and now she was going to carry that to the next logical step – in her world, anyway. Kill the truly blameless, and I was stunned. Too stunned for words.

When she told me what she intended to do I unloaded on her, and that devolved into a big fight. Kill that kid, I said, and you’ll never see or hear from me again. Simple as that. When she told me to fuck off again I left the hospital and went down to the marina, listed the sailboat with a local broker and flew back to LA.

Yup. Cold. Heartless. No empathy at all. And suddenly too tired of going round and round on her psychotic merry-go-round.

Her docs called me two days later and said she’d opted to have the abortion. It was done. They’d tried to stop her but she’d left and had it done elsewhere.

And so was I. Done, I mean.

With her, anyway.

Not with sailing, as it turned out. Not by a long shot.

There were a couple of guys down in Costa Mesa working on a new 38 footer, and I drove down to see them, and the boat they were working on. They called their creation Alajuela, named after a place in Costa Rica, and work was well underway on their second hull when I showed up on their doorstep. She was, they said, an evolution of the beloved Ingrid design popular around Seattle, and by the time I left later that afternoon I’d bought hull number three, and would have her in a few months, so I went home and retreated to my studio to work through the lingering pain and anger I felt.

Jenn, of course, started calling as soon as she got back to Newport.

So I did something completely out of character. I changed my telephone number.

Then she started coming up to the house and ringing the doorbell for hours at a stretch. 

I answered once and asked her to leave, and to leave never return. After the third return I called Shelly, my lawyer, and had Jenn served with a restraining order – and out came the razor blades. I heard that anecdotally, of course. Her father didn’t call me. He called my lawyer, who told me. Another near miss, of course, but this time they hospitalized her. In the end, I didn’t see her for a while.

She made her way into my music, however. The love I felt that day for her was as real as it ever was, and that was hard to reconcile with the truth of her existence. As hard as it was to reconcile the kid she had so ruthlessly killed.

+++++

I wrapped up new the album about a month before Troubadour launched, though the studio had released Idyll as a single a few months earlier. The single was nicely received for what it was, something disconnected from the rest of the story, and the album would be unlike Elektric Karma’s other albums so was entering uncharted waters. So when the new album shot up the charts two weeks after release I was as surprised as I was happy.

But the odd thing about it was I just wasn’t into music now. I had moved on, was already planning for my new life on Troubadour. Everything about her was planned for one thing, and one thing only. I was going to take her wherever the wind took us, and I planned on going solo, too. 

Refrigeration was built-in this time, and one of the first furling headsail units, too. A more robust self-steering vane was installed, and a drifter for light air, too. I wanted teak decks again, and the builders relented, laid them for me, and by the time Troubadour hit Newport Harbor she was mine, purpose built and ready to roll. I moved her to a friend’s slip at the Balboa Bay Club and fitted her out, packed her to the gills – and in less than a week, then I went home for a few days – to talk to my lawyer and to make my goodbyes to friends.

I decided to rent Pop’s house to a friend of mine, a musician, but in the end I left the house in the care of my lawyer. I drove down to Newport, handed my car over to the guy at the guard shack  and told him where the title was, and in the middle of a foggy March night I cast off her lines and slipped out the jetty, pointed her bow to the southwest – and set sail for the Marquesas.

Part II

Early that first morning out, sitting on a flat, windless sea maybe thirty miles off La Jolla, I watched the stars and took inventory of my life. There was nothing else to do, you see – literally. In my rush to leave I realized I’d not put a single book on board, and the only music I had, other than from my little guitar, came from a shortwave radio – which meant whatever I could pick up, usually the BBC, and usually news, not music. Only then did I realize I’d have to stop in San Diego to fix these nagging omissions, or turn around and return to Newport – something I really did not want to do.

When Troubadour and I cast our lines off the night before, when we motored past Lido Isle, then Harbor and Linda Islands, then, finally, Little Balboa Island, I couldn’t help but think about Jenn. 

Jenn, locked away in her madness. 

Jenn – and her endless fascination with razor blades. 

And when I passed her father’s house I had seen him standing in his living room looking at me as I passed.

Did he know Troubadour was mine? Did he realize who was passing by just then, in front of his house of horrors? Did he understand his role in this little drama? In my little corner of the universe he was Nixon to my McGovern. He hated me not least because I’d voted for McGovern, but I was a musician so next to useless. And yes, while he was a staunch Nixonian, and I’d liked to chide him about Watergate and all that told us about modern Republicans, he’d countered with endless jibes about Democrats being socialists, or worse, while I referred to Goldwater Republicans, like him, as fascist John Birchers. Which he was. When he told me once he thought the free speech protestors at Berkeley should have been rounded up and shot, and that Edwin Meese had privately agreed with him, I saw a smug pride in the man’s eyes that haunted me for years. He was a Nazi and didn’t even seem to realize that one simple fact, or even care what his hatred really said about his world.

Jenn, of course, struggled with the dichotomy I had presented. She claimed she loved her father but the more she learned about the world the more she understood what her father really was. And pretty soon her father realized he was spending money to turn his daughter against his own ideas about the way the world should be, and I think that set up the final conflict between the two of them. Rather than let her grow, I think he began to undermine her at every turn – at first in intellectual arguments, and then, when that didn’t work, through emotional attacks.

Jenn, I think, fell into the traps he set for her. And they were traps, the kind weak bullies love to set for the emotionally defenseless. There was no way she could win, of course, no way to avoid his traps in the first place, at least not for her. One of his traps, maybe his favorite, was to keep her on a tight financial leash, and he undermined every attempt she made to reach out for some kind of independence, and though he didn’t understand this at the time, the only way he could win such a game was to destroy her. And he did, but you’d have to be sick to call that a victory – by any measure I understand, anyway. He knew nothing about nurturing children, about teaching by example, and don’t even get me going about Jenn’s mother. I’ve thought about her family over the years and saw in their collapse nothing less than a mirror of the struggle between generations that flared in the 60s. The results were debilitating for everyone who got caught up in all that drama.

About halfway through that first night out of Newport Beach I realized I couldn’t break free of all this toxicity by myself. At some point I’d need other people around, and at first I’d hoped to find these voices in books, and maybe in music. I’d also need to be able to pull into a new anchorage and get ashore, find local music and then listen, really listen to new voices. Maybe voices of anger and love, of resistance and submission, but more than anything else they would be voices of life beyond California. Yet if this trip was to turn into a series of dizzying flights from LA, I was afraid the time would be wasted. If, on the other hand, I tuned in and really listened with my musician’s heart there was a chance I could learn something valuable, and quite possibly share what I learned with people who might also be willing to listen. Maybe that was just ego speaking, but then again isn’t all artistic creation an act of ego?

The wind fell away from me that night, then the sea took a deep sigh and lay still, leaving a black mirror alive with dancing starlight. Then Troubadour and I drifted by a massive kelp bed and I saw a sea lion’s whiskered face pop up out of the tangled mass and into starlight, and we stared at one another as my little boat drifted by. I wanted to dive in and play, to live in its world for a minute or two, understand what concerned this stranger as it went about its business in the darkness. Find dinner, I reckoned, without becoming something bigger’s dinner. Elemental exigencies. Kill or be killed. That was life, wasn’t it? And that’s what civilization had tried to tame. All our laws, all our frail moralities…all those things kept nature at bay, because nature, true nature, has always been all about the most basic kind of survival. Find food and keep from being killed and eaten in the process, so you can live long enough to procreate then get out of the way as the next generation comes along.

That seal was hiding in the kelp because something bigger than it was out there in the darkness, circling, waiting for the opportunity to sprint in and eat him. Just like me, I thought. Out here on Troubadour, running, hiding, trying to turn this escape into a noble mission to enlighten civilization while I ran from Jenn and her razor blades, ran from being devoured by all the dark creatures out there, creatures just like her father. And, mind you, I was looking down into the sea while I tried to hide from images of Deni and Pete and my bandmates as they fluttered down into the dark embrace of Lake Erie.

It’s funny, the things that run through your mind in the last minutes of darkness, just before the sun rises, even when you’re only a few miles offshore. You can see houses on bluffs above beaches, sleeping people just coming to the sun while you look at the processes of civilization from afar. When you cut the cord and sail away you begin to distance yourself from all those routines, from all those laws and moral constructs that define your shoreside existence. When you sail along the elemental periphery you really begin to feel that ‘apartness.’ You feel it in your bones, like you’ve set yourself adrift and whatever purpose might exist may or may not be revealed to you. In the end, you may think you’re just along for the ride, but all the while the rest of the world is leaving you behind. When you’re out there, time stops.

But…as I watched that sea lion I realized this was my first time out on the water by myself.

And it hit me then: I didn’t like this whole being alone thing. It was scary.

So I turned on the motor and advanced the throttle, made for the entrance channel to San Diego harbor. By late-morning I was tied up in a marina behind Shelter Island; a half hour later I was eating eggs Benedict on a deck overlooking the water; I was back inside the distended gut of civilization so quickly it made me giddy. I walked to a nearby shop after brunch and asked about radios, maybe one with a cassette deck? No problem, they told me. They could have it in by evening.

That, too, is civilization. Ask and ye shall receive. Just hand over the cash and run to the next store, in my case the nearest bookstore. America is and always has been about leaving you alone so you can go out and spend more money.

So…I went to all the bookstores I could in five hours, and went back to Troubadour loaded down with piles of books and tapes, and I stowed them while workmen rounded out the radio installation. After the dust settled I went back out for dinner, and I made my way down to an upscale steak place a few hundred yards away.

“So, what could I get you to drink?” my cheery, drop dead gorgeous waitress asked.

“Something strong, something with rum.”

“How about a Mai-Tai,” she said. 

“As long as it’s strong,” says I, the hearty sailor-man, “and not some watered down girly drink.”

She looked at my shorts and boat shoes.

“Coming, or going?” she asked.

“Pardon?”

“You just coming in from a trip, or heading out?”

“A little of both,” I said, which required an explanation.

“Where’s your boat?” she asked

“Right down there,” I said as I pointed in the vague direction of my boat, and you could indeed just see Troubadour’s mast jutting up across the marina’s fairway, “the one with the blue hull.”

“Troubadour?” she asked. “I was looking at her earlier. She looks sweet.”

“Oh?”

“I’d love to just sail away someday.”

“And where would you go?” said the bumbling, horny young man fresh from his fall off the turnip truck.

She put her hands over her eyes and pointed in some random direction: “That way!” she said, smiling as she laughed a little, and I laughed with her before she took off and brought my medicinal strength rum and some honey-sweet Hawaiian bread. After she took my order, she pointed me in the direction of a truly colossal salad bar and disappeared, but a minute later she dropped by again.

“So, where you headed?” she asked. Her voice was self-assured, her tone – flippant.

“Nuku Hiva.” he replied, the old-pro sailor replied confidently.

Then she said something startling, and to the effect of “When are you leaving?”

“In the morning.”

“Want some company?” she asked, and I looked up to see if she was joking.

“Have a passport?” I joked right back.

“Yes.” A little more serious this time. A little more direct eye contact.

“Maybe you ought to drop by after you get off tonight,” I replied, then I sat back and watched her reaction.

“Okay,” she said, parrying my thrust.

Surreal? Yes, I know.

Stupid? Probably, but what the fuck…?

Random, almost to the point of silliness? Oh yeah.

Ah, but her name was Jennifer. Of course. It had to be. After life hands you a double helping of grief – as in Pops and Jenn – you’re due a little levity, served steaming with a side of irony.

Jennifer, and I called her Jennie – was late of Madison, Wisconsin, and she had a bright smile and long legs, brown hair and eyes. Honest eyes. No evasions, and no hidden agendas.

And this Jennifer would in just a matter of days become the love of my life. She would spend the next fourteen years glued to my side. There are chance encounters, random permutations of luck and timing, and then there was Jennifer. Jennifer ‘Do you have a passport’ Clemens. ‘Okay’ became a standing joke between us, the simplest word imaginable to set in motion an endless series of adventures, an infinite chain of New. 

“There’s a fiery volcano! Wanna race to the top?” 

“Okay!”

If Jennifer of Newport Beach was a morphine drip-fed scowl, Jennifer of Madison was a serene smile, an imperturbable, old world outlook grounded in mid-western sensibility. She was JFKs glass half full, she was two years in the Peace Corps after earning her RN. Best of all, she’d never heard of Electric Karma, and neither did she know who I was, or what I did – and it never once mattered to her after she figured it all out. She’d wanted to see the world, and in the beginning I was simply going her way. Her ticket to ride along the long and winding road..

She’d been sailing out on the bay a few times since she’d moved to San Diego the year before, ostensibly to get her Master’s in nursing, but she’d fallen into the beach vibe after she settled in with a group of rebellious nurses – and so then decided to ‘go back to school’ to learn New things. She didn’t know what, only that learning was an imperative she couldn’t shake. She went to school days, worked tables at night, and spent weekends working at a free clinic – because that gave her the time and the resources to do New things. Until she figured out that what she wanted seemed to change from course to course – and then she understood what she really wanted was to break away and get out there in the world. To travel, and to see the world she’d only briefly discovered in the Peace Corps. To learn, and yes, maybe to fall in love along the way, but to always keep learning.

So maybe there was something mercenary in our coming together. She’d planted her feet in a place and at a time where sailors gathered before jumping off to Baja or the South Seas. Maybe her questions about where was I headed and when I was leaving weren’t without purpose, or maybe now that she knew what she wanted to see, she’d simply put herself in a position to get there. Maybe she would have been like an autumn leaf, blowing any way the wind blows – but for whatever reason she found her way to me.

Because I’d forgotten to pack a few books. Because I couldn’t listen to real music, on my boat.

Sometimes life turns on the silliest, most inconsequential things. Sometimes love comes to you, and you’re just stupid if you turn away.

We put off leaving a day, only because that’s how long it took her to cut all the ties that bound her to life on shore, and when we slipped away that following morning, I did so knowing that this was almost a case of the blind leading the blind. I was not yet a deeply experienced sailor, and she was a neophyte – so we went slow. We sailed down to Ensenada, anchored out and rowed ashore, went to Hussong’s because that’s what everyone else did, then we made a longer trip south, to Isla Guadalupe, about a third of the way down Baja, though after watching researchers diving with Great Whites we decided against swimming ashore. We baked our first loaves of bread together, learned how to move around the boat without getting in each other’s way, and then we started listening to our hearts – and not just with our minds. Not as simple as it sounds. 

We hemmed and hawed, debated about whether we should go to Cabo or Puerto Vallarta and top off the water tanks or just strike out, head for the Marquesas, but as I’d stowed lots of gallon jugs of water to go with what Troubadour carried in her tanks, we opted for the latter. So, setting a course of 210 degrees, we stared ahead at 3000 miles of open water – and what do you suppose happened next?

I might have, at one point, called it something like wedded bliss, but for the time being I called the feeling exactly what it was. I was in love with Jennifer Clemens.

You’ll see. Okay?

+++++

We usually set the wind vane and let the contraption steer for hours on end, and our days centered around the usual routines of long distance sailing: standing watch, reading, shoot a noon sight, making bread, reading, standing watch…repeat as needed until symptoms disappear. Yet our days were anything but monotonous; the most joyous moments came when dolphins joined us, but seeing another boat out there came in a close second. The dolphins, however, came up from behind one morning and zinged alongside, playing in Troubadour’s bow wave for about an hour and, as she has a tremendous bow-sprit, Jennie lay up there, her hand outstretched, waiting for contact. And every now and then one of them would arc up, let her take a touch on the fly, and those close encounters seemed to energize our little universe. She’d come back to the cockpit with this look in her eyes and I’d wrap myself within her joy for a few hours. Once when we were enjoying each other’s company in the cockpit I looked up and saw we had an audience, and I wondered what orcas thought of us. Were we really so different? I know they were curious, too. They swam alongside quietly, just taking in the moment.

A great Atlantic storm entered the Caribbean, then crossed Costa Rica and Panama as the beast made it’s way into the Pacific, and though by the time of closest approach the hurricane was tracking north of us, the remnants hit us, and hit us hard. It was my first real storm at sea – with or without Jenn – yet Troubadour was built, like my Westsail 32, to handle these conditions – and she did, too, with ease. After the storm’s passage we both felt a surge of confidence, yet we knew it hadn’t been a direct hit. Even so, we felt like we were becoming a team, that we worked well together, and that we could make this work. Believe me, that’s half the battle.

The net result? We began to talk about ‘what comes next?’ Both for this voyage, and for us. Maybe it sounds silly, but in retrospect I felt bonded to Jennie after that storm, like she had truly become a part of this journey. Like that otherworldly loneliness I’d felt off the coast of La Jolla was finally a thing of my past, and Jennie was fast becoming my future. And I told her that, too, and in no uncertain terms.

“What do you want to do?” she asked.

“Spend my life with you.”

“You do?”

“I do.”

“Okay.”

“Does that mean what I hope it means?”

“Yes.”

So, right out there in the middle of nowhere, with only God standing as our lone, mute witness, we said what words we remembered and pledged to take care of one another ‘til death do us part. It was really that simple. Even if marriage is a civilizational construct, I felt more comfortable after that – knowing she had my back, and that I had her’s, too. Yes, that’s odd, but yes, that’s called being human. We need connection. Sometimes we seek out such connection, and sometimes it just falls into our lap, but we weren’t meant to make this journey alone. Yet the funniest and perhaps the most staggering thing was how I knew she was ‘the one’ within minutes of meeting her. Does that seem strange – after Jenn and her razor blades?

When Jennie first came down to Troubadour that night she was still in her frilly waitress uniform, a short little dress with black tights under, a white blouse with a silly red vest over, and while she looked the boat over I looked her over. We talked for a few hours about the road she’d taken to San Diego, and where she hoped it would lead next, and the more she talked the more comfortable I grew with her voice. She might have looked like any other ditzy beach chick on first glance, but really, she was anything but. She was as grounded as anyone I’d ever know, yet grounded to the beat of a different drummer. I guess the moral of that story is that sometimes we pay too much attention to unfounded stereotypes. 

I fell asleep with my head on her lap that first night, and she was still with me when I woke up a few hours later. When I slipped away and fixed coffee, she was kind of startled when she woke up and looked around, like maybe she was disoriented, then she looked at me.

“So, you really want to do this?” she asked.

“Yup. Can’t imagine doing it without you.”

“Okay,” she said, grinning.

Yes. Life really can be that simple. I know this is a tired cliché, but sometimes you just have to open your heart and let life in.

Three thousand miles at 140 miles a day is 21 days, and as my celestial nav was spot on we nailed it, sailed into Taioha’e in the Marquesas and cleared customs, then anchored out under the influence an unexpectedly easygoing euphoria.

“We did it,” she sighed. And We had, too.

She snuggled in and didn’t move for a long time, and then I heard her easy breathing, her gentle sleeping, and I settled in beside her for the duration.

+++++

I know this marks a departure from the flow of things, but we walked ashore a day later and ran across a small Catholic church on a hillside. Jennifer being an Episcopalian and me being more or less agnostic, when we ran across the local priest we told him about our at-sea vows, then we asked him to do the whole marriage thing for real. No paperwork, mind you, just say the words before God; he graciously did, before God, and for some reason the whole marriage thing felt more grounded in fact after that. She took my name, a nice German-Jewish name, and jettisoned her Wasp-British name. Then she called her folks back home – who had no idea she’d even left San Diego, mind you – and told them the news.

Major freak-outs ensued, by the way, then her folks told her they’d like to come to Tahiti to meet me, and to let them know when we might arrive. 

Then we took off to find a market.

Yeah, I know. Surreal.

Just like grocery shopping in the Marquesas was surreal.

No supermarkets, especially not in the early seventies, and very few tourists to get in your way. Want a new alternator belt for your Volvo Penta diesel engine? Say the words ‘fat chance’ three times as fast as you can. Then try it backwards. Yup, it was about that easy. Fed Ex hadn’t quite figured out how to spell Marquesas back in 73-74, which meant an alternator belt would come by sea. Like maybe by copra schooner out of Papeete? I had a spare, of course, but what if that one cut loose? I needed a spare to replace my spare, but it looked like that would have to wait a few thousand miles. I did find a mechanic savvy enough to locate the alignment issue causing the belt to wear prematurely, so problem solved, lesson learned and filed away on a 3×5 card – with notes and drawings on the back.

Long distance sailing has been justly described as sailing to exotic ports and doing extensive maintenance in rolling anchorages, and after fifty years I can say I’ve pulled apart more engines in obscure places than I’d ever care to admit. I’ve replaced Troubadour’s original engine four times in fifty years, too. I maintain the things, do all the fluid changes at twice the most conservative intervals – like changing engine oil after every fifty hours of use – but as I don’t run my engine often the salt water environment simply kills them that much faster. Yes, that’s correct. Most marine engines are cooled with raw seawater, one way or another, even so-called fresh-water cooled engines need to transfer heat somewhere, and salt kills metal, period. So, here’s boatie rule number one: shit don’t last and it’s got to be replaced. Rule two? Anything made for a boat costs ten times more than the equivalent widget costs for something made for a car. That’s why sailing has also been described as like standing under a cold shower – ripping up hundred dollar bills just for the sheer fun of it. That’s the nuts and bolts, but here’s the grease: the more you can do yourself the more affordable sailing becomes. The corollary? When you pay someone else to do the work, about 90% of the time the work will be poorly done – or was just plain wrong, this leading to more expensive repairs. Which leads to rule three: do the work yourself and shop around for parts. When we made New Zealand a year or so later, I took a diesel mechanics course; it was the best six weeks I ever spent – in terms of saving heartache. I still have zero interest in engines or in tearing apart a winch, but I’ve always had tons of interest in saving my sanity.

Anyway, Jennie was as good as her word. She wanted to explore. She wanted to meet people. And Jennie was an RN. A real, honest-to-goodness Registered Nurse. When word got out on the island that she was an RN one of the nuns from the local hospital actually had the local gendarme get his boat and carry her out to the boat! Then the old nun asked if Jennie would mind working on Hiva Oa at a clinic for a month or so. Jennie looked at me and I shrugged; I said something learned and sophisticated like ‘Why not’, and off she went. There wasn’t a doc at the clinic just then, as it turned out, so Jennie was doing front line work under a docs supervision – by single-sideband radio – but she loved it, had never been happier doing medicine. One month turned to two, then three, then her replacement – from France – finally turned up and we were free again.

Rangiroa was our next stop, and we entered by the northeast pass by the village of Tiputa, and we stood by and watched Jacques Cousteau and Calypso maneuver into the lagoon and drop anchor a few hours after we had – and only about a hundred feet away – and Jennie wound up working on the boat for two weeks while Cousteau & Co dove on the reefs just outside the pass. One night we heard Electric Karma’s second album blaring over their onboard hi-fi and when the crew found out the next day who I was they went nuts. We had a blowout on the beach the next night that was truly epic. We became good friends and ran into Calypso a couple of times over the next decade or so, yet that experience came to define most of the people we ran across out there. After a few months we both realized we’d be running into the same people time and again – because we were all like-minded nomads on the same thorny path. We might not see Dick and Jane for a few months, but then one day there they’d be, in some out of the way anchorage no one had heard of before, and we’d exchange information and ideas, maybe some rum, too, then be on our separate ways a few days later.

During the three months we spent on Hiva Oa, I got this Paul Gauguin bug up my ass and started painting. Yeah, Gauguin spent most of his time in the Pacific on this island, and yeah, you could buy art supplies at the tiny market there. So I did. Another old nun, a French gal, taught me the basics and so I started painting, and I’ve not stopped since. When he dropped the hook someplace nice I’d start sketching anywhere and everything that looked even remotely interesting, and in time we began searching out anchorages simply because they reportedly had great scenic appeal. By the time we hit Papeete I was running out of places to store sketchpads and canvases. 

Because of the time Jennie had worked on Hiva Oa all sorts of bonds and fees were waived in Tahiti, and we were extended the offer to spend more time on Moorea, in the village of Papetō’ai, if she’d work for another month or two. Okay, look at pictures of Cook Inlet on Moorea, then factor in your calculations that getting a permit to anchor there was next to impossible, then hit enter. Now, you’ve just been given a permit to anchor there as long as Jennie was working there, plus a month or so more. Free, as in no charge, instead of coughing up big bucks. We ended up anchored by a waterfall – for six months. I shipped fifty canvases back to LA; when my lawyer Shelly saw them she asked if she could buy a couple. Then a few weeks later she told me she had shown a few to a gallery on Rodeo Drive. They wanted to represent me. Please send more, they said. Bigger is better.

I already thought life couldn’t possibly get any better than this – and now: please paint more? A month later word came that thirty plus paintings had sold, and the next time I sent in a batch I’d better count on returning to LA for a dedicated showing.

Then the inevitable happened.

Jennie’s parents, and two of her three sisters, announced their coming to Tahiti to meet the latest member of the family. And her two sisters, Niki and Taylor, were huge Electric Karma fans, too.

Oh happy day.

So, I rented a house for them use while here, and figured we’d take them sailing on the days Jennie had off, and on the day of their arrival we got on a Twin Otter at Temae and hopped across the channel to Papeete. 

Warren Clemens looked like he’d just been called up by Central Casting to play the part of a midwestern preacher with an attitude problem. Yeah, I guess, but looks can be deceiving. Warren was a hard drinking ex-Marine with a seriously deranged sense of humor. He was also a physician, a skilled general surgeon who also taught at the medical school in Madison, Wisconsin. He was also a Green Bay Packers fanatic. I mean a real fanatic, not some half-assed wannabe. And as soon as Warren learned his baby girl was working at the local clinic he had to go see what she was up to.

And yeah, you guessed this one already, didn’t you?

As soon as they learned he was this hot shot surgeon some kid gets pulled off a reef after a white tip reef shark tried to eat his legs off, and the kid was half dead by the time they get him to the clinic. No way he’ll make it to Papeete, someone said. 

If only we had a surgeon?

And there he goes, mild-mannered Clark Kent dashing into the phone booth, emerging seconds later in his red cape as Super Surgeon, ready to save the day. Yeah, he saved the kid’s life. Yeah, he did an appendectomy three days later. Then gall stones, then he repaired a femur with a nasty compound fracture. Another appendectomy followed – and, mind you, he wasn’t getting paid for any of this – and he was having the time of his life. Long story short, for the next eight years Warren and his wife, the first mother I’d ever really known, came back to Moorea every summer and he volunteered for two months at a stretch. He stopped coming – eight years later – only because he died; there’s a chapel in the forest overlooking Cook Inlet named after him. He’s buried there, and so is his wife, and my wife too, for that matter.

Mind you, all this happened because I forgot to pack some books on Troubadour. I mean, are you following along with the chorus here? It’s why my next solo album was called Serendipity, why a butterfly sneeze in Tibet comes across the Pacific as a typhoon. Everything is part of an endless chain of cause and effect, so trying to find the root cause for something is as pointless as asking what happened before the Big Bang. Who the devil knows? And who cares? It’s pointless and silly to ask the question, and Buddhists are on the right track when they say ‘accept what is.’ If you can’t handle that, go get an enema, flush your brain and get right with God. You ain’t ever gonna know, so chill out and go paint another picture. And could I have a Mai-tai when you come back?

Warren’s two week trip stretched out to a month, by the way, and everyone wept when he left – Warren most of all.

Okay, enough about Warren. Let me introduce you to Michelle. My mother. Well, you know what I mean.

Michelle liked to play cards. She also taught physics. Quantum mechanics, to be more precise. She was one of a handful of women assigned to work at Oak Ridge – on the Manhattan Project. To say she was smart was like calling Einstein kinda bright. And to say Jennie came from the deep end of the gene pool was as scary as it was misleading. Scary because she was serving steaks at a waterfront restaurant in San Diego, waiting for me to come along. What if I’d gone to a bookstore in Westwood? 

And what about misleading? Well, because she had turned her back on all that, yet that’s who she was. Sure, she was smart. Sure, our girl is smart. Okay? So what?

And…Michelle also liked to paint. Watercolors. Nothing but, and she usually kept to simple flowers. She taught me the techniques she knew, and I was hooked. We spent hours walking off into the forests around the inlet and she’d find something new, sketch the rough outlines then pull out this monster Nikon F and start shooting away, getting just the colors she needed down on Kodachrome 25 for later reference.

So, time to meet my new sisters, Niki and Taylor. Both into music, and seriously so. Both teaching music, piano and strings, at elementary schools in Madison, and Niki was apparently a talented singer. Both in love with the idea of me, the rock star, even before they met me. Both went nuts after spending a few hours with me on Troubadour. We spent evenings on the boat cooking and talking shop, then I’d pull out the old backpacker and start playing through my newest ideas, sounding my way through the classics and bridging the divide to rock. And yet they were all abuzz about Yes and ELP and Pink Floyd, and had I heard Dark Side of the Moon yet? Niki set me straight, and Us and Them became my new favorite when we found a cassette in Papeete a week later.

There are jagged spires around the island, some of the most awe inspiring peaks I’ve ever seen, yet many lack perspective unless seen from the sea, particularly along the west side of the island. We circumnavigated Moorea, all of us, slowly, over a two day period, and I should have bought Kodak stock before we set out: I don’t know how many rolls we blew through. Hundreds? Maybe – maybe more. It was nonstop – blow through 36 exposures then dash below to rewind and reload – and as I’d never seen this part of the island before, I was just as pathetic, just as consumed. My only regret? I shot Ektachrome as there was no place to get Kodachrome developed out here, and some of those slides were fading fast by the time Jennie passed.

Still, some of my most cherished memories were captured during those three weeks. As I’ve mentioned, I’d not had a mother and father, let alone sisters, but by golly now I sure did. I would have fallen in love with them, all of them, simply for that reason, but they turned out to be really fun, really interesting people, and all of a sudden life felt complete. To put it succinctly, I’d not felt this good since Electric Karma’s heyday – and no stage fright, even. A year away and life was evolving into the best sleigh ride possible, not a care in the world and everything was just as easy as sliding along a country road in the snow.

Of course, shit had to hit the fan. It just had to.

And it hit from an unexpected direction.

Terry. My ‘grandmother.’ She’d married and divorced an old English movie star and was now simply destitute. He’d bled her dry and walked away, walked into the arms of a younger, more economically productive actress, and Terry was about as low as a human being could get when she got word to me through Shelly that she needed help. I bought her a ticket from New York City to Papeete and she arrived two days before the Clemens clan was due to leave. By the time she got to Troubadour I’d told the family my grandmother was coming, but not who she was, so when Terry McKay showed up onboard, Warren clammed up tight, Michelle tried to act nonchalant – and failed miserably, while the girls gushed nonsensically. All in all, it was exactly what Terry needed. She was entranced by Moorea and I made an offer on the house I’d rented, bought it outright and she moved in – with the understanding that we’d all consider the place kind of a home base going forward. When local officials heard they had a genuine Hollywood legend in their midst…well, let’s just say they were very supportive of the idea. Warren was still tongue-tied every time he was around her, though. He was a classic. Tongue tied and his eyes full of stars.

We said our byes at the local airport, and, as I said, Warren was a basket case. The experience had been as draining as it was fulfilling, and when I hugged Michelle and the girls, well, in a way that moment said it all. I was happy. They were too. I felt whole.

Terry was beside herself, of course. She and ‘destitute’ were not on speaking terms, and I talked to my lawyer who talked to some people at Universal who talked to – yada-yada-yada – and she had an audition if she could get to it. Then she said she couldn’t, that she wasn’t strong enough.

“Could you,” I asked, “if I went with you?”

“Yes.” Her eyes shined, too.

Jennie was working 16 hour days at the clinic so off we went. We stayed at the Beverly Hills Hotel, a first for me, because she had to ‘keep up appearances.’ The studio picked her up and I went to visit my gallery, dropped off a few new canvases. Visited my friend at Pop’s house, then with Shelly, and by the time I got back to the hotel Terry was in the room, out of her mind with anxiety. She wouldn’t hear for a week or so, and if she prevailed her presumed co-star would be none other than her ex.

“Let’s leave tomorrow,” she cried.

“Let me make a few calls,” I replied.

She got the part and her ex was passed over, the part going to David Niven instead, and she was suddenly ecstatic and destitute no more. Shooting would begin in two months so we returned to Moorea, and as I finally had a real space to set up a studio I started painting in earnest. Huge canvases this time, like six by ten feet, and this series was all Moorea, all misty mountains and rain forests full of furiously blooming flowers. Terry and I started walking the forests, too, and she started photographing flowers and soon enough she was getting into it, then she too wanted to learn watercolors and when I passed word along to Michelle she was over the moon, too. Next summer would be fun, I reckoned, assuming Warren didn’t lose Michelle over to his obvious infatuation with Terry. I mean…Peyton Place, anyone?

Jennie was the one who picked up on Terry’s infatuation with me.

I’d never seen it before, obviously, but then again – what about Jenn. Jennie, on the other hand, was adroit at picking up these things. She read people and didn’t miss much, and she could spot a phony in two seconds flat. And according to Jennie, Terry was a phony. Insecure, not really talented but cute as hell. She was, in Jennie’s mind’s eye, a real pretender. Terry’d made it this far on her looks alone, not to mention her ability to enchant men, and that was why, Jennie guessed, the old Englishman had ditched her. He’d seen through the bullshit and moved on. Jennie doubted the guy had swindled her, too; more likely she’d try to buy the guy off, keep him interested by buying him things. Classic, she said. Now she’d turned her attention on me – because I was safe, and I had money. Because she could count on me to give her all the attention she needed. And because of Pops. She was, in short, taking advantage of me.

Yeah. Maybe. I wasn’t buying into that quite yet, but I could see her point. Regardless, Terry had been a real part of my life since forever, including some of the most important years of my life, and I wasn’t ever going to turn my back on her. If I had some justification for calling her family, then where’s the line between being taken advantage of and doing one’s duty?

Pops? You listening?

Funny thing, that whole part of my past. Jennie and I finally talked about Pops and Terry, then about Elektric Karma and Deni. Yet I’d never talked to Jennie about Jenn. Jenn and her razor blades, but for some reason I decided to that time. I ran through the whole sordid chronology, from the toxic relationship with her dad to her last attempt, and even the abortion in Vancouver. 

She was appalled, I think.

Mainly, I reckon, that we’d not talked about it before. That led to a talk about abortion. We both hated the idea of it, but we both supported the idea that it was ultimately a woman’s right to choose. No big deal so far, right? 

So why had I, in effect, ditched Jenn when she decided to have an abortion?

Because, I countered, I considered that child ‘ours,’ not just ‘hers’ – and by taking unilateral action to take that child from me she was declaring in the starkest possible terms I wasn’t a real part of her life.

“But she was ill, Aaron. Couldn’t you see that?”

“But she was considered well enough by some doctor to make that kind of decision? If she was ‘well enough’ to consider the implications of ending a life, why wasn’t she considered ‘well enough’ to take her own? Was she, or was she not a danger to herself or others? I don’t get all these moral inconsistencies. They don’t make sense. How is it okay to kill a baby at four weeks but not at four months. I don’t get it…?”

“But still you think it’s okay if the mother wants to have an abortion?”

“No, I didn’t say that. I think it’s wrong to butt into other people’s lives.”

“But it was okay to force someone into having a baby, because it was yours, too? But you were not going to carry that baby, were you? Or care for that baby if you two split? Maybe she was never secure enough in the relationship to think you’d always be there? After you split up in Honolulu, went back to LA…do you think she felt real secure about where things stood between you?”

“I was disappointed, but we never talked about splitting…”

“Oh, come on, Aaron. How do you think she felt? And then she’s trapped on that boat with the one man in the world who was bound to torment, then abandon her – yet again. And what do you do? You abandon her? So yeah, why bring a kid into that world? What else was she gonna think? Her life had been one threat of abandonment after another, and all you did was validate her fears.”

I looked away, looked at a mist-enshrouded mountain across the inlet, and I could see Troubadour sitting comfortably at anchor beneath scudding clouds. Immediately I wanted to get out to her, pull up that anchor and set sail, head to New Zealand…hell, why not Antarctica? I could just keep on going, because circles never end, do they? Elektric Karma was not supposed to end like it did, but we were aborted, weren’t we? Five kids’ lives snuffed out by an air traffic controllers little mistake, another hundred kids’ lives ended by a single careless distraction – so why not run away. Everything is endless circles, when you get right down to it. Everyone is scared shitless of being abandoned – we’re all running in endless circles.

I didn’t sit with Jenn and try to help her reason things out. I ran away. I tossed an ultimatum in her lap – like a hand grenade? – then I ran from her room. I needed to run away, didn’t I? I didn’t fulfill my end of the bargain with Electric Karma, so I ran away. Ran back to Pops, but then I left them in Cleveland and they died. I should have ended when Deni and my mates did. But I ran. When Pops needed me most, when he got sick, I ran. I ran to Deni and my mates.

Abandonment? Guilt? Did I have issues? Who, me?

Holy fuck!

I was running in circles, too. I had nowhere to go, nothing important to do, so I was running in the mist, running between mountains of guilt – and trying to paint pretty pictures of my aborted life. But what life was I talking about? The life my parents wanted for me? Oh yeah, those parents. The parents I never knew. Had I been running since I was three years old? And what about them, my parents? Had they been running, too? Away from me? Away from their responsibilities to me? Just how far back did these circles go?

So…what’s out there on the other side of the Big Bang? What’s on the other side of all that sky? What would happen if you put all the matter in the universe into a suitcase, then waved a magic wand, said a few magic words and poof – you made the suitcase disappear. What’s left, smart-ass?

Silly, huh?

Accept what is. Move on.

Like running in the night is silly, hiding from the answers when they’re right in front of your face. Running in circles. Running into endless answers in search of questions.

Accept what is. Move on.

+++++

So, I painted for a while, helped Terry read through her lines – and this was comfortable for us; it was something I’d helped her do since junior high. I still felt close to her, still liked to bask in her reflected glow, and when it was time we flew to LA together. I dropped off some paintings at the gallery, sat on the soundstage and watched David and Terry work some screen magic, and I sat in the Polo Lounge that afternoon and watched people watching Terry, and I was still proud of her for being so goddamned beautiful.

And I called Jenn’s dad in Newport, asked how she was doing.

“Why are you asking me?” he said. “Why don’t you call her. Why don’t you ask her what’s going on?”

“Because I’m asking you.”

“It’s a struggle, Aaron. I’m finding out more and more about her life. About the role I played in this, and I’m not happy. Are you happy, Aaron?”

“About Jenn? No, not really.”

“No, I can’t imagine why you would be.”

“Should I try to see her while I’m here?”

“No. No, I can’t see that doing her any good now, but for the life of me I don’t know why you don’t come down and see your daughter.”

I think the word is thunderstruck.

“My – daughter?”

“Yes, your daughter.”

What followed lasted a half hour or so. I told him my version of events, he told me his. I told him I’d call my lawyer in the morning. He said that was fine with him. I hung up the phone, suddenly more concerned than anything else in the world that I had a baby girl – and she was being raised by that lunatic monster. I called the clinic on Moorea, left a message for Jennie to call me as soon as she got in. I went to Terry’s room in our bungalow out by the pool and told her. She was aghast. I was sure Jennie would be too, then, on a lark, I called my lawyer’s number – and she picked up.

She was working late, she said, on a big case going to trial in the morning, and I asked if she had a minute to listen to something important. She did, and I told her all I knew. Could she help, I asked? What do you want out of this? she wanted to know. Because if it’s raising a kid on a boat vs with her grandparents in a house in Newport Beach, you’re going to lose. I wanted to know why no one ever told me, I asked. Well, she said, you left, didn’t you? Because, I said, she told me she’d had an abortion! Why am I the bad guy here, I wanted to know?

She listened, I could hear her taking notes and she asked me to give her a few days, then she’d get on it, highest priority.

I thanked her and let it go at that, then turned to Terry.

“What do you want, Aaron? When all is said and done, what do you want?”

But then I noticed she was lying on the bed dressed like a lingerie model, right down to the sheer black stockings and five inch heels.

“What do you need, Aaron?” she said again, rolling over, now showing just a little too much.

“What are you doing, Terry?”

“I’m going to give you what you need. What you’ve needed for a long, long time.”

“I don’t need this, Terry. Please don’t do this to…us. Please?”

“You’re wrong, Aaron. You’ve wanted me for as long as I’ve known you, and don’t even try to deny it.”

“There’s a big difference between wanting and needing, Terry.”

“Not tonight, there isn’t.”

She stood from the bed and started for me, but I was out the door before she could close the distance. And as I walked over to the pool I started feeling weird, disjointed, cur off from reality. Perhaps because I had just been that close to the edge. Close to giving in, to saying yes, because she was right. I had always lusted after her, but she belonged to Pops, not me. And as far as I was concerned she still did. And she always would.

I had just made it back to my room when Jennie called, and I told her about my daughter and the current situation vis my lawyer’s inferences and advice.

“What do you want to do?” she asked. “Bring her out here?”

“That would be ideal, but my lawyer, Shelly, says that living on the boat…”

“That’s bullshit,” Jennie said, suddenly quite angry. “There are kids on half the boats we run into out here, and besides, you have a house here, remember?”

“I forgot to mention that.”

“Well, don’t.”

“What about you? What do you think about all this?”

“I think you should try for some sort of joint custody. Like you take her now, and when Jenn is better you revert to some more traditional sharing structure.”

“That’s not what I mean. What about you? How would you feel about having my daughter around?”

“Me? I’d love it, but it seems to me the most important thing right now is to get her away from Jenn’s father.”

“Yup, me too.”

“So, how’s LA?”

“The same, only worse.”

“Oh?”

“I watched Terry and David on the soundstage. They look good together.”

“Aaron, she’d look good with Hitler.”

I laughed. Maybe a little too much. “You know, you’ve got that right.”

“How are you, Aaron? You sound weird.”

“Weird?”

“Yeah. Weird.”

“I couldn’t sleep. I miss you.”

“I miss you too.”

“I’ll let you know when I hear something…” I looked around then, saw that Terry was gone. Her bags, too. I felt bad. Really bad. She called later, told me how embarrassed she felt and I told her to forget about it. It was an awkward conversation, not least because I couldn’t get the image of her from my mind. I dreamt of her that night. She had become Leucosia, one of the Sirens, to my Odysseus, and her song was overwhelming. Who would, I wondered aloud in my dream, tie me to the mast and shelter me from her music? 

“Maybe I’m not really running in circles,” I said as I woke in the middle of my fevered dreaming. No, I thought, maybe my circles were coming for me, and because I wasn’t running fast enough there was a real danger of being overtaken. Then I remembered that sea lion in the drifting kelp off La Jolla. All those things I imagined circling in the night. Kill or be killed. Isn’t that what I told myself that night? What about Shelly, my lawyer? Could I trust her? Could there be anything worse than being eaten alive…in the dark?

And then I realized I didn’t even know my daughter’s name.

Part III

After I talked to Shelly two days later, I went to LAX – on her advice – and returned to Moorea, to my Jennifer. And when I fell into her arms I felt the most overwhelming wave of emotion I think I’d ever experienced, a homecoming so overpowering it left me breathless. 

I hadn’t heard from Terry again by the time I left LA, yet the encounter had left me just as confused and, yes, just as little breathless. I think most of all because seeing her dressed like that, laid out like that, was straight out of the fevered dreams of the anxiously uncertain teenager I had once been. Then that dream came to life, yet it felt more like a nightmare, like the soundtrack of a nightmare I just couldn’t get out of my head.

And now Jennie said she wanted to have kids. 

While I was worrying about Tracy, my daughter, back in Newport Beach. 

And now, to put a nice red cherry on top of this fat hot fudge sundae, I was so torqued-up I couldn’t get it up. Like…I’m not even 25 and I couldn’t do my wife? My mind was in constant overdrive, and to say I was confused is to simply miss the point.

“You’ll get over it,” Jennie said, but now I wasn’t so sure. “You’ve got too much on your plate,” she added. “You need to just let go…” 

Yet, when I let go, when I closed my eyes at night the same fevered dream fell in behind me again and the chase was on. I saw Terry on that bed again, only this time her legs were soon on my shoulders, her stockinged legs resting beside my face. I could feel her all enveloping warmth, the smoothness of her cool skin. So…now that I was married, now that I couldn’t have her, was I simply going to obsess about her. If so, she was going to take over my life – in absentia. 

“Why don’t we head south, for New Zealand,” Jennie said a few days later.

“What about the clinic? I thought they…”

“My replacement arrives Friday.”

“Are you ready to move on? What about your parents and next summer?”

“I think it’s time to leave,” she sighed. “We can come back if Mom and Dad really do decide to join us next summer, but maybe we stay for just a month or so. I’ve been thinking about Auckland. About maybe going to school there.”

“School?” I asked.

“I was thinking of medical school. I might be ready for that now.”

I was stunned. She wanted children, and she wanted to go to med school? “I see,” said the blind man. “I had no idea.”

“The idea hit me while you were away. What do you think?”

“I’m not sure what to think, Jennie.” And I didn’t. I had been going on the assumption that the voyage we’d started on was an open-ended thing, that we’d keep on sailing – even with a couple of kids – but starting med school meant stopping and taking root in one place, didn’t it? “Well, let’s go over to Papeete and get the bottom painted, pick up a few spares. We can talk some more about this and when we’re ready we can leave from there.”

“Okay. When can we leave?”

“I don’t know? Why, are you in some kind of hurry?”

“No, not really, but the sooner the better,” she said, and I knew right then that the trajectory of my life had changed. No, that’s not quite right. The heading I’d set had just been altered by the one person I’d counted on to help me stay the course. There’d been no discussions, no conversations, she’d just been thinking about it and had decided that’s what she wanted out of life.

Okay…?

So, let’s add this little wrinkle to the pile of dirty linens waiting to be ironed. One more item to store in my anxiety closet. One more monster under the bed. One more airliner fluttering down into that same godforsaken black water.

We set sail at sun-up; it was only a short hop, really. Just 15 miles, nothing like the 2600 mile jump to New Zealand’s North Island that lay ahead, and we got there later that morning, got Troubadour checked in at the yard and went to find a hotel. We found a room in one of the old places along the waterfront, hard by the Parc Bougainville, and when we found our room it was a little difficult to feel where Paris ended and Tahiti began. I called the yard, told them where we were, and they told me it would be two days at least before they could start on Troubadour. No problem, I said as I looked at Jennie.

She wanted to go out, by herself she said, so she took off, said she’d be back in a couple of hours. I showered, stood under the water for what felt like hours, then called room service and had them bring some lunch. I looked at my watch, called the Beverly Hills Hotel then hung up the phone and called Shelly, my lawyer. 

“We have a hearing on the 23^rd,” she told me.

“But that’s next week!” I cried.

“Yeah. You’ll need to be here. Oh, the house on Foothill is vacant now. Want me to get it cleaned up so you can stay there?”

“Yeah,” I think I said, now utterly flummoxed, “I guess you might as well.”

“What about Terry? Move her in?”

“We’ll see. Maybe after I leave.”

“Oh?”

“I think she likes the hotel. I’ll check with her and see what she wants to do.”

“Oh, okay. Well, have her call me if she needs the key.”

“Yeah. Well, I’ll try to get in on the 21^st or so,” I said, and I gave her my number at the hotel then rang off. And made the call to the hotel again, asked for her bungalow.

“Hello?”

“Terry, it’s me.”

“Goodness, Aaron, I thought I’d never hear from you again…”

“That’s not how this works, Terry. Look, I’ve got to return on the 21^st for a custody hearing, and Shelly told me the house is vacant now. You want to move in again?”

“Are you planning to stay at the house when you come up?”

“Yes. Jennie and I will.”

“Wouldn’t it be awkward for you if I was there already, or would you rather I stay here at the hotel?”

“I’ll leave that to you. Call Shelly if you need the key.” I hung up the phone like it was dirty, just a snake in the grass, and yet I felt ashamed of myself.

I called Air France, made reservations for us to fly back to LA, and was just wrapping up the call when Jennie came back to the room. She saw me on the phone and frowned, and when I told her about the hearing she nodded her head. 

“Should I be there with you,” she sighed. “Could you get me on the same flight?”

“I already have.”

She smiled and I joined her, stood by her side and we looked across to Moorea, on the other side of the channel. “That’s such a wonderful, enchanted island,” she said, and yes, wistfully.

“Are you sure you want to leave?”

“I think so, yes. How long do you think we’ll need to be in LA?”

“I’m figuring on a week, but I left the return open.”

“Okay. Anything else I need to know?”

“The house on Foothill is vacant now. I’m having Shelly get it cleaned and ready for us.”

“Okay. Where’s Terry?”

“Still at the hotel. I called and told her to get a key from Shelly.”

She nodded. “Okay,” was all she said, and that word came out like a wounded whisper.

“What did you find out there?” I said as I looked at her packages.

“Oh, just some girl stuff.”

“Girl stuff?”

“Yeah. I’ll show you later. You hungry?”

“I ordered some stuff from room service.”

“Stuff?”

“Guy stuff. Real food.”

She laughed. “Oh? They make hamburgers and chocolate malts out here?”

Knock on the door, waiter rolled in a cart and after I tipped him he split. Two onion soups, escargot, broiled sea bass and huge prawns – for two.

“Perfect,” she said. “But I thought you said guy food?”

“I like to think I take care of you, kid. That’s kind of a guy thing in my book.”

“You do? You really think like that?”

“Yup. Because I love you,” I said.

“I know – I love you too. Maybe even more than you know.”

We ate in silence, then she went and took a shower. I heard her taking stuff out of her shopping bags, and she was taking her time getting dressed.

“Could you pull the drapes, maybe turn out the lights?” she asked from the bathroom.

“Sure.”

She came out a minute later – dressed to the nines. Lingerie, heels, everything in white, and she walked over to me.

“Do you like me like this?”

I nodded my head. Shocked, dumbfounded, and terrified are the words that now come to mind.

“Does she…” she began, but then she stopped herself and looked at me. “Show me,” she said as she lay on the bed.

“You really are the loveliest creature,” I said to my very own siren. We didn’t leave the room for days, then we held hands across the Pacific. We drove to the house on Foothill Road and Terry was waiting for us in the doorway. The house was immaculate, some of Pops old friends were on hand and Terry had laid out a homecoming party just for us.

She was like that, I guess. An actress. I knew what she wanted, and yes, she knew what I wanted – but had decided I couldn’t have. So she did the next best thing. She insinuated herself into the action, became an integral part of the story, yet only she knew the plot – and the outcome.

Accept what is. Move on, because the circle is a spiral and you aren’t running fast enough, are you?

+++++

And so Terry came with us to the hearing.

I think because Shelly had learned the judge was a big fan of hers, and Shelly had told her as much before we left. Jennifer’s father was there too, of course, and he seemed to read the expression on the judge’s face when the robed old man saw ‘my grandmother,’ and he knew then that he’d lost. And true enough, in the end I won temporary guardianship pending a final review once Jenn was out of the woods and able to stand on her own two feet. It was decided that I’d pick Tracy up in two months time, and that I’d return to LA to pick her up after Jennie and I arrived in New Zealand.

When we left, Jenn’s father looked at me like I was the anti-Christ. He did, I think, because we only called one witness, one of Jennifer’s psychiatrists. She all but blamed Jennifer’s condition on her father, and pointed him out in the courtroom, and right then and there called his behavior to his wife and daughter monstrous. The judge noted that he had perjured himself when he declared in court he’d made a good faith effort to notify me, and that he was lucky the court wasn’t sending him to jail. 

Terry, for her part, batted goo-goo eyes at this righteous judge, which I think made everyone’s day. Then we all went down to Newport so I could meet my daughter. It was a supervised visit at her father’s lawyer’s office, and at first I couldn’t tell who she looked like. Not like me and certainly not like Jenn, but then Terry spoke up: “She looks just like your mother, Aaron.”

And I couldn’t help it – I started to cry. I held my daughter and cried for all the unseen memories I’d never known, because now they were in my arms. And with her little fingers on my face my first circle was complete. Barely a year old, she held her little hand out and touched my face, my tears, and I didn’t want to let go of her. But I did, of course, because I had to, then I drove Terry and Jennie back to the house on Foothill Road.

“Are you happy?” Jennie asked later that evening.

“Yes, I am. For all of us, but maybe for Tracy most of all. Did you call your parents?”

“Yes,” she said, “and they’re still planning on this summer. Dad’s looking forward to seeing Terry again, of course.”

“Of course he is. When do you want to head back down?”

“Are you ready?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Are you sure? Anyone else you need to clear the air with?”

“Jennie? What’s this all about?”

“Terry,” she said. “I was used to the way she looks at you, but I wasn’t prepared for the way you’ve been looking at her.”

“Oh?”

“Anything happen between you two I need to know about?”

“Jenn, there’s nothing going on between us. Period.”

She looked devastated as she looked away. “Aaron, you just called me Jenn, not Jennie…”

I didn’t know what to say.

“Are you beginning to see me like that? As damaged goods?”

“Good God, no! Jennifer…? What’s gotten into you?”

Yet she just turned and walked away, walked into the kitchen – where Terry was helping clean up after our dinner, and yeah, ‘two’s company and three’s a crowd’ was definitely running through my mind. 

And I went and sat in Pop’s chair in the little den off the kitchen, and despite the obvious tension I sat and thought about Tracy and what my mother looked like as a child. Then I heard a raised voice, then Jennie walking to my bedroom and I knew she would be there, waiting for me. I walked into the kitchen and looked at Terry. “Anything I need to know?” I asked.

“No, not really,” she said, distracted by my intrusion.

I shuffled off to my old room and found Jennie leaning forward against a low dresser, her head down, her face red. “You want to tell me what’s going on?” I said – about as quietly as I could.

“She’s getting too close, Aaron. I’m not sure I can keep doing this because it feels like she’s got some kind of hold over you.”

“Have you ever really sat and talked with her, Jennie? I mean in a ‘really get to know her’ way?”

“No, and I don’t want to, Aaron. She scares me.”

“Scares…? Jennie, excuse me, but that’s an odd thing to hear you say.”

She shook her head. “No it’s not, Aaron. I’ve watched her work a room more than once now and that woman can hypnotize men with her eyes. I watched her do it to my father. I watched her doing it this afternoon, too, but Aaron, I’ve seen her do it to you. And I’ve seen how it effects you…”

Then came a gentle knock on the door, so I turned and opened it a bit.

“Jennie?” Terry said. “Mind if I come in?”

Jennie looked at me, helpless. “No, of course not,” she said, now clearly terrified.

I stood aside and watched Terry walk into the room – and I couldn’t help but think that this woman was not only a consummate actress, capable of working any room at a moments notice, but that she was also, technically, still my grandmother. No matter the circumstance, I still owed that much to Pops. And to her as well.

Jennie and Terry looked at one another and I saw fierce possessiveness in both their eyes, and that’s when the danger bells started ringing…

“Yes,” Jennie said, her voice clear, even a little restrained.

“I’m off to London,” Terry said. “Stanley called, and he wants me to read for a part, so I just wanted to make my goodbyes. Aaron, I’m so happy for you, so happy for you both, really…”

“So you’re off?” I asked. “Now?”

“Yes, yes indeed. Time flies and I’ve got to pack an overnighter. Aaron, do you think you could run me out to the airport?”

“He’d love to,” Jennie said – a bit triumphantly, I might add. “Wouldn’t you, Aaron?”

And an hour later we were on Sunset headed for the 405, and Terry was radiant.

“So? London, is it?” I asked sarcastically.

“Cannes, actually. I’d like to spend a few weeks there.”

“And then?”

“And then nothing. This is a tactical retreat, Aaron. Nothing more.”

“A tactical retreat? Look, Terry, you’re my…”

“Don’t say it, Aaron. Please. Never again refer to me as your grandmother. I was your grandfather’s wife, but never your grandmother. Don’t do that to me, Aaron. Don’t relegate me to careless falsehoods and evasions.”

“Falsehoods?”

“I know what’s in your heart, Aaron, but I don’t think you understand what’s in mine.”

I turned onto the 405 and saw an endless sea of brake lights stretching off into infinity. “What time’s your flight?” I asked, trying to find any way to change the subject.

“No evasions, Aaron. Not between us. Not ever. Promise me at least that much.”

I looked at her and yes, she was as intoxicatingly beautiful as ever, and now there was also something almost regal about her countenance. “So, you think you know what’s in my heart?”

She smiled, and yes, her’s was a knowing smile.  

“No comment, huh?” I added.

Then a tremor, followed by the slightest scowl. “Don’t trivialize me, Aaron. Just, please, be a man. For once in your life, face the music, face the crowds and step out into the light – and be yourself.”

“Did you know my parents well?” I asked, now on very shaky ground.

“Of course,” she said openly, unapologetically. “And your mother was a dear friend. The dearest, Aaron.”

“The dearest?”

“She understood me.”

“How so?”

“I’ve always been a very sexual creature, Aaron. Very. You have to be in this business.”

“So you’re saying my mother understood you were a very sexual creature?”

“Yes. As was she. Your father was too, for that matter.”

I think my hands were shaking by then. “So, you…and my parents?”

“Oh, heavens no!” she cried. “Friends, Aaron, I said they were my friends; sex was always political, at least it was when I started out in the awful business. We had friends to escape all that mess, to stake out some kind of normalcy in our lives. Your grandfather understood that, understood what I had lost when I came to LA, and the dear man simply moved to protect me.”

“To protect you? Is that all it was?”

“In the beginning, yes. Then I grew to understand what a kind, decent man he really was. He was the first, you know? The first man I ever truly loved. I saw that same kindness in you, Aaron. You didn’t take advantage of Deni, and certainly not Pete, though you might have. Indeed, in this business I think everyone at MCA was expecting you to. To force the group into accommodations. But you never did, and no one ever understood that about you.”

“But…?”

“But…I did. Your grandfather did, as well. He told me once that if you turned Hollywood he’d cut you off, but no, that never happened. He was so proud of you. Did you know that?”

I tried to shake it off, but the waves of emotion were getting to me. “Don’t do this to me now, okay?”

She looked ahead, then at her watch. “Aaron, please don’t forget about me. Alright? Please? That’s all I ask.”

“Terry, I couldn’t forget about you if I tried.”

“I hope you mean that in a good way.”

“I do.”

She smiled. Triumphantly, too. “Good. So, we’re good? You and I?”

I nodded as I confronted the wall of brake lights ahead.

“Would you like me to be here when you come back for Tracy?”

“If you like, certainly. And I think it would be nice if you came back to Moorea this summer.”

She giggled, just like a teenager. “Really? You do know that Warren has a bit of a crush on me, don’t you?”

I smiled. “Terry, everyone has a crush on you at some point in life.” Another giggle, then an abrupt silence, and I saw she was looking out the window. “You don’t find that funny?”

“No, not really. Sometimes it leaves me feeling empty. Objectified, if you care to look at it that way. Very innocent and all, but in the end, empty.”

“That sounds…”

“Please, Aaron. Don’t trivialize me.”

“I’m…I…didn’t think I was?”

“There’s only one thing left in this life that holds any interest to me at all.”

“Oh? And, that is?”

“You, Aaron. Just you. And please, don’t punish me for that. Please.”

+++++

Troubadour was already back in the water, ready to load fresh provisions onboard when Jennie and I got back to the yard in Papeete, and after a rest we spent a day getting things loaded and our little ship ready for sea. We filled the tanks last of all, then settled in for a short night. We had a light breakfast about four the next morning and then, after a final check of the weather, set out at first light.

Jennie had talked a bit more before we left LA, and we kidded around some, went shopping on Rodeo Drive, too. I bought her a ring, one to wear on her left hand, and she said it didn’t mean anything unless I did too, so she picked out a plain band and slipped it on my finger. That really seemed to calm her down after the Terry thing, and after that was behind us she slipped into her old groove. And you see, the thing is I’d taken Terry at her word. Before she left me at LAX she told me to stop worrying about her feelings for me, to stop worrying about her, and to just let her slip into the background – and to stay focused on Jennie now, on making her happy. 

Accept what is. Move on.

Auckland turned out to be an all too brief 16 day passage, but with seas rough all the way the trip wasn’t exactly easy, or pleasant. We were both seasick, too, a first for us.

The plan was to haul the boat, replace some rigging and all the sails (yes, they wear out too, and fast in the tropics), so we rented a house while Jennie worked on the admissions process to get into med school. I decided to take that class on diesel mechanics, too, and we also planned our upcoming trip to pick up Tracy in LA. So, first things first, I called Shelly, asked if everything was still a ‘Go,’ and it was. I got tickets for the two of us headed north, and three coming back. I let Terry know the situation and she told me she was off to Morocco during that time for a shoot, and told me she was sorry she’d miss us. 

Okay. Sure. I believed that. 

I made a shopping list for boat supplies and we took off on the anointed day, just like a herd of turtles. 

It’s a long flight from Auckland to LA, and the Air New Zealand DC-8 stopped in Papeete for fuel – which felt kind of silly. The long haul to LA came next, and the trip was simply awful. Dry air, bad seats, and lousy food do not a good combination make. Throw in some heavy turbulence for good measure. And then the endless indignities of customs – when all you want to do is find a bed and sleep for a week. After we rolled into the house – which was well past midnight – we dropped into the sack and slept for days. Well, it felt like days. After we ran errands the next day, and that meant shopping for boat supplies, for the most part, we crashed again so we could wake up early to meet Shelly down in Newport Beach the next morning.

I half expected Jenn to be there, but no, that was not to be. Her father was a no-show, too. He sent Tracy with a sheriff’s deputy, I think to upset her more than any other reason, but it was a vintage choice even for that asshole. When Tracy got to the lawyer’s office, and yes, quite upset, we spent a long time simply calming her down before heading back to the house. We took her swimming that afternoon, took her to Disneyland the next day, then for a really long airplane ride the day after that. And keep in mind she didn’t know me from Adam. And Jennie? Who was she?

Yet never a word about Mommy.

Oh, how I wanted to kill that bastard.

+++++

New Zealand was very quiet and most civilized in the mid-70s, and an ideal place to raise kids. Jennie was accepted into the medical school in Auckland; soon after she opted to go for full citizenship. I decided to remain a US citizen for the time being, yet the fact that I had some money and that Jennie and I were married gave her the opening she needed. I decided to get Tracy in the queue for citizenship as well, just in case, and so she started school there two years later. Well, kindergarten, but you know what I mean, and by that point Jennie considered herself Tracy’s Mum. More importantly, Tracy had started calling Jennie ‘Mommy’ long before she started pre-school.

In order to maintain US citizenship I had to return home periodically, roughly twice a year, and of course Terry usually happened to be in LA., and so she was often at the house when I arrived. On my second trip home I began upgrading and modernizing the recording studio, and also started working on a possible next album. As Jennie’s sister Niki had a helluva a voice, I asked her if she might be interested in coming down to LA to lend her voice on a few songs I had in mind. I seem to recall it took her about a millisecond to say yes.

I moved into the pool house for these trips, if only to make sure that Terry behaved herself, and after a few sessions with Niki I sent the masters over to MCA for their opinion. Well, sure enough they liked these demo reels so we went to their studios to cut the final album. This became Serendipity, which was officially released in ’76. The title track, however, was all Niki. Her voice was as perfect as her songwriting – and almost overnight she became a minor sensation. She then penned several songs of her own and we arranged them together; I played keyboards on each track and had some friends help with the other instruments, and MCA loved her album, too. It went platinum by year’s end and all of a sudden she was not only famous, she was rich as snot, too. She took off for Wisconsin after the master tapes went to Burbank, leaving me alone with Terry for the first time in weeks. And she continued to behave herself, only inviting old friends to dinner by the pool every now and then.

And still, no word about Jenn. Shelly could get no information at all from the so-called treatment facility and by the time I left we still hadn’t heard a word from her father. My hatred for the man, by that point, knew no bounds.

Jennie and Tracy met me at the airport – in Papeete – as it was time for Warren and Michelle’s annual visit to Moorea. A few days later Terry arrived, too. Tracy and Michelle went on short walks sketching flowers, while Jennie and her father worked at the clinic, and soon enough Tracy was working at an easel with Michelle, painting flowers. Terry presided over the house like the grand old matriarch she loved playing these days, though in truth she was maybe forty years old. Warren doted on her, and every time she slipped across the house, if he was there you knew exactly where his eyes were trained. Focused on Terry’s legs, like laser beams. Michelle and Jennie thought it hilarious. Terry, I think, enjoyed the attention most of all.

I spent several days working on my biggest canvas yet, an eight foot tall by twenty four foot wide panorama of, you guessed it, the misty mountains around the inlet in a lifting fog. Framed by windblown trees, of course, and the rolling surf in the distance. Then I got word MCA wanted me in LA for a concert they had in mind, so I called Shelly – in the middle of the night my time – to get the lo-down. 

“A bunch of people want to do an Electric Karma tribute concert, Aaron. They want you here,  of course, but they want Niki to take Deni’s place. She’s asked me to represent her, by the way. It would mean the big time for her.”

“What? A concert, at the Amphitheater?”

“No…haven’t you heard? They’re talking the Coliseum. A hundred and twenty thousand people. Some big names have signed on already, including all your old San Francisco friends.”

“What would Niki take home?”

“Maybe a million, maybe a little more.”

I whistled. “Okay, count me in. When is this thing going down?”

“Does that mean you’ll really do it?”

“Yes, Shelly…when?”

“October. You have three months to get ready.”

“What’s my take?”

She told me and I whistled again.

“Aaron, you can’t turn this down, but it’s the chance of a lifetime for Niki, and it’ll keep you in the spotlight for a whole new generation of listeners…you’ll be set for life. So will Tracy. She’ll be set for life.”

“Okay, get me the contracts. You take point for now, start setting up rehearsals, probably late August, early September. See if MCA is interested in cutting an album of the concert, and ask Dean if he’ll do the stage and album cover. You do good and you can have twenty percent of my cut, on both the concert and the album, including any residuals. Got that?”

She was silent for a minute. “You mean it?”

“Shelly, my life would be shit without you. Make this work, get Niki on the fast track. Yeah, of course I mean it.”

“Aaron…I don’t know what to say.”

“Well, Shelly? This is the best way I can thank you for everything you’ve done for us. But, thank you.”

“Yeah,” she said, and I could hear her voice crack a little. “Could I ask you a personal question?”

“Sure.”

“What’s going on with you and Terry? Is there anything that could blowback on you?”

“No. Nothing.”

“If something comes up, am I authorized to do damage control?”

“Absolutely, but I’m not sure what that would be. Anyway, put that into our contract.”

“Okay.”

“Are you hearing anything? Any rumors?”

“No, nothing. Just a gut feeling.”

“Well, if something crops up, make it go away.”

“Will do. Should I call, leave messages at that clinic?”

“For now. I’ll see about getting some kind of phone at the house.”

“Okay. Bye.”

“Yeah, bye-bye.”

When I turned around Jennie was coming out of the OR, her dad right behind, and they were both dripping in sweat. She saw me on the phone and frowned as she came over, and Warren came up too, curious and protective at the same time. God love him.

“What’s up?” she asked. “You look psyched.”

“You better sit down, both of you.”

They sat; now Warren looked concerned. 

Then I told them about the concert, and about the deals I was trying to get Niki. “It’d mean a million in the bank, on top of what she’s made on the album already, but it would put her in the big leagues, Warren. I mean big. Bigger than big, would be my guess. She took my advice, too, and signed with Shelly, my lawyer. There’s no one better in LA at this stuff.”

Warren’s hands were shaking. “My girl…will make more in one night than I do in ten years?”

“Yup.”

“Holy smokes.”

“Yup.”

Jennie was looking at me. A look I hadn’t seen before. “You’re doing all this for her – why?”

I looked at Warren, then at Jennie. “You’re my family, you are all I’ve got left in this world. Niki is a part of me now, too. I’m doing what I can for my family. Simple as that.”

I looked at Jennie, and she seemed to accept that. 

“Rehearsals will be in LA, end of August, and the concert is on Halloween, at the LA Coliseum. I think we should all be there. All of us.”

“Okay,” she said, looking me in the eye, “then we will be.” I could tell my hands were shaking too, and she looked at them, then up at me. “You okay?”

“Yeah, I don’t know. Hyped, I guess, is the word. It kind of feels a little like a dream right now.”

“Why don’t you go up to LA now. Get started. I can see it in your eyes…that’s what you want to do.”

I shook my head. “No way. I want to be here with you guys now, period.”

“So stay, head back with Mom and Dad.”

“Yeah. We’ll see. I need to finish the new painting, spend some time with Tracy. Maybe a little with my wife, too. I think you should come with us.”

She came to me and we hugged, and Warren stepped outside, lit up a Camel and coughed away his excitement.

“So, you really want to spend some time with me?” she asked.

“More than you know.”

“You should, you know,” she whispered. “I’m pregnant.”

I blinked, then my eyes went wide. “Holy smokes!” I managed to say – just before she kissed me.

Accept what is. Move on fast now boy, ‘cause the spiral’s really a snake, and she’s gaining on you.

+++++

Different people bring out different things in me.

I thought about that all the way up to LA. When I was with Jennie I painted. I painted because I became interested in the visible world, the visual world. When I was with Terry I fell into my music. I could think music because she had been a part of that life since my teens, when music became important to me. When I was around Jennie the music almost stopped. When I was even thinking about Terry music poured in and out of me from every direction, but when I was with her the music grew into a tidal wave.

I’d written all of Electric Karma’s music, Pete and Deni the lyrics, so that music would always be a part of me, yet when I put together my first solo album all that vibe had slipped away. There was nothing about Karma I wanted to incorporate, so I made a clean break. But that was then and this was now, and sitting in a 747 over the Pacific all I could think about was Deni and Pete and all the music we’d made together. And flying home with everyone was opening the floodgates of memory, so by the time we landed I had written three new Karma songs. With Niki on vocals, no one would be able to tell this wasn’t Electric Karma – so why not cut a new Karma album? Get a couple of old buds from San Francisco to cover guitar and bass and drums and the sound would be as authentic as it had been almost a decade ago… 

Warren and Michelle regarded me as some kind of sorcerer during that flight, but when I told them what I was thinking they kind of sat back and watched – in awe, I think. I asked them to have Niki call me as soon as they got home, then we said our goodbyes at the gate. Of course baggage claim had been moved – again – and it took me a while to find our bags, then I drove straight home and made for the shower. After that, I ran down to the studio and put my notes on my keyboard, then just let that new music come to me again.

“Do you two have anything going on the next three weeks?” I asked a startled Terry and Jennie as they walked into the studio.

“No. Why?” they asked.

“You may not leave my side for the next three weeks, not once, not at all.”

And it was Terry who asked the next question. “What about Tracy?”

“Right here. All of us, right here. I want her to see this. To remember this. And to be a part of this.”

“You’re on fire, aren’t you?” Terry said, smiling. “I haven’t seen you like this in years.”

“I finally put two and two together, Terry. I can’t write good music unless I’ve got the people I love by my side. The stuff I’ve churned out when I’m alone is garbage. Ever since Lucy-Goosey, when you and Pops were right there with me, it all came together because of that. You, Jennie, Tracy…all of you, you are the music of my life, the essence of my love. Without you I’m a hollow shell.”

These two women looked at me as if I’d slugged them in the gut, then they both came to me, put their arms around me and I felt Jennie crying on my chest – and what else was there to say, really?

“Well, you finally grew up,” Terry whispered as she squeezed my arm. “Good for you.”

Maybe I nodded my head, maybe not. “I guess it finally had to happen, if this is what you call growing up, but you are all so much a part of me it’s insane. It’s surreal. I can’t even think music without you…”

“Aaron? Are you okay?” Jennie asked.

“No, Jennie, I am not okay. I am on fire. I am on fire because some kind of revelation has set me on fire. Terry and Pops set me on fire once upon a time, and ever since I’ve been interested in writing music about that fire. I doubt that I’ve ever written anything that wasn’t because of them. Do you know the first piece of music I ever wrote was named after Terry. A little piano concerto. For you, Terry.”

“No, I didn’t know that…”

“I think I always wanted to impress you, to be worthy of you and Pops.”

“Worthy – of me?”

“Yes, you. Life Magazine’s Most Beautiful Woman in the World.”

“Okay, Aaron…you can stop now,” Terry said.

“No…you don’t understand. I can’t stop. I’ve got at least ten songs to write, and I’ll need you all to stay right here, by my side. All the time. Understand?”

“Alright,” Jennie sighed, exasperated by my manic outburst, “but are you sure this isn’t just jet-lag…?

+++++

I spent the next morning on a song I called Lemon Tree, the afternoon’s effort would be titled Shining Need. Terry stood behind me the entire night looking at my scribbled notations, and when  rosy fingered dawn appeared Jennie took over, and soon she and Tracy were playing on the sofa as I wrote Dancing Eyes. And still I could not get the night before out of my mind, out of my music. After I played Dancing Eyes through for Jennie and Tracy, Jennie looked away, hoping she might wipe away her tears before I could see them.

The three of us went out to the swimming pool after that and we played for an hour or so, then I remembered the sea lion off La Jolla, and stars on the still, black water, and I fell into the memory of faint stars dancing on the water’s surface – and then I wondered who was out there watching and waiting, always circling, endless circles, always ready and waiting to come in for the kill…

That’s how Starlight Blood came alive, and it revealed a heavy brooding place that scared Tracy when I played through the final draft. “You need to go someplace lighter now,” Jennie said after dinner, “or you just might implode.”

“I’m not ready for death, but when I am, I want to die in your arms. Promise me you’ll be there for me.”

“I promise,” Jennie said.

“Death won’t be able to hold us apart. You know that, don’t you?”

She nodded her head.

Those two lines formed the core of the next track, Fate and Promise. An echo of Pete, perhaps…in my chorus?

Terry watched Tracy while Jennie and I went out the next morning, but that was the only time off we took from writing. And yes, I said we. They were as much a part of the process as Deni ever was. When I stumbled for a word, appeared lost as I searched for the next chord in the progression, they were there. Even Tracy.

Terry sat with me later that night and I watched her watching one of her old movies, a steamy noir set piece with a famous kiss filmed at Coit Tower.

Which became Sin Scintilla as the night wore on.

The next afternoon I was sure I was done and Terry reminded me she hadn’t had anything to eat for days, so we all loaded up in Pop’s old car and drove down to the beach, to Gladstones, and we ate Shee Crab Soup and charcoal broiled shrimp on rice pilaf, then all of us walked on the beach for an hour, the music of the surf beating into me as the sand pushed between our toes.

Which became Seashell, an unfolding story about eternal love that came alive that night.

And on and on it went. Every breath I took led me deeper inside this new music. 

Until the last track.

Deni. A ballad about Deni, and why she still mattered. We were a broken soul, your music made us whole… My other love. Broken, fluttering down into the darkness – doomed. I broke apart and came undone when I finished those lyrics, and Terry helped me up, then led me to bed. Jennie told me later that Terry sat beside our bed that night and the two of them talked and talked, and somewhere in there the two of them became friends.

Yes, I was stunned. And so happy.

I called Jerry and Carlos – and Niki – and asked them to come to the house next Monday morning. “We’re going to cut Electric Karma’s last album,” I told them.

“Far out,” Jerry said.

And I kept thinking about Pete…my oldest friend in the world. He was gone now but he too would be right there in the middle of it all, again. God, I was so happy I couldn’t stop crying.

+++++

I could feel the changes Niki was going through, I’d seen it all so many times before. Sudden fame, almost immeasurable wealth had turned her from petite and unassuming to larger than life, and everything had happened almost overnight. She had that force now, the force money confers on the once unassuming. The meek. She was a year older than I and that, in her mind, justified this new assertiveness – until Shelly pulled her aside and set her straight.

“Aaron’s doing this for you,” Shelly told her. “All of this, for you, even for Tracy. Don’t ever forget that. Don’t ever forget to dance with the one who brung ya, or this town will chew you up and all this will disappear so fast your head will spin.”

Niki mellowed out, tried to accept that Deni was still bigger than she was. That Deni was one of the strongest voices of the 60s, and that the 60s still defined rock ‘n roll. People helped her understand what she was being given – a seat at the table – if she had the grace and the good sense to sit quietly and listen for a while, to learn from and about her new muse.

She was a midwestern gal so full of common sense, yet it took a couple of days to get through to her, but she settled down, watched and listened to Carlos and Jerry, two of the biggest of the San Francisco bigs, as they wrestled with my new music. We settled into the new-old vibe again, the collaborative nature of making music. I played a passage and they interpreted what I wrote. The last thing I could do was object to someone hijacking ‘my’ music – that’s not the process. We took my framework and turned it into our version of Karma in 1968. I led Niki into that wilderness, too, let her own unique phrasing blend into my music, and we listened to her when she started making suggestions, because that too is part of the vibe. We’d take her thoughts and blend them into the whole – because that IS the vibe – and at the end of the first day I was already looking at Niki like she was becoming as one with Deni. Even Jerry, who was still devoted to Deni – and what she’d meant to the scene, started to feel that Deni vibe when Niki started singing, and at one point he looked at me and nodded his head slowly, like ‘yeah, I get it now, I understand why you chose her.’

We came together as Electric Karma for two weeks, then we carried the tapes down to MCA and let the folks have a listen. Everyone was blown away, there were even some tears, too, and as I’d hoped they talked about weaving this new material into the old when we played the Coliseum, and this news jazzed me – as I already knew this would be my last hurrah. Jerry and Carlos had their own things going, and Niki? Hell, who knew where she’d go from here, but it would be big. Me? I planned to do some serious sailing when Tracy got big enough to walk Troubadour’s decks. The three of us were going to see the world together.

It was late September by then, time to get down to choosing the old numbers we’d play, then playing them over and over until we had them in memory, and all the while I kept the recorders going, laying down tapes of our sessions.

And yeah, Jennie and Terry were still there. Low-key and in the background, and I had to explain to Niki what they meant to me – in such a way that the nature of my relationship to her family didn’t overpower her – but Niki said she got it, that she understood. I started to love Niki a little after that. When she came into the room I looked at her and smiled inside, and there were times – like when she fell into a seriously real Deni vibe – that she’d come to me and talk and I could hardly tell I wasn’t talking to Deni. And I told her about those two days and the whole love-heroin thing, so in effect what Deni had really meant to me.

“I feel that with you,” she said. “This thing inside the old music. The tension, almost like there was some kind of carnal undertone playing out between her words and your music. When I sing Deni I want to reach out and hold you, but then I want to fuck your brains out.”

“That’s what it was like, man,” Jerry said, coming over and sitting with us. “We’d sit around listening to her and it was like, man, I got to get inside this chick’s head, see where this power’s coming from. Then one day I knew. She didn’t simply project love, she was mainlining lust and when you watched the way she phrased her words you wanted in on that lust too. You felt like you needed to take her because that’s what she wanted you to do. Now…imagine that happening in the main room at the Fillmore…with hundreds of dudes getting amped up on her vibe. She was fucking with fire, I mean literally fucking with fire onstage, daring people to fall into her vibe.”

It’s what happens when you fall inside music. When you make it, not listen to it. The notes start playing through your synapses and as you mold the music into your being it cuts through your life like a sharp blade. The Feel Flows through you, if you dig Brian Wilson – white hot glistening. When you’re playing you become this other thing: you, and the music in you, takes over that thing called a body. When you come down after, down in soft blue drifting, you snap out of it and realize you’ve been someplace else. A special someplace only music takes you. You’re different. Changed.

I gave headsets to Niki, let her listen, really listen to Deni’s voice – and just her voice, and then I watched Deni coming to life again, Deni now inside Niki as she sang Deni’s words. It’s hard to imagine that kind of transference, yet Deni was truly inside her now, taking Niki to the places she used to go with her music. I watched Niki from behind my keyboards, watched the change come over on her, the way her body swayed, then I’d look at Terry and felt this divine thing settle inside me, the same beast I felt when I created Lucy. Terry had been the constant in my music, the universal lust that lived beside me inside this house, the craving penetration that had once rolled through me. Feel Flows, baby…Brian got it right that time. Shadowy flows.

Now Terry was letting Jennie see into that other world. But Niki was living there now.

We went out to the Amphitheater and did a run through concert to an ‘invitation only’ crowd of maybe 500 people. No nerves, no bad vibes, and we played for two hours straight then just sat on the edge of the stage and watched everyone go nuts. This was Niki’s first taste of that electric adoration, the cresting wave of love that rises up from the other side of the lights and breaks over you, and she started laughing, then crying, as she leaned into me.

“Way to go, babe,” I whispered in her ear.

I knew it then. I knew she loved me now. She was Deni, she was love heroin all wrapped up inside something shiny and new, that something we didn’t quite understand yet. She was becoming music, this creature of the otherworld. She could understand Terry’s role in that music now, what made Terry an imperative in this new effort, and yet I knew she wanted inside that part of me now too. 

She put her arms around me and I sighed, and I could feel Deni there beside me again, the purple-paisley-spring she gave me once.

I hopped down and walked out into the surging crowd, felt the light breaking over me.

I felt immortal, if only in that moment.

Stupid, I know. Pride goeth before the fall.

+++++

I got a couple of bungalows at the BH, put Warren and Michelle in one, Taylor in the other, and Jennie and Tracy stayed at house with me and Terry – and Niki.

By that point Jennie was astonished at the change that had come over her big sister, the way she walked barefoot around the house in undies and a t-shirt. The way she draped herself over me when we were in the studio, when the music came. Jennie couldn’t relate to the transformation – yet Tracy could, and did. 

I started playing notes and chords with her on my lap, and I could see the music taking hold deep inside my child’s mind. She’d be sitting there with her eyes open one moment, then she’d be swaying with eyes closed in a heartbeat, inside the music with me. Jennie watched that going down first in Niki, then inside Tracy, and I think she felt like she’d been on the outside for a long time – and never had a clue what was going on inside, until that moment.

And Jennie could feel the whole Terry vibe now, how innocent it all was, yet how dangerous it was for me, too. Terry kept her distance most of the time but I insisted she stay within sight of me the closer the big night came. Jennie was starting to freak out but Niki hit her like a missile, took her aside and laid it out for her. 

“Terry is his muse, she always will be so don’t fuck with the vibe. You fuck it up and you’ll lose him. You got that, baby sister…?”

The thing with Jennie? She knew me, she knew my love for her was real, deeper than deep, but now she was learning my love for her existed in a world outside music, a world lost outside the eternal springtime Deni had created for us. The place Terry kept me rooted to. There were two of me, and she had one of them, but only one. She’d hated Terry before but after living with us those weeks she came upon the terms of her surrender. Accept what is or move on. If I lost Terry I’d lose me, that link to the me as a child that had learned music in this setting. I think she sensed that if I lost Terry I’d be wandering alone in the ruins, lost inside a broken, melting Dali landscape. 

You love a musician at your own risk. Feel Flows different here, white hot glistening.

Then one day I talked to Terry about Warren and his tongue-tied infatuation with her and she looked at me. “What do you want me to do?”

“Shake up his world a little. Michelle’s taking him for granted – she needs, I think, a little jealousy in her life.”

Poor man. When Terry McKay turns on the sex that’s it, game over. I’d seen how devastating she could be. I told Jennie what was going to go down and to take her mom out shopping – to maybe pick up some appropriate lingerie. Surely, I said, someone into quantum mechanics could come to terms with simple attraction? Cause and effect? What’s been down a while still needs to come up? Sunrise, sunsets – ya know?

We set up at the coliseum the day before, ran through a few numbers for the media and we began figuring out that a real 60s-type happening was in the wind, that the event was now SRO with a hundred and fifty thousand tickets sold. 

And we announced the new album at the press conference, that copies would be going on sale the day after the concert, but that a special edition would be available only at the concert. Karma Kubed, with Niki Clemens handling vocals. Yes, we’ll be playing a few of the new songs at the concert. Yeah, the vibe is right on, we’re like, ya know, channeling Deni…very cool stuff.

We made the news, anyway.

I woke up the day of the concert feeling like pure electricity. I couldn’t keep still, went downstairs and sat in the dark listening to The Beach Boys, trying to focus on their vibe, their quicksilver moons. 

I felt her then.

Tracy, my little girl. She stumbled through the dark and found her way to my lap, crawled up and cuddled up beside me, and I held her close, let her inside for a while as I drifted in Brian’s music.

Jennie came to us a little later, told me she was going over to the hotel, spend some time with her parents and that she’d see me at the Coliseum.

“I love you,” she whispered.

“I love you too, babe. Seeya there.”

She took Tracy and left me there with Terry, who told me she’d found this outrageous jade and black lingerie down on Hollywood Boulevard. I just asked that she take it easy on Warren and let it go at that.

Oh, silly me.

I’d had Shelly send tickets down to Jenn and her family in Newport, and while I doubted they’d show I had my hopes. Their seats would put them next to Tracy and Jennie and my family, right behind Terry and Shelly.

I was in another place by the time we met up with Carlos and Jerry. Niki was already freaking out. “A hundred and how many thousand people?! Are you fuckin’ nuts…” she cried as she circled like a cornered animal. “I can’t fuckin’ do this…I’m scared out of my mind…”

I could see all the classic signs, so I sat down with her, gave her the talk.

“You’re not going to be able to see anything but lights,” I said. “You can’t tell if there are fifty people out there, or fifty million. You’ll hear them, yeah, but just close your eyes, let the music in, let it take you where it always takes you. Give it five minutes and you’re home free, but if it gets to you just come over and sing to me, sing into my eyes. I’m here, right. I’m here for you, okay?”

I held her close, then Warren came inside the tent backstage and took over. Soon she was herself, yet Warren had a curious smile on his face, too.

Ah, Terry…

A British group called 10cc was warming up the crowd, and their I’m Not In Love was bringing down the house, but then the lights went up and they left the stage. Our crew from MCA came in and set up our stuff, and camera crews called their director…

“Ten minutes,” one of the stagehands announced. That meant ten minutes to the main rush. 

Carlos was in the zone, Jerry was standing in a corner, his eyes closed as he played through the toughest riffs in his mind’s eye. Warren left and Niki came over, melted into me, and I could feel her trembling through my own ragged heartbeat.

So I leaned into her and kissed her. Not a brotherly kiss, if you know what I mean. A curl your toes kiss, and she responded in kind, looked at me after like I’d just lit a fuse inside her guts – and she slipped into the zone after that and never once looked back. I’d just become her muse, for better or worse, but that’s the way these things go. We knew the score, didn’t we?

I walked out first and the roar was literally deafening. I felt it through the stage as I walked within the spotlight, as I walked up to my keyboards, then Carlos and Jerry came out and the crowd sounds turned into sustained thunder. When Niki came out I had to slip on my headphones, then I looked down at Terry, looked at her jade dress and stockings and I smiled, then I looked at Tracy and Jennie and blew them a kiss, ignoring the empty seats where Jenn and her father should have been. Then I raised my fist – and stepped into the light.

+++++

The next morning’s papers said we were flawless, and I don’t know, maybe we were. What I’ll carry with me was Deni, the song, the music. The way Niki came to me then, singing my life, singing her way into my soul. I looked at Jennie and Terry, saw their tears, then I saw almost everyone was crying, even a few of the cops standing by the stage. Whatever it was, that song took all of us back to 1968 – and made us reexamine our lives through the shattered light of her death. I played an extended interval, took the music ever downward, fluttering down to deepest octaves as Deni’s jet might have as it fell to earth, as Deni might have while she watched death unfolding, and Niki came up from behind, put her arms around me while I played, and I felt her leaning against me, crying, and when she stepped back into the light everyone saw what had happened to her and I felt this huge outpouring of love, pure love, the kind of love only music takes us to.

The rest was, literally, a blur. One long blur straight into memory. One of Deni’s first anthems, Tiger’s Eye, pulled me in so deeply…I was in her purple paisley house adrift in her sea of patchouli again, watching her watch my hands as I played the first version of the entry. How she changed the phrasing of her words to reinforce my rolling chords, and I watched Niki watching my hands, forcing rhythm changes of her own – and it was like the three of us were out there together, creating something new out of something that had died a long time ago.

And I’d look from Jennie to Terry, my two touchstones, each representing polar extremes so far apart it was funny, each so intimately tied to my soul it was unnerving. Terry in her afterglow, Jennie with my daughter, already showing as our first composition took form in her womb. Then I was in a limo headed for an after-concert bash at The Bistro, Jerry and Carlos still in the zone as the Lincoln fought through traffic – Niki leaning into me, biting my neck, almost purring with the Deni-lust now coursing through her veins. Drinks and dinner, family and friends, big-wigs from the studio – along with their wives and kids, teenaged girls who told me they wanted to suck something and I’m like really? Get a life, and get away from me, you might be contagious.

The Fillmore was real. You could smell us up there onstage because we were in a room smaller than a basketball court. The Coliseum wasn’t real, it was spectacle. We weren’t musicians, we were being pawned off as demigods while venues like the Fillmore were disappearing into commercial oblivion. Politics in music was being reordered to fit the marketplace, so political messaging was on it’s way out at the big studios, which only meant emerging groups would flock to small, local studios and politics in music would become regional, local, and maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing. But what would happen if ‘main street’ music became a commercial avenue?

That’s what I watched taking form that night. San Francisco nights giving way to LA glitz. What had been real was going to be trivialized, and I knew I had to get away from it or I’d die a slow, meaningless death.

Jennie and Tracy came by, took one look at the scene and disappeared. Niki remained glued to my side, started holding my hand, then wrapping her arms in mine, becoming more possessive by the minute – Terry and Shelly looked on with wry smiles, while Carlos shook his head. Warren finally rescued me, took Niki back to the hotel, and that left me with Carlos and Jerry. The three of us, the last three with ties to Deni and Elektric Karma.

“Man, what a scene,” Jerry sighed as he plopped down at my table. “What was with you and Niki, man?”

I had to smile, even as Carlos sat down beside me. “You guys remember how wigged out I used to get before a gig?”

“Yeah, man,” Carlos said, shaking his head, “those were some legendary freakouts, Dude.”

“Niki was heading down that road. Total freakout. So I started telling her stories about Deni. Then I convinced her that she was mainlining Deni, that she was going to be channeling Deni out there on the stage tonight…”

“And she bought it?” Jerry grinned.

“What do you think?” I countered. “Did you begin to feel like we were with Deni out there?”

Carlos nodded. “I was there, man. The whole thing was getting intense, then she came over to you.”

“Man,” Jerry sighed, “she didn’t just come over. To me it looked like she was coming on…”

I nodded. “Remember our second gig at the Fillmore…?”

Yeah, the second circle was drawing tight, another chapter complete. Time for the next one.

+++++

So, a few weeks later Tracy and I are on Troubadour, in the little marina by St Mary’s Bay, Auckland, and I’m letting her walk along the deck – roped up in a safety harness, mind you – getting her used to the whole boat thing, and Niki is sitting in the cockpit, watching us. Watching me, really, ‘cause she’s got it bad. It wasn’t a week after I got back that she flew in, and it wasn’t two hours after she got to our house that Jennie had become annoyed. So…I told Jennie to just chill out, that I’d take care of it. And I did.

I took Niki sailing, again.

She’d been of a mind that sailing was for her, so I just took her out for a nice four day sail, out to the Cape Reinga lighthouse and back. We talked music, we talked babies. We talked about Jennie and Tracy, Jennie and the new baby. About what it meant to be a parent. She wanted kids, too, she told me.

“Have someone in mind?” I asked. “You know, like a father?”

“Yeah. You.”

“Oh, really? And you do recall that my wife is your sister? Her name is Jennie, in case you’ve forgotten?”

“She doesn’t have to know. We fuck until I’m pregnant, then I leave.”

“Why so transactional? Why not meet someone, fall in love and go make babies?”

“Because I’m not all that into guys, Aaron, but I want a baby. And you’ve got the music genes I want.”

“So what? What about love? Just sex, babies and bye-bye? I ask because, well, if you know just one thing about me, you know love is the one thing I cherish.”

“Oh, I love you, Aaron. Maybe not as much as Terry, but I love you.”

“Terry?” I said, stunned. “What makes you say that?”

“Because I’ve seen the way she dotes on you, and I’ve seen the way you change when she comes around. She’s the most important thing in your life, and you’re afraid to admit it.”

“I see. And you think Terry is more important to me than Jennie, or Tracy?”

“I do, yes.”

“You’re wrong, Niki. Wrong about so many things.”

“Am I?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, let’s set that aside for a moment. What about me?” she asked. 

“Well, what does that make me? A sperm donor? And if I’m the father, what happens to the kid? Does he know who I am?”

“Yup. And Aaron, that’s kids. Not kid. As in plural, not singular. I want kids.”

“And what’s that do to Jennie?”

“Well, for one thing, all these kids will be related – to you. We’ll all be, in a way, your wives, and they’ll be brothers and sisters, not cousins.”

“You do know I’m not Mormon? And that this whole conversation is beyond weird?”

“Yeah? So? That’s why I came here.”

“To get pregnant? For me to get you pregnant?”

“Yup.”

“You know, I’ve never had sex with someone I didn’t love.”

“So? Fall in love with me – again.”

“Again?”

“Yeah, when we did Deni the first time I could feel you falling in love with me. It was real then, it’ll be real tomorrow. And I’ll have your kids, so you’ll love me all that much more.”

“You’ve think you’ve really got this figured out, don’t you?”

“Yup.”

“And this is what you want?”

“Yes.”

“And you love me?”

“More than you’ll ever know.”

“Why?”

“You know why. Everything you’ve done for me. Before you, the only thing a guy ever gave me was a Dilly Bar at the Dairy Queen on Wisconsin Boulevard. You gave me a life, but you also gave me so much more. You’re my husband, in case you didn’t know – whether you want to be or not. And I’m all that you’ve got left of Deni.”

I shook my head, and confused doesn’t even begin to get close to how fucked up this whole conversation felt, but then it got truly weird.

“Okay. Here’s the deal. If you want this to happen, you have to run it by Jennie, and she has to give you her blessings. Got that?”

She smiled. Oh, how she smiled, because the had so many aces up her sleeve and I never saw them coming. Not the way she did, anyway.”

“Oh,” she said, “we’ve been talking about it for a long time.”

I swallowed hard. “Who? You and Jennie?” My Jennie?

Let me lay this out for you. Jennie was, as I’ve said, pure Midwestern sensibility rolled up inside a very attractive wrapper. Brown hair, brown eyes, a minor sprinkling of cute freckles here and there, great legs – and she was smart as hell as well as a fine athlete. Niki was Jennie’s polar opposite. She was always skating along the edge of raw emotion and rarely had that energy under control. Jennie was turning out to be a spectacular mom exactly because of her solid, no-nonsense sensibilities. There was no doubt in my mind that Niki would be the epitome of a rolling clusterfuck as a single parent, and that in the end Niki’s kid or, heaven forbid, kids would end up deposited on our doorstep in the middle of the night. Or…as she had enough money now, perhaps she just thought she could buy her way into parenthood. Money warps people, I’ve seen it go down too many times to ignore that reality, but so far I hadn’t seen that in her.

Jennie and I didn’t exactly get into a fight over this nonsense, but Niki had not been dishonest. Jennie wasn’t exactly thrilled at first, but Niki was persistent. She knew her sister’s vulnerable spots and zeroed in on those, and in the end Jennie was unenthusiastically onboard with the whole thing.

“So,” says I, once the writing on this wall was perfectly clear, “how do you want to do this? Send me off to the bathroom with a stack of Hustler Magazines and a test-tube?”

She wasn’t a colossal fuck, but then again, neither was Jennie, not really. Deni had been, but then again she had been nitro to my glycerine. In the end, Niki could hold her own in the sack, and I was content knowing that her reproductive urges had been met, yet the whole thing left me with an uneasy feeling. 

She bought a little place, a three bedroom house near the marina. Jennie was in school all the time now, and I was doing the single parent thing most weekdays, and so there we were, down on Troubadour one fine day. Tracy walking the deck and me holding on for dear life, with Niki in the cockpit staring at my ass – her words, not mine – and when we came back to sit in the shade for a while Niki leaned over and said something along the lines of “I’m late.”

“Oh? How long?”

“A week?”

I shrugged. “That doesn’t mean anything.”

“I know, but I feel it.”

“That means something?”

She grinned. “I know, Papa.”

A week later, she knew. She returned to the States, to Wisconsin, and began planning for a life in New Zealand. I began dreaming of a life without women, then remembered I had a little girl who needed a father, and another who’d be joining the ranks in a few months. Yes, recall that Jennie had another girl coming and all of a sudden it looked like the very idea of sailing away was about to be buried under a pile of soiled diapers. 

Then Shelly called. Thank God for lawyers, ya know…? 

MCA wanted to know if…

“I’ll be on the next flight up.”

And the next day there I was, sitting inside another northbound DC-10 lost in thoughts about babies, then about cause and effect. I guess if you use your equipment often enough the odds are really pretty good you’re going to make babies, but the trouble with that, I now knew, was that I was about to be overwhelmed with the little creatures. And yet, all I’d ever wanted to do was to sail away on Troubadour. And as that airliner soared towards LAX I knew I began to feel like I didn’t want to be loaded down with even more of those very same responsibilities.

But that’s not how this game works, Bucko. 

Pops would not have been pleased with how this new music was turning out. He’d been conservative about such things, and believe it or not he passed many of those virtues on to me. I know, I know, there was Niki – but somehow this felt was different. This wasn’t a one night stand after a concert, a slam-bam-thank-you-ma’am deal; no, I had instead signed on for another layer of fatherhood. And maybe this even felt true to me, at the time. And yes, perhaps because I had lived through the ugly side of San Francisco in the 60s and 70s my moral compass had grown a little cloudy. At any rate, after dinner and a glass of wine, I leaned back and closed my eyes, and soon enough I started dreaming.

And I dreamt I was some kind of weird teacher, telling a classroom full of uninterested students all about the 60s…

“For a while,” I began, “at least until Aids came along, sex became recreational, not procreational, and because contraception wasn’t yet widely, or readily, available, lots of unplanned kids were born. Lots of these kids grew up inside unstable environments, and yes, drug abuse figured in that dysfunction. Inevitably, drug abuse became endemic, but as this new lifestyle created new kinds of families, and as new kinds of family dysfunctions arose, in no time at all these dysfunctional families became endemic, too. 

“I think,” I continued, “that many people began looking for easy answers to these problems, and the easiest blame landed squarely on the shoulders of the counter-culture that arose around college campuses – and the music that came out of these revolutionary communities. Yet maybe, or perhaps maybe not, placing singular blame on a cultural phenomenon like music in the 60s misses the point. By that I mean that such ill-apportioned blame ignores the various synergies behind the multiple problems that developed, and so the thoughtless identification of these causes by ill-intentioned politicians masked possible solutions. And hey, just to be clear, these changes weren’t all going down in and around Berkeley. Think about the protests and sit-ins at Columbia and NYU, at Harvard and Kent State, and only then will you begin to see the deeper contours of the problems we faced.

 “After conformity was shoved down my generation’s throat,” I told my students, anger rising in my voice, “you had to be an idiot to miss the revolutionary impulse building in the mid-60s – but then, to make matters worse, along came LBJ, and Vietnam. And then, oh yes, let’s not forget Reagan and Meese. But wait! If you’ve forgotten about JFK in ‘63 and what he meant to the kids just then coming of age, you won’t be able to see any of this for what it really was.

“Betrayal?

“And please, don’t blame the Beatles for any of this!

“Because, you see, rock and roll grew out of the so-called negro spirituals of antebellum times and then big city blues. Robert Johnson ring a bell? How ‘bout the Harlem Renaissance? And don’t even get me started on Elvis. And you have to remember, by ‘68 music was leading the charge, right there along the front lines of the new Kultur Wars. If you weren’t there, if you didn’t see, and feel, the military presence on your college’s campus, you had no idea what betrayal really felt like, but on top of JFK it was monumental. By the time the country made it to 1970, Nixon had been in office almost two years and everyone was exhausted by the deceit he represented. Then Watergate hit. And then Nixon resigned. But then Ford pardoned Nixon and by then everyone knew there was something really wrong with the system. 

“So, what did all this mean?” I asked my students… 

“First things first, so let’s start with something that you might think was trivial – but you have to consider that nothing going on back then was really trivial. And the first trivial thing was posters. Posters on dorm room walls. On bedroom walls. On subway walls. Posters were everywhere. Psychedelic posters of Hendrix that came alive under blacklight, images of peace signs concocted out of B-52 bombers, even two geese humping in midair, captioned, of course, as Fly United. If someone had a cause – there was a poster for it. And posters became potent reminders of The Revolution. And to be honest, as a survivor of the sixties I still don’t have any idea what The Revolution was supposed to be about, yet Equality comes to mind as one of the first things the revolutionaries focused on. Because that changed when MLK was gunned down, and then RFK – just when it looked like he was going to run against Nixon. And yes, everyone was talking about how the CIA was behind both assassinations. And yes, there were posters of these events too. And, oh yeah, maybe you’ve heard about a war in Vietnam? Okay, if you thought the 60s was about ‘Nam you’re getting warmer. Well, how about getting stoned and fucking your brains out, too?

“Bingo!” says the very erudite professor.

“Or, as Timothy Leary said, Turn On, Tune In, and Drop Out, but of course it turned out that TL was dead, but no, he was on the outside, looking in…

“If you feel confused about the 60s, congratulations. Join the club. 

“But we were raised under the old paradigm. You fucked someone you loved, then you had kids with that person, and then you loved your kids and got them going down the road to finding their own love – and then the circle could continue. 

“And that was exactly what had been crammed down my generation’s throat.

“The problem with that paradigm?

“Let’s see. How about we make a list? Let’s start with spousal abuse, wife beating, and alcoholism, then increasing domestic violence and pretty soon everyone is on antidepressants, or barbiturates, or tranquilizers, or they have mistresses, and soon enough infidelity is out of control, and then pretty soon you have a generation of kids raised under these conditions, and to top it all off these kids are going to church every Sunday and they are beginning to see what all these problems really represent. So, do you have any ideas what that might be…?

“Ah yes, but before I go on, let’s consider one other poster I’ve so far not mentioned, and I had one on my dorm room wall at Stanford, too. Any ideas? No?

“Well, my poster had a picture of Uncle Sam on it, and in big blocky bright letters it proclaimed ‘Question Authority!’

“That was the biggie. The Big Idea. And that’s where our music was coming from.

“So. You want to boil the sixties down to one revolutionary impulse, to just two words? Well, here they are. ‘Question Authority!’”

And that’s when I woke up, because Professor Know It All had missed the point.

Because I knew better. Just like I knew you don’t find a girl and then make her some kind of pretend wife. You don’t fuck a girl and leave her in a funny farm, take her kid away from her and then sail away. But hey, I did that. You don’t have a bunch of kids with multiple pretend wives, then get on the aforementioned boat and sail away again and again. But what if the pretend wife’s big sister is carrying your baby, too. And with no strings attached – “Just get me pregnant!” – and she’ll take care of all the rest.

But was Berkeley really about all that?

Weren’t my actions the epitome of my ‘Freedom!’ to ‘Question Authority!’ and to just go out and do it my way?

Free speech. Free love. Open marriages. Like hummingbirds flying from flower to flower, dipping their wicks into each new golden honey pot, depositing their seed and moving on, flying to the next flower, falling in love for a half hour then flying out the window. Who knows what you’ll leave behind, but I can tell you one thing: it sure won’t be love.

And that was what I thought about on that flight. Pops had taught me right from wrong, and yet I wasn’t holding up my end of the bargain. I needed to change, but was I capable of changing…?

So, it turned out MCA wanted me to produce Niki’s first solo album, but then that got me thinking. Niki had flown from Madison to LA the week before, flown to see Shelly. She did so to get my lawyer to convince me to come back to LA. So in effect Niki had come to LA to set another trap all her own. Trap the hummingbird, cage him, stop him from flying away again. I saw myself flying over the Pacific, my wings growing tired as I flew from flower to flower, then flying into a new house, Niki slamming the windows shut behind me, trapping me. Then diapers everywhere. Little white surrender flags covered in baby shit, and out the window, in the distance, my poor little boat sailing away – without me. I’m hovering on the wrong side of the glass, trying to find a way back outside to Freedom, but Freedom was the trap all along, wasn’t it?

No, I had freedom and it trapped me.

Is freedom supposed to work like that?

What is Freedom? Why had Freedom become a trap?

Why had my generation fallen into that trap? We knew better, didn’t we?

Someone was pushing on my shoulder and I woke up, startled, then I saw downtown LA out the window. I looked up, saw a stewardess telling me to get my seat-back up and I shook away the dream – but it didn’t want to leave there just yet. Like a bad aftertaste, this dream was lingering, telling me to wake up before it was too late.

I looked out the window, saw the ground reaching up for me, saw Century City off in the distance. Home. I was home again. I was running straight into another trap, and once again I couldn’t stop myself.

And I wondered…would Terry be there?

Part IV

Shelly sent a limo to LAX to pick me up and carry me straight to the recording studio, and there was an envelope waiting for me on the back seat when I crawled inside. “Meeting at MCA as soon as you get in. We need to iron out the contract, but terms look good.”

I felt strange driving through through the city. Signs of growth were everywhere and the freeways were even more crowded, but that wasn’t what was bothering me. No, I think I felt more like a visitor, a stranger in a strange land, and this huge, sprawling city was no longer recognizable to me. 

“So,” I asked myself, “just where is your home now?”

Good question. My technical address was still on Foothill Road in Beverly Hills, and I was still a US citizen. Jennie wasn’t a citizen now, and soon Tracy wouldn’t be, either. Troubadour was still a USCG Documented and California registered vessel, and her home port was still Newport Beach, but she hadn’t seen those waters in years. This was the city of my birth, the city I grew up in, yet it no longer felt like home. At least, not in the sense of home as I now understood the term. Home was where Jennie was, where Tracy was, and that home was now 6500 miles distant, across half of the Pacific Ocean.

Or, was that really the case? 

Home was also where the events that had defined my life took place. School in Beverly Hills and Stanford and then Deni and Elektric Karma in Berkeley. Pops and MCA in Burbank, the recording studios on Sunset with Carlos and Jerry. The Universal Amphitheater, the LA Coliseum. The Balboa Bay Club and the Crab Cooker in Newport Beach. Get on the 5 and go to Anaheim, go to Disneyland, or make the long drive up to Bishop and up to Mammoth to go skiing. And then there was Jenn, lost somewhere inside the scrambled, labyrinthine corridors of her disease. She and her father were an inextricable part of this thing called home, too. Because this would always be Tracy’s home.

There always seemed to be more trees every time I came back. And more cars. And millions more people, too, but how could that be? Maybe that’s why there were so many police cars?

So yes, different, yet somehow there were layers of sameness everywhere I looked. You just had to dig a little to find the memories. Then, into the lot at MCA, Shelly waiting for me in the lobby.

How was the flight. Fine. How’s Tracy? Good.

Then I asked her: “How’d you make out from the concert?”

“Amazing. Aaron, I can’t thank you enough.” When a lawyer says that to you, you know it had to be spectacular.

“So, I made some money too?”

“You didn’t get my statement?”

“Nope.”

“I’ll bring it along with me tomorrow, but you did well, Aaron. Pops would be proud.”

“So, is Niki here already?”

“At the Beverly Hills. Registered as Rooster Cogburn, in case you want to call.”

“Ah. Never figured her for the John Wayne type,” I sighed.

“Yeah. Original, isn’t it?”

“Right. Well, why did I just fly halfway around the world? What’s going on and why am I here?”

A lot, as it turned out, had already gone down. Niki had Shelly call Jerry and Carlos, talk to them about a new album and they were onboard, and when MCA caught wind they called for a conference to look at their options. Niki and Shelly had hammered out a new recording contract that took into account what had happened at the Coliseum, that we had sold a hundred and fifty thousand tickets and that the live Elektric Karma album had gone gold – in a week. Now Niki wanted to revive Elektric Karma, not as some kind of tribute band but as the real deal. I was the sole surviving member of the band and as such, if nothing else, I owned the rights to the name. In fact, I was Elektric Karma. Without me, Niki would be on dangerous legal ground. With Jerry and Carlos onboard, however, the case could be made for an Elektric Karma reboot, but again, only if I was involved.

What did MCA have in mind?

A new album. A double album. Half new material, half kind of a Karma Klassics redo.

“Why redo the old stuff?” I asked.

Well, you see, there was this new digital technology called Compact Disc, and making a direct to digital recording of our earlier works was impossible. It would be an analog-to-digital conversion and therefore not as good as it could be, so by redoing our catalogue we would help usher in the new technology. They played some samples of work that had been recorded digitally and yes, it was impressive, yet in a way the music lacked something, too. Anyway, MCA was investing heavily in the new medium and they really wanted us to pull this off.

The proposal Shelly had ironed out with the studio, while naming Niki as our the group’s official vocalist, was truly impressive. Once again I felt this responsibility to Niki, but now also to Jerry and Carlos – to the group, really – to sign on the dotted line. Shelly knew it was the right thing to do and she told me so too, in no uncertain terms.

I hesitated. “What am I missing here? Any concerts?”

“A world tour,” the lawyer from MCA advised. “And we handle the upfront costs.”

This was too good to be true, and they knew it. Only a crazy person would walk away from a deal like this.

So, was I crazy enough to walk away from all this? Or, what about the opposite…was I crazy enough to sign on the dotted line? Reductio ad absurdum, perhaps? 

Signing would commit me to much more time up here in the studio, to be followed by how many more months, possibly even years, on the road. Jennie and Tracy were half a world away. Troubadour was too.

“I need to call home, run this by Jennie,” I said.

And…did I say home? As in…call home?

Shelly understood, I think, but the suits from MCA were a little miffed. Actually, they were terrified.

We walked out and Shelly drove me home. “Aaron, there’s not much in the house right now. No food, and the car hasn’t been driven in ages…”

“What do you mean? Where’s Terry?”

Ah, yes. Where’s Terry.

Man, talk about home. Terry still defined that home. And she had moved out, moved back to London, leaving behind the empty husk of the only life I had ever known. Gone. Flown away on the cinema show’s flickering lights. 

Shelly saw my anguish and left me alone. She knew better than to get mixed up in this drama.

I carried my bag inside and the house smelled the same, the same but different, because I could smell Terry everywhere I went. Everything was spotless, cleaned last week, and even the pool was heated and ready to go, but that was just Shelly being Shelly, Shelly doing her job. Terry used to do all that. Terry ran the house, like she had quietly run my life when I was in junior high. She was the one standing behind me on the recital stage. Her smile. Her patient understanding. Terry was my home. My touchstone. And by God I missed her. I walked through the house looking at her life – and Pop’s – in the little knick-knacks scattered here and there – yet everything felt like an echo. Sitting here empty like this the house was, I could see, little more than a museum. Without Terry this wasn’t the home I knew and I didn’t know what to do. I walked down to the studio and looked at my keyboards, then the phone rang and I walked over and picked it up.

“Are you okay,” Terry asked. Her voice sounded far away. To far away to reach out and touch.

“I don’t think so. When did you move out.”

“Do you have something to write with?”

I went to my desk, found a pen and notepad. “Yup.”

She read out her phone number, where she’d be staying in London, and I committed the number to memory. “If that changes, I’ll leave word with Shelly.”

“Why? Why did you do this? I thought this was your home?”

“Aaron?” she said, “I couldn’t go on like this?”

“Like what, Terry?”

I could hear her standing on the edge of a very dangerous precipice. “I don’t think you ever realized how I felt about you. And Aaron, I can’t do that anymore.”

“Terry?” I said, dumbfounded. “What are you not telling me?”

“Aaron, no. We’re not going to do this now. And certainly not over the telephone. Call me in a few months. But do the right thing, Aaron. Not for me, but for Tracy.”

“I need to ask you something important, but work related, not personal.”

Silence.

“Terry, please don’t leave me like this.”

“Oh, Aaron, go ahead.”

I told her about the meeting with Shelly at MCA, about Karma reforming, about Niki and Jerry and Carlos and possible tours and the almost terrifying existential dread I’d suddenly felt over the past 24 hours. The dream on the airplane, what the 60s had meant to me and my place inside this cascading kaleidoscope called California. And then I told her the most important part of this story, the most important thing missing from my life.

“Terry, it hit me today…and I hate to resort to clichés at a time like this, but there’s no place like home. I was sitting here in the office, and I’ve never done anything like this without you there holding my hand. I know you told me, after the coliseum, I think, that I had finally made it, that I’d finally grown up, but today it got to me. When Shelly told me you’d gone. When I realized you weren’t going to be here…I’ve never felt so alone in my life…”

And right then the line went dead. I sighed, devastated, then looked at those numbers on the paper and held onto them like they were a lifeline, then I sat down and looked around my studio. 

I’d be bringing this room back to life, but could I – without her?

What could I do without her?

I sat in the near dark thinking about what Terry really meant to me, and I knew she was right. Life would go on. I would write music without her. Good music. Maybe not great, but we’d soon see if there was any magic left in me.

Then the phone rang again and I snatched it up, hoping it was Terry. “Hello?”

“It’s me. Niki. Are you still up?”

“Yup, I slept on the plane.”

“Mind if I come over?”

“Sure. Door’s open, I’m in the studio.”

“Is it close? Could I walk?”

“You could, but it’s not something I’d recommend at this time of night, at least not in LA, and not along Sunset.”

“Don’t you have a car there?”

“I think it’s dead; apparently it hasn’t been driven in a while.”

“What?”

“Terry left.”

“What do you mean she left? You mean, like, for good?”

“Sure sounds that way.”

“I’ll be right over,” she said, hanging up the phone.

And sure enough, I heard the front door shut about ten minutes later, then heard her running down the hall to my studio. I was still sitting, inert, in the darkness. Still thinking about life after Terry – and then Niki came right to me and sat by my side, took me in her arms and cradled my head in her hands.

And I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t. I felt too burned up inside for tears, for much of anything, really, but I think Niki got that…and that was a surprise. 

“How’s the baby?” I asked after a while.

“Good.”

“You been writing any songs?”

“I tried, but I’m not sure I know how to anymore, not really. I think I’ll rely on you this time out. Maybe teach me the basics again, how you go about it.”

“Got any lyrics yet?”

“Yeah. A few songs, but I’m not sure they’re any good. I think one or two are okay. The rest suck.”

“Oh? We’ll look at the bad ones first. Got ‘em with you?”

“I brought everything with me,” she said, slinging down a small backpack.

“Yeah?”

“I wanted to ask…could I move in with you while we’re working on this?”

I thought for a minute, then nodded my head. “Yeah, sure. I was going to ask all of you to stay here. Saves time, less to get in the way…”

Terry was right, of course. Niki was insecure and she needed to feel loved. And in the end, I was sure there’d be nothing left of me – but what the fuck, ya know? I mean really, what the fuck.

+++++

I tried to pretend that Niki was Terry, that Niki could be my muse, but her energy was different. Not wrong, just different. Niki was a hot, wet towel draped over my face, suffocating, maybe, after an initial surge of comfort. Her lyrics were inconsequential, too, like stale mid-western white bread. Empty love songs, all longing without purpose. Everything an ambiguous word salad.

It turned out she had been raised around a lot of country music, the real old southern country stuff, and though she liked rock she was trying to blend the two without any idea of the structure she wanted, or needed. Creating something new out of these two forms was going to be tricky at best, because country music isn’t structured like rock. And I think the reasons for that escaped her; there was a fairly unhealthy antipathy between Southern Country and the rest of the music world, yet that’s where she wanted to go.

So what she wanted would have to be soft-rock infused country music, a commercialized amalgam of styles I’d never tried before – and right away both Carlos and Jerry said they wanted nothing to do with a project like that. Niki understood but she was crushed, and I wasn’t really sure why she wanted my help on a project like this. In the end, as she had signed on to do an Elektric Karma record she finally accepted that her country album would have to wait.

But there was another problem, too. She wanted to project a sexy image for this album, which meant photoshoots for the album art would have to project sex, but she was showing now. Big time. MCA hired a photographer who normally shot the wide open spaces for the likes of Playboy and Penthouse, and with makeup artists in tow they worked for two days getting just the right look. Yet they ended up with some really weird shots, like Nashville’s idea of a cowboy’s hooker from hell, with no pubes or nipples and just a little Christian symbolism to placate the Baptist set, and we looked at those images and called Shelly, who called MCA, who called me.

They were what Niki wanted, the suits told me. ‘How do these images reflect the Electric Karma genre?’ I asked. They don’t, the suits said. ‘Then what’s going on?’ I asked.

Nobody knew. Shelly was upset. The project was already out of control.

I nodded. I understood.

“Do you know how to get in touch with Terry?” I asked.

She did.

“Make the call. Tell her what’s going down and let me know what she says.”

Then Jennie called.

“You ever coming home?” she asked. There was that word again, beating me up from the inside out.

“Listen, things are getting weird here. Niki is turning into a gospel country queen right before our eyes and it’s causing a lot of friction.”

“Aaron, she’s always been flaky like that, but she’s easily led. Just punch out a couple of old Karma songs and let her play with the vocals and see if she doesn’t come around.”

“Okay.”

“How’s Terry?”

“She’s gone. Left for London, apparently for good.”

A long pause followed, then: “And how is Aaron handling that?”

“I feel cut off from the world, Jennie. She’s always been my anchor…”

“I know, but don’t you see the problem with that?”

“No, not really.”

“Aaron, she loves you. And not the way a grandmother loves a grandson, because she was never your grandmother, not really, but you know that. She loved your grandfather and then he was gone, and who did she have left?”

“But…”

You’re the one who leaned on her, Aaron. You. You depended on her for your emotional security, for support, and she was always there for you, wasn’t she?”

“Yes, but…”

“God, you are so fucking blind, Aaron.”

“What…?”

“Aaron, she was so insecure growing up, so frightened all the time because the only thing she had going for her was her looks, and like everyone else in Hollywood, she knew that looks don’t last. But then here you come, insecure little Aaron who has no idea of all her fears and insecurities, but who – miracle of miracles – depends on her to be his rock solid support. And she meets all your needs too, right? She’s there whenever you need her, and your need for her has absolutely nothing at all to do with her looks. You need her, you love her in your innocent teenaged way, and so when you started  college, when you formed the group, by golly she finally fell in love with you. My guess, probably back in high school, but more likely when Elektric Karma really hit it big, because when you hit it big you still relied on her, you still needed her, and you still loved her unconditionally because she was always the only woman you were ever going to truly love.”

“You think I’m in love with her?”

“Oh for Gods sake, Aaron, you’ve been in love with her since you were twelve. Of course you still love her.”

“You mean…as a friend?”

“Don’t be stupid, Aaron. Men aren’t like that. Men don’t have friends like Terry McKay.”

“Jennie, I love you. Don’t you get that?”

“I do, yes, of course I do, but peel an onion and you’ll find another layer. And at your core, Aaron, that’s where you’ll find Terry. In the deepest part of you, in your secret place.”

“I…don’t know what to say.”

“Okay, Aaron. Answer me this. If she was there right now, what word best describes how you would feel?”

I knew of course, the moment she asked me.

“Jennie, don’t make me answer that question…please?”

“Why not? I mean, I know what the word is, but are you telling me you’re not man enough to tell me the truth?”

“Complete,” I said.

“Yup, that’s the word.”

“Jennie, how long have you known this?”

“The first time I saw you two together. Everyone sees it, Aaron. Everyone but you.”

“Oh dear God.”

“God’s got nothing to do with this, Aaron. This is all on you. And on Terry.”

“Do you think that’s why she left?”

“Hell yes! Aaron! You’re a moron!”

“Jennie, I don’t get it, what are you saying I should do?”

“You either let her go forever or you ask her to come back to you.”

“But…Jennie, don’t you understand? I love you? I love Tracy.”

“And you love Terry. So?”

“What do you mean? So?”

“Let me see if I can make this simple for you, okay? We, you and I, we have to accept what is. We have to deal with this. That means we have choices to make, you and I, and I assume Terry will have to one day soon, as well.”

“Jennie, I’m not leaving you, period.”

“Okay, so don’t.”

“And that means I have to cut the cord, so to speak, with her. Right?”

“I’m not sure you should do that, Aaron.”

“What? Why?”

“Because before you left I spent a few hours in Oncology. Aaron, I didn’t want to tell you like this, but I’m sick. I have cancer, and my dad wants me to come home…”

+++++

I called Air New Zealand, then I called Shelly, told her what was going down. Niki wanted to come with me but something held me back. Like too much flying, and over such long distances, wouldn’t be good for either her or her baby; in the end I convinced her to stay at the house with Carlos and Jerry and get to work.

I flew back to Auckland the next day, met with Jennie’s oncologists – but it turned out that just about every physician in the medical school was already in the loop, and already involved. Tracy was too young to understand so Jennie had decided to keep her out of the normal flow of information, and while I could understand that, I also felt strongly against any sort of deception. With that in mind I would stick with “Mommy’s sick right now” for now. But I wouldn’t lie if Tracy asked direct questions.

“So,” Jennie’s oncologist asked when we had a patient conference the next day, “what do you know about the pancreas?”

“Not much, maybe something about the islets of Langerhans? So, tell me about it.”

So she did. Pancreatic cancer is a silent killer – in that the symptoms, at least in the beginning, are so benign that most people, including experienced medical professionals, don’t make the connection. So of course, by the time more noticeable symptoms occur the cancer may have had a chance to spread unchecked – and Jennie’s had done just that. It had metastasized throughout her gut and was hitting her liver and was also showing up in one lobe of her lungs. She was very sick now, to put it bluntly, and her doctors told me she was going to die, and probably sooner than I could imagine.

“How soon is soon?” I asked the doc.

“You need to start making hospice preparations, get all her paperwork in order, and you need to start making plans.”

“Okay,” I said as I turned to Jenny – and as my mind lurched, “are there any treatment options?”

And Jennie just shrugged away the question, because that wasn’t the important one. 

So, what was important? 

The things she wanted to do while she still could. With me. With Tracy. And with her family.

And, as it happened, what she wanted to do with me was as unexpected as it was hilarious.

She wanted to go back to California and be a part of Elektric Karma’s Last Stand, which was what I had taken to calling the project.

“You…can’t be serious…” I howled.

“Oh yes, I can be. And Aaron, this is what I want. Because this is how I want Tracy to remember us, the three of us, together. Making music. Making your music. Because I really want to be apart of that at least once in my life.”

Before we left for LA, I went down to the marina and had Troubadour hauled for the season. She needed work after so much time out of her element, tethered to a dock, neglected, and not running free off the wind. I wanted her perfect. Again. I needed her to be perfect – always.

I didn’t dream on the airplane this time. I spent the day with Tracy, sitting her on my lap and pointing out the few things I recognized down below. This flight refueled in Honolulu for some reason, something to do with the weather in Tahiti, so I dutifully pointed out that we were flying close to where Elvis filmed Blue Hawaii, a landmark in the pantheon of Elvis flicks, and Tracy loved Elvis flicks. Her first song, the one she had shared with us for a year – nonstop – was You Ain’t Nothin’ But a Hound-dog, but after seeing Honolulu up close and personal I promised we’d watch it together when we got to LA.

And I was careful to not call LA home. She had no recall of anything there, but she had of course heard of Disneyland…so, yes, it’s a small world, after all, because she “wanted to go with Mommy.”

We took Jennie to UCLA, to their oncology service, and checked in. They already had her records on hand and recommended chemo to slow down the metastatic progression. Jennie was dubious but in the end decided that a few more months with us was worth the price paid in side effects.

Everything was set up at home. We put a long, low sofa in the studio for Jennie and Tracy to lounge on, then we did what we always did. Start with the lyrics, work out the time signature and a backbeat, then I would lay down a very basic drum track. And as always – there were non-stop discussions. I’d come up with a melody on keyboards, or Carlos might on his acoustic guitar. Jerry and Niki would start to massage the main melody with her vocals, then Jerry might add supporting harmonies on bass, or add a rhythm guitar track. 

Pete Davis had been our original drummer, so we’d relied on a sessions percussionist for the later post-crash concerts, including our concert in the Coliseum, and we might have taken that route again – until we learned Pete had a younger cousin trying to break into the business. We interviewed him at MCA and he showed us what he could do, and that was that. Jordan Davis was our new drummer and he slipped right into our routine, maybe because he’d always looked up to Pete.

Niki’s pseudo-country stuff was almost useless, and even Jennie could feel how hollow her words sounded when layered dense, heavy rock. Yet Jordan, like Pete, was dialed into writing lyrics – not great, but good enough – and like Pete, he was into poetry. The serious, college level stuff that English majors study. And he was really into symbolism, too.

So I had an idea. What if we put together a concept album? Like Days of Future Past or Tommy. That kind of concept album. Let’s tell a story, he said.

“Like what?” Jerry asked.

And because I’d told the group about my dream on the airplane, Jordan started there. An album about what the sixties. About the forces shaping life, from 1963 to 1974, from JFK to Nixon being run out of town.

“Okay, what do you have in mind?” Jerry asked, but I could see he was dubious.

And then Jordan added. “Faust, right? We do Goethe’s Faust. That would be perfect.”

“What?” I said. “You mean like Mephistopheles, the bargain with the devil? Okay, what’s the bargain we made, and how would that work if a whole generation made the bargain?”

“Well, Faust wanted knowledge, right? And he knew he would never live long enough to learn all there was to know, so he made a bargain with Mephistopheles…so we shape it so that our generation sought a Faustian bargain…through all the counter culture revolutionary stuff…”

“Man, I hate to ask, but who’s Mephistopheles supposed to be?” Jerry asked. “Is he, like, the Devil?”

“More like an evil spirit,” Jordan continued, “but some scholars think the name derives from the word mephitic, which basically means the poisonous vapors that come out of pools and springs deep inside caverns. So Mephistopheles was somehow relegated to the shadows, and he comes out of the underworld, out of the shadows, sp, you know, ultimately he’s poisonous.”

Carlos shook his head. “No way, man. That shit sounds like it’s coming out of some kind of wonky debating society…like, uh, we’re a rock ’n roll band, so let’s try and act like one, right?”

And I had to agree. “Sounds like something you might want to do on a solo project, Jordan.”

Jordan nodded. “Yeah, I know. It was just an idea. I started on some words, a beat line, but no big deal.”

Carlos saw Jordan’s sudden anguish and stepped up. “Show us what ya got, man…”

It’s funny and a little introspective writing about one generation’s travails because, ultimately, the present rhymes with the past. The country splintered after Oswald’s bullets found John Kennedy, began tearing at the seems when civil and voting rights legislation passed in ’64, but the same splintering had nearly ground our country to dust in the late-1850s, and before that in the 1780s. That had to be the framework for that kind of song, didn’t it?

Jordan had the bare bones we’d need to work up one good song, and he started humming as Jerry picked his way through a tentative melody. Niki picked up Jordan’s notepad and started vocalizing what Jordan was humming; I hit contrapuntal chords – because America has always been contrapuntal – and Carlos worked his way into the flow with a few licks…and I looked over, saw Jennie and Tracy watching us, mesmerized, as something came out of the nothingness that exists before thoughts and hopes and dreams take shape.

I started scribbling notations, then ideas for chord changes and where to insert sub-melodies, and that’s how it happens. Jordan called his song Breaking Glass, and we agreed he’d get songwriting credits for this one – because though it was my dream it was indeed his work. That’s the way it ought to be, the way Pops taught me the business should be even when a group is involved, and that was the way Carlos, Jerry and I had always worked. It’s amazing how easily life goes when fairness becomes a guiding principle, but that was the way Pops saw things.

Yet at the same time it’s hard to describe what life was like for us during those two months of nonstop brainstorming. Sleep was important, too, but probably not in the way most imagine it is, because during that time between the lights going out and the eyes closing – an unusually productive part of the creative process takes form as sleep comes. As the mind winds down, as the body relaxes, ideas that have been repressed begin come out and play, ideas hidden behind the constant stress of working with other creative personalities. Sometimes I think most music is born in that quasi-netherworld, born in the glow caught between light and dark.  So there you are in bed and then you’re stitching together little snippets of multiple unformed ideas in the dark, trying to find the way to something meaningful. 

We mused more than once how much like politics this process was; when it worked, when the disparate elements of our musician-personalities came together, we made progress. Divisiveness and ‘gotta have it my way or else’ always led to infighting and recriminations, too. Just like politics.

The process never really stopped, not ever, not for any of us. Jerry might burn out and wander off to his bedroom while the rest of us kept at it, but if something really good hit him after he went down, more often than not he would dash back to the studio ten minutes later and lay down these latest ideas. The constant infusions of hidden inspiration never stopped, and that was the beauty of having a studio in the house.

The down side? Yeah, the obvious stuff. No privacy at all, and no time for yourself. Meals an endless procession of Chinese take-out, pizza, and chocolate chip pastries from an old school Kosher bakery over on Beverly Drive, close to the Farmer’s Market. The less than obvious? How the swimming pool saved my life more than once, because of Tracy. She was physically very active now, so it was time to get her feeling comfortable in water. We’d wade around in lazy circles and then I’d hold her arms out and lead her around in circles, always around the shallow end, and let her kick up a storm. Then I held on to just one hand, then one day we tried no hands, because sometimes that’s all some people need; just a helping hand to see that the way ahead doesn’t have to be all about fear. She took to the water just like a porpoise, perhaps because she’d already seen her fair share on Troubadour.

Jennie’s mom Michelle arrived two weeks after we began working together, and she started taking Jennie to her doctor’s appointments when I couldn’t, but that was the funniest part of it all. Jennie rarely left the sofa when we were at it. She was soaking our music up, living inside our minds – yet she never tried to contribute anything beyond the occasional smile. Michelle was the same way; she’d sit and watch Tracy watching us, yet at times it felt like she’d been hypnotized by the chaos.

Then Jennie delivered another girl into the world, and we named her Rebecca, after my mother. Oddly enough, Rebecca looked like a near clone of Tracy, so at least it looked like my mother’s good looks would come boiling to the surface. Tracy not only accepted that she had a new sister, she instantly assumed a protective role, looking after Rebecca like a guard dog might.

Once Rebecca was safely out of Jennie’s womb she began chemo, and I think my compositions necessarily became a little darker. Niki, bless her, pulled me up and out of the hole I was digging for myself and once again it was ‘I get by with a little help from my friends,’ because isn’t that the way life really ought to be? All you need is love, right, because every generation needs its anthems.

Michelle played the kitchen like I played keyboards. She kept the momentum going even when Jennie was wrapped up with the baby; when someone wanted scallion beef or sweet & sour chicken she was on the phone, serving plates then running the dirties to the dishwasher – all while taking care of Jennifer, and of course, Niki – who was cratering emotionally as fast as Jennie was physically as chemo began taking its inevitable toll. It started getting crowded when Warren showed up, and pretty soon the rest of Jennie’s family started coming by for a visit, all of them sitting poolside under the palms while we did our thing in the studio. Her sister Taylor stood behind me, watched how I played and kept a running notation going almost simultaneously, then she offered to help. So fun, really, the way we came together.

Once we wrapped up the sessions we sent the tapes over to Burbank and waited for word to come down from on high, and Niki brightened a bit when Jennie went into one of those mini-remissions that every so often come after chemo. As Jennie rallied she joined Tracy and myself in the pool, then Niki and Michelle came in too, all of us swimming under the sun before we basked in the warmth of our instant togetherness. Warren stood above us documenting everything with Michelle’s Nikon.

The guys at MCA were effusive, but then came talk of the promotional tour we’d agreed to do. But, I said, this was no time to leave Jennie and my kids – even if Warren and Michelle were willing to stay with them. I wasn’t willing to leave, and there was no way in hell MCA was going to put up a fight over that. And now at eight months, Niki looked more like the Goodyear blimp than some kind of rock diva, and yeah, even the suits at MCA knew what that meant as far as ticket sales went. So, the tour was put on hold, yet of course not everyone was happy about that. Touring, and with MCA footing the bill, meant some serious income, and Jordan was, to put it bluntly, hurting financially. Jerry and Carlos weren’t poor, but they were ready to go, too.

In the end, MCA decided to delay release of the album a few months so any tour we mounted would necessarily follow the album release. Jordan was crushed, so I loaned him enough money to keep him going.

And I still hadn’t heard from Terry, nor had I called her.

Which brings us full circle, to Jenn. The other Jennifer. Yes, to Jenn of the razor blades and monsters under the bed, currently warehoused in the hills above Laguna Beach.

Shelly called me about a week after we wrapped, told me that the police in Newport Beach had called and told her that Jenn’s father had just been taken to Hoag Memorial. Apparently after Jenn got home on a weekend release from her psychiatric hospital, from what little I was able to gather from these first reports, and she had finally broken down and gone after him. That was the official version, anyway. Then Shelly called later that day, and told me we needed to drive down to Newport right away, because there were some new developments with Jenn’s case.

“Do I need to bring Tracy?” I asked.

“No, I wouldn’t, at least not this time,” Shelly said – cautiously.

She picked me up a half hour later and we drove down to Newport Beach, yet she was clearly agitated.

“What happened, Shelly?” I asked as soon as we were on the 405.

“Jenn shot her father.”

“She – what?”

“Right in the main pump, Aaron. He dropped to the ground, dead as a doornail. Her mother watched it go down, too, then ran screaming from the house. Jenn’s in the ER now, apparently doped up and out of it, but she’s asked to see you. Won’t talked to the police until she talks to you first, and her mother agreed. She’ll be there, by the way.”

“Fuck.”

“You got that right.”

So I shut up the rest of the drive, tried to ignore the heavy traffic on the 405, and by the time we got to the hospital and up to the room where she was “under observation” – I was well and truly in a deep funk.

She shot him…? I kept saying to myself over and over. She finally shot him…?

She was no longer in the ER, had been moved to a rubber room on the psych ward. A detective was there – along with a handful of orderlies and patrolmen – as well as Patricia, her mother – all of them waiting outside the door to her room, and the cops joined us after I’d been searched for weapons – and yes, drugs. Jenn was wide-eyed, staring out the lone barred window in the general direction of Catalina Island and Avalon Harbor, and man, did that image burn a hole in me. When I said her name she turned, slowly, and then she came back to me.

Her hands were cuffed to the bed, her eyes were like angry red caldrons of boiling blood. She’d lost so much weight I hardly recognized her. Her face looked ghostly, hollowed out and ghostly.

“I wasn’t going to let him hurt me anymore,” she said as she recognized me. “Not ever again, Aaron,” she pleaded.

I pulled a chair up to her bedside, took her hand in mine. “I know, babe. Something had to give, didn’t it? What happened?”

“In the car,” she said, her voice raspy and dry – yet her meaning clear, “he told me what he was going to do. Aaron, he kept talking about going back to court, about getting Tracy back. So he could love her the way he had loved me. I couldn’t let him do that to her, Aaron. Or to you…”

The detective leaned over. “The way he loved you? How was that, Miss?”

Jenn ignored the cop, just looked into my eyes. 

“Jenn,” I continued, “you never told me about that stuff. Could you tell me about what happened. No one understands, no one knows, so could you tell me about what happened…please?”

“Aaron, he wanted to fuck her like he used to fuck me,” she growled, and I felt sick as I watched tears well up in her puffy, bloodshot eyes. And what did I feel? That my betrayal in Hawaii had been absolute…yet I’d never really understood just how devastating this betrayal was to her.

“When did he start doing that to you, Jenn?” the detective asked.

“Always, at least…as far back as I can remember…”

We talked, or tried to, anyway, about what she had been through, but really, what was the point. Her father had always been the monster under the bed, the snake in the grass, and she had fought and struggled to get free of abusers like him and so had run straight into my arms, yet in the end I betrayed her too – just like the two other men in her life had. That was what she wanted me to know, to understand. I felt ill, yet my role in her collapse was clear, at least to me. But I had one more question to ask, the most difficult question of all: “Jenn, what do you want me to tell Tracy?”

“Don’t tell her about me, Aaron. Never. She’ll never remember me anyway, but don’t you ever tell her anything about me. I don’t want anyone to remember me…I was a mistake, Aaron. God’s mistake. I should have never existed…”

Her mother recoiled from these words, stumbled out of the room, and I heard her crying out there in the corridor, literally horrified – yet what the poor woman’s role was in all this, I could scarcely imagine.

“Look, if you change your mind, if you ever want to see Tracy…”

“No!” she screamed, and all I heard was the pure rage of finality released from her shackles. “Go away, Aaron – now! I don’t ever want to see you again…not any of you…”

Newport Beach’s finest escorted me from the room, and I talked with the detective for a while, and besides learning he was an Electric Karma fan I told him what little I knew about her relationship with her father, up to and including the custody hearing a few years back, and that was that. Shelly walked me back to her car in silence, but once out of the cold fog rolling in we started to talk.

“Why did I leave her in Honolulu? Why?”

“Because she acquiesced, Aaron. She agreed to let her father join you for the trip back…”

“Maybe she wanted a reckoning,” I sighed, lost inside the pain of her confusion. “Or maybe she wanted a face-off – between me and him.”

“But she never told you about any of this other stuff, Aaron. She kept all of that stuff with her father from you, and yet she was more than willing to make you confront her demons. It wasn’t fair of her, Aaron, and it certainly wasn’t right.”

“Vanquish, I think,” I sighed, “might be what she wanted from me. To vanquish her demons. But, oh no, I abandoned her, Shelly. And that was my fault, not hers…”

Shelly slammed on the brakes and pulled over to the side of the road. “No, you did not do that, Aaron, and don’t do this to Tracy…”

“To Tracy? What do…?”

“Yes, to your daughter. Don’t you dare start to feel guilty about this. If you do it’ll ruin you, it will poison your life, and all that misery will bleed-out onto your life with Tracy, and Aaron, let that sink in, will you? This was not your fault. This was in no way your doing, okay?” 

I sat back and nodded – but to what, exactly, was I agreeing to? Ambivalence? Acquiescence? Arms crossed over my chest, head turned away, staring out the fog-streaked window to my right, looking out over the bleak hellscape that was the south side of LA in and around Long Beach. Oil depots and cracking towers, squalid houses in disrepair, endless billboards advertising the services of worker’s comp and accident lawyers. 

‘Injured at work? Hurt in a car accident? Let us help you get the millions you deserve…’

How many lawyers would line up to help Jenn sue me for abandonment and neglect, I wondered. Didn’t I deserve it? Could a good lawyer, I wondered, sue a corpse? Could she go after her father, too?

Jennie was waiting up for me; so were her parents. Her staid, good natured, mid-Western plain as white bread parents. Warren the scientist-surgeon, who simply could do no wrong. Michelle the physicist who carried her water color supplies with her wherever she traveled. They’d raised three daughters and I feel certain neither ever hurt their kids in any way whatsoever. So what was that all about if not the luck of the draw? Sorry, kid, but your dad’s a molester. Tough luck, kid. Better luck next time. Jenn’s parents were church-going conservatives, but then again, so were Jennie’s.

The luck of the draw? How fucked up was that?

But we faced an even bigger problem, one waiting just ahead. 

Jennie was getting very sick now, and yet despite the nature of her condition no one would tell me anything.

Then Niki delivered. Another girl, my little girl. Michelle. And wouldn’t you know it, Michelle looked just like my mom. And as Niki was resolute in her resolve to not tell her parents who the father was, guess what they thought? At least they had the grace to smile and not come down on me, but they had every right – because the shortest distance between these two points was an easy jump to the obvious conclusion.

A week later a hospice nurse showed up on my doorstep. She was delivering some supplies, she said, for Jennie. And these I could not help but see carried meanings all their own.

Morphine, and lots of it. In amber cough syrup bottles. With little insulin syringes – without needles affixed. Just fill the syringe with about five units, put it under the tongue and within seconds the pain will abate – somewhat. “More might be needed,” was the next casual understatement so casually delivered.

Warren showed me how to fill the syringe to the proper dose but, he told me, he just couldn’t do it. Not to his baby-girl, the one he’d doted over while changing her diapers, the little girl who had always been his secret favorite. He pre-filled five syringes then went out and sat by the pool, his upturned face full of a despair no sun could warm.

Jennie just nodded to my obvious reluctance. “Don’t worry, it’s not going to kill me, Aaron. It’ll just make the pain go away, maybe make me a little sleepy. That’s all…”

I slipped the syringe under her tongue and gently pushed the plunger, then threw it away like those plastic things were pure evil. Because like all double-edged swords, they truly were; true, they eased her suffering, but with each syringe she began drifting away from us. 

But Jennie felt more at ease in her drifting, though she rarely slept, not on five units, anyway.

The water in the pool felt cool to her so I turned up the temp until it was where she felt comfortable, then I would kind of sashay along through the water while I carried her and damn it all but she was still so lovely. And it was so unfair. To her. To Tracy and Rebecca, and to her parents and sisters. And yes, to me as well. Jenn, locked up in a room full of demons was still just as healthy as a horse, and here was Jennie, locked up inside a body that was failing her. 

Then one evening while I carried her about the warm pool, she kind of rolled over a bit and then she straddled me, pulled aside my trunks while she played with me, then before I knew what was happening I was inside and the look in her eyes was amazing. The love in her eyes. Her love of life, her love for me. Everything about that moment felt kissed by the infinite, like her life would never end, like our love would never be at an end. She told me how much she’d wanted to feel me like this again, and how making this new music with Elektric Karma had felt, in a way, like the best kind of sex. Sex inside the mind, she said. Sex within the infinite. She told me she’d felt like she was inside me as she watched – and listened – to the alchemy within as our music took on shape and form. She told me I’d always be able to find her in my music, because she had finally become my muse.

She was so attuned to life, and she always had been. 

“Feel like company?” 

Okay. At first her demure little ‘Okay” had felt kind of humorous, it was our inside joke, but it meant so much more to us now. She was going to go wherever life took her – and then Troubadour happened along – because her dimwitted owner had forgotten to bring along a few books..

I think about five days later the pain became insurmountable. Not unbearable, but insurmountable. Unbearable pain she could deal with, but not this new, much deeper creature. She said she had been stalked long enough, that it was time to stop and to finally confront the beast.

It’s all too easy. Instead of 5 units, you fill the syringe to 50. Then you fill five syringes.

One after the other. Slowly. So easy, yet so impossible the mind retreats from the reality of this last duty.

And then I held her hand. Slowly. I kept talking to her, kept feeling the reassuring squeeze of her hand. Slowly. Then her breathing slowed, her skin grew cool, and too soon my Jennie didn’t hurt anymore. I was vaguely aware of the hospice nurse making a call, then I heard those words you never want to hear. There was nothing more to do so I went out to be with my family.

+++++

Her passing was not marked by any familial strife; her parents had grown inured to the idea of cremation. Jennie wrote that she wanted the girls to spend equal time in the States, Moorea, and New Zealand, and she wanted them to spend gobs of time on Troubadour. With me. She wanted them to understand where we had come from, the forces that had brought us together, and where, I think, our generation had come from. We struck out to see the world on terms all our own, and our girls were the result. And Jennie knew that it would be their turn soon.

So I dashed down to Auckland, checked out the ongoing work on Troubadour. I cleaned the house, made sure that Rebecca’s room was ready to go before dashing back to LA. Shelly met me at the airport, drove me straight to MCA in Burbank, drove me for a final confrontation with the suits. Jerry and Carlos and Jordan were there, waiting. I could sense daggers under the table, waiting to be called to action.

‘Was I ready to tour?’ everyone politely wanted to know.

“I am if you are,” I said, as politely.

Everyone relaxed.

“How about Niki?” I asked. “Do you think she’s ready?”

“She says she is. Our only concern is you.”

Elektric Karma was my last link to a rapidly vanishing world – and I simply wasn’t prepared to let that part of my life pass from my hands just yet. The album, Elektric Karma’s Last Stand was released, to modest fanfare. Jordan’s song proved to be a durable single, yet it wasn’t quite the performer he’d hoped for. Niki’s pseudo-Christian hillbilly rocker was widely ridiculed, and she of course was crushed. My lone contribution, The Gordian Knot, was the unexpected sleeper hit of the release, and I had to admit that the digital recording brought out all the nuance I’d struggled to give the piece. Though the track bordered on Prog bombast, I think it was an accessibly deeper meaning within that struck a nerve with most listeners. I’d tried to summarize my dream – that torrid, overwrought wandering through the sixties on the flight from New Zealand – through the eyes of a child trying to make sense of that world. Because that’s what we all are, really. Children wandering around in the dark trying to make sense of this thing we’d created.

Anyway, the album was a modest success, and I say modest because life had moved on by then. Moved on from the sixties, and even the early seventies. Disco had swamped the airwaves, and the rock Gods of the 60s had simply crumbled up and fallen away, one group after another disbanding and moving on. To solo careers and other uneasy, inept rationalizations.

MCA decided a more modest tour of the US was warranted, given the modest sales and even more modest audience reaction to word we would tour to support the release. This US tour was further trimmed to just ten venues, and not one was a sold out affair. While the tour as such was enjoyable, I was more than happy to be done with Karma after six weeks on the road, and I returned to LA ready to get on with the next chapter of my life.

I liked Beverly Hills, and I always had, but something odd was going on. The town had always been an enclave of sorts, where people from the entertainment industry mingled in close proximity to the studios – and to one another. It was, in a word, cliquish. And in a way, very Jewish. And perhaps it was this Jewishness that made this enclave such an obviously attractive investment opportunity for Saudi princes and wealthy Persian ex-pats looking for creative ways to offend the locals, whom they detested. Buying Gene Kelly’s old place on Sunset and putting up fences replete with nude statuary painted black and gold was just the first salvo, but after that the parade of garishness was officially off to the races.

The exodus started soon after. Aspen and Telluride became two of the preferred destinations, then Provence and Tuscany. One by one, houses built by actors from the Golden Age were razed and replaced with mini-mansions built to the lot lines. I refused to give in.

Pop’s house, in the 800 block of North Foothill, remained a curious holdout. And ever the reactionary, I planted a tangled jungle out front and the house soon disappeared from view, hidden behind diaphanous veils of protective green traceries. The backyard remained unchanged; a vast swimming pool surrounded by orange and lemon trees, with a sprinkling of avocado trees mixed in for convenient guacamole salads. By 1980 the house was outlandish by virtue of its anachronisms, and therefore I loved it.

Niki lived there for a while and I think she was hoping that I’d give in and marry her, but in truth I did not love her and she knew that. She was, too, the opposite of Jennie, even the opposite of Jenn. Troubadour troubled her. Or I should say Troubadour’s hold over me troubled her. I would not, and could not abandon our little ship; Troubadour was mine, but more importantly she was ours, Jennie’s and mine. And like Jennie, Troubadour owned vast swaths of my heart.

Yet the four of us returned to Auckland for the new school year, and I started taking Tracy out on weekends, getting her used to the motion, and she still loved playing with the dolphins. Rebecca nursed beside her ‘sister’ Michelle, cementing a relationship that would define these girls in so many unexpected ways, and it wasn’t all that long before they began going out on Troubadour. Sailing became second nature to them, just as French Polynesia became their second home – even as Pop’s house in BH remained a fixture in their lives.

I still had to return to the States twice a year, though frequently I returned almost monthly. I was producing now, and now had production facilities of my own in Auckland. Keep in mind that this was happening in the pre-internet era and often things had to be handled ‘in person’ to keep things moving. So for that reason alone it made sense to keep Pops house, and I continued to use the studio there for all kinds of projects.

And then one time I returned only to run across an interesting development.

I could see the lights were on as Shelly pulled up into the driveway to drop me off, and when I stepped inside I heard music was playing gently in the background – Sinatra and Jobim, of course – and I turned, looked at Shelly. She looked at me and smiled, then just left me there, dangling.

So I walked in, followed the music to Pops old bedroom, and yes, Terry was there, waiting. I was lost, until I was found? Isn’t that how it goes?

We drove out Sunset to Gladstone’s for soup and shrimp. She’d had enough of London, she told me. Enough of life without me. Without California, too. When Shelly called about some kind of legal matter a few week before, she told Terry about Jenn and Jennie. Terry said she rang off and then called TWA and within hours was on her way. I didn’t ask any other questions, just told her I was happy to see her. Because I was.

There was still a lingering distance between us, but I knew and she knew that this was our time. We took it easy, separate bedrooms and all that jazz, but we started spending all our time together. 

The love had always been there. That wasn’t the problem, and it never had been. And I really didn’t care what people said or thought now. Terry was home, she was my safe place, and gradually we worked our way up to more than that.

“Should I stay here?” she asked the day I told her I needed to return to Auckland. “Or should I go to Moorea?”

“You’re Commonwealth. Come to Auckland.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Where will I stay?”

“With me and the girls, of course.”

And that was that.

+++++

Terry became a part of our life, and Niki surrendered to the inevitable.

Producing duties in LA became more frequent, and demanding, and so we all surrendered to the inevitable. We moved back to LA, to Pop’s house. We spent vacations on Moorea with Warren and Michelle, or we went back to Auckland and to Troubadour and we took her out on mini-adventures around the islands. And so began the most exhilarating period of my life, as the next two decades were marked by the most astonishing changes. Flurries of soiled diapers gave way to morning walks to Hawthorne Elementary and Trick-or-Treating at the Witches House on Walden Drive. Niki and Michelle stayed a few miles away, in Westwood, and so Michelle began to fade quietly from our lives – until I relented and told Niki she could stay with us. With the order of our little universe restored the girls flourished again.

But then all sorts of things started turning sour. 

The first? Warren, while working at the clinic on Moorea two summers after Jennie left us, simply stood up from a chair and clutched his chest – and he said “Oh, my,” on his way down to the floor – and just like that, he was gone. In the blink of an eye. Except he was with me and Tracy when that happened. I called Niki and she hopped on the next flight to Papeete with Michelle, who was devastated.

I was left to settle Warren’s affairs, and he’d declared he wanted a chapel built on the island, and he’d left funds to get that going. No one was surprised by how many lives he’d touched, or by how many who came to the dedication of the chapel, but his ashes were interred there with Jennie’s, as I think I mentioned earlier, and everyone was there for the service – including Terry, who Warren talked about ‘til the end.

The girls, all of them, were as shattered as I by his passing, but Michelle, Warren’s wife, was particularly ill-equipped to deal with life without her soulmate. She loved Moorea, however, and I had no qualms telling her to consider the house hers.

But as his memorial service passed into memory, what left me reeling was the thought that Jennie and I had never finished our trip together. On Troubadour. And yet she was still sitting down there in New Zealand, waiting for my return. 

The next shoe to drop? I learned that Jenn had finally succeeded, and in a psychiatric prison, no less. I didn’t hear how she did it, only that she had finally succeeded, and I was left to reconcile the two of them, my two Jennifers. One doomed to a life of hell, the other doomed by a life too short. One who’d had too much, too soon, and one who’d never had enough – and both linked to Tracy, now and forever.

And so it was Tracy who first went to sea with me, to finish Jennie’s voyage. We sailed up to Moorea, then to Hawaii, and she was nine years old when we started that first trip together, and she was already a good sailor the voyage was spectacular. We went snorkeling with friends, had dinner on Calypso, and I taught her how to play my backpacker’s guitar. Michelle joined the crew next. She wanted to see Japan, the temples and castles around Kyoto, so the two of us spent almost a year on Troubadour exploring the Sea of Japan. She dove with the Ama and we walked mountain trails alive with cherry blossoms, and we took hundreds of pictures of temples and cherry blossoms to carry back to her grandmother. 

Rebecca was last to join up; we sailed from Japan north to Alaska, then down the west coast of North America to Newport Beach, and Troubadour had a homecoming of sorts there. I re-powered her again, replaced her rigging and sails, then Michelle joined us and we sailed her back along the track of our original voyage, from San Diego to Nuku Hiva, Papeete and finally to Auckland.

It seemed like only a few days passed and then Tracy left for college, to Stanford of course, and then Rebecca and Michelle followed, to Stanford and Berkeley – and now I, just scraping fifty years young, was alone for the first time in my life.

I’ve been deliberately vague about Terry.  And yes, she was still Life Magazine’s Most Beautiful Woman in the World. Pops had, I think I’ve mentioned, moved to protect her from the consequences of a horribly abusive relationship. She had loved Pops but theres was a platonic affair. Pops had just lost his second wife and was a total basket case, but not so far gone that he couldn’t see the trouble Terry was in, so he’d done the honorable thing. And they’d consoled each other for a time and, yes, loved one another in their way. But that was then…

…and this was now.

After her return, she told me how her feelings towards me had changed when Deni and I first showed up at the house, right after Elektric Karma’s first ever concert to the coterie of music dignitaries at the Universal Amphitheater. I was no longer the awkward teenager she’d coached out onto the stage at piano recitals, nor was I the painfully shy, infinitesimally young teenager having my first nervous breakdown before the Big Spring Dance in junior high. No, she’d seen me as I really was. I would always be Pop’s grandson – and therefore the one person who would never hurt her, and everything she’d learned about me over the years had simply reinforced her opinion and, in a way, only made her love for me that much more intense. Her words, not mine.

I never had to tell Terry what my feelings were for her. She knew. And I knew that she knew. Perverted? Not really. Not from where I sit, anyway.

Troubadour was now on the hard in Hawaii, so Terry and I flew across and looked her over. She was curious about sailing but in all our years together I’d never once taken her out. She’d been out on big yachts in Antibes, but those weren’t the kinds of yachts one or two people sailed. And yet she’d always been curious about that life, or should I say that part of my life. God knows why, but that’s between God and her, not me.

I had Troubadour resuscitated once again, brought back to her original glory. Everything new. Engines, sails, standing rigging and chainplates, through-hulls and electronics – every little thing – and then we, Terry and me, set sail to Moorea, two drifters out to see the world, outbound, together. My huckleberry friend.

We sailed to Australia a month or so later, she and I, then on to the Red Sea. We transited the Suez, sailed to Greece, then Sardinia and Corsica, and we stopped in Antibes and stayed a year. We continued on to Gibraltar, spent a week there getting some skin cancers cut out, then we crossed to the BVI and, eventually, a few years later, we transited the Panama Canal and returned to Hawaii, technically completing a circumnavigation somewhere along the way. Tracy was going to medical school at UCLA in the fall so we put Troubadour on the hard again and flew over to LA., as it was now time to get the house ready for Tracy.

I wrote my first serious classical work that summer, while Terry and my three girls played in the bookstores around Westwood Village. I filed my little symphony away for posterity when I finished with it, to be opened only in case of emergency after I was long gone. Maybe someone would play it someday, but that would be for the girls to decide, not me. I did write one more Electric Karma album and Terry called it Troubadour. The last of my San Francisco cadre, Carlos and Jerry came to the house and with Jordan and Niki we worked on it for a few months, and I like to think that Deni’s ghost was helping us out here and there. Anyway – everything finally came full circle on the master recording, though there’d be no concerts this time. We said our final goodbyes and Elektric Karma was no more.

Troubadour had fallen into disuse again by the time we returned to her; she’d languished in Honolulu for two years before I returned to her – and Terry and I decided to work her over one last time before her final return to Newport Beach. When she was perfect again we left together, heading set to northeast out of Hawaii. Terry had become a decent sailor, far better than Jennie, almost as good as Jenn, but my three girls were pretty good, too. We made it to Vancouver then waited for the weather before following the route that Jenn and her father might have, if I’d joined them on that doomed voyage. We picked up the currents that pulled us home, and it was easier to bypass Seattle so we made for the Golden Gate, and Terry and I spent a week walking around Berkeley. I finally found Deni’s purple paisley house, yet it had been painted an olive green that made it look vaguely putrid and militarist, and I had to laugh at that irony. We walked around the streets of the old downtown, tried to find some of the places we haunted back then, but like the Fillmore everything was gone now. Troubadour took us outside again a week later and we turned south, bound for Santa Barbara and, finally, to Avalon.

Off Casino Point in that shockingly blue water, it felt like another spring day fifty years ago. LA was still just visible in the distance, still lost under her blanket of perpetual brown haze. Sparkling sunlight danced on the water, a few dozen sailboats on mooring balls hovered on a cool breeze blowing in from the Pacific. 

We are motoring through the mooring field, and the hand on the outboard’s tiller is mine but I don’t recognize the skin on those fingers, but that’s about the only thing I can see that’s changed. 

Even Troubadour looks unchanged. The same hull, the same green cove stripe, the varnish still gleaming. A few details have changed, this and that to keep up with the latest technology, but she looks ready for the next fifty years. And who knows, maybe she is. Maybe she’s in that same petrified forest me and Pops were stuck in that night, right after he married Terry. I turned away from my feelings, turned and looked at Terry and looked at all our yesterdays. Once upon a time I had gone out looking for a Terry of my own and I found Troubadour instead, yet now here she was, by my side. Funny how life takes you places you never thought you’d go. Maybe love is the funniest thing of all, but what is life without love…?

We heard the Grumman fly over the harbor and turned, watched her line up into the wind and land on the water just off the point, and then the seaplane taxied into the harbor, pulled up next to the float off the town dock and helping hands tied her to land again. A moment later three girls started streaming out of the old Goose, my girls, all three of them, and then came Niki. I came at them through the anchorage and Tracy saw me first. They turned as one, like fish turning in unison, and they waved at me. The children of three women – and me. Sisters all…and what a thought that was. All so different – yet all the same, of a part. All of us bound together by our time on Troubadour, by the journeys we’d shared. By the Time we spent together as father and daughters, mothers and grandmothers.

I have a new inflatable now, still too small for all my girls to cram into all at once, so as I hopped up onto the float, and after we hugged each other to death I turned the Zodiac over to Tracy and let her run her sisters out to Troubadour, then she turned around and headed back for the us. She is the oldest and, as I’m sure you’ve already figured out, the steadiest of the girls. Starting her last year of medical school soon; she, of course, plans on going into psychiatry. She stares at us as she motors between the boats, Terry and Niki and I standing there in the morning sun, breathing in the new day…

“You know,” Niki said, “I’ve never been out here before. Funny how far away everything feels.”

“None of you have,” I said, “but this is where it all started. My love for sailing, my love for Tracy’s mother.” I turned, pointed out an old corner restaurant. “Right there, as a matter of fact, and that was almost thirty years ago.” 

Time has been kind to this old place. Change never took root here.

“How’s Troubadour?” Niki asked.

“Kind of like me. Old, but serviceable.”

We smiled at one another; Niki looked at me and came over, slipped under my arm and held onto me. Terry of course never lets me go – not ever – and we stood together until Tracy made her way back through the anchorage to us. We loaded up and rode through the morning, and I never once looked back.

Tears For Fears \\ The Girl That I Call Home

Coda

We sailed to Newport Beach, back to where Troubadour was born, and I had her hauled. Her hull needed attention now, her gelcoat was tired and cracked, so she was due for a facelift – and maybe another engine, too. It was funny if only because one of the guys who helped build Troubadour was the owner of the yard now, and he remembered me, and Troubadour. We got caught up on her travels and he kind of teared up when he realized what I was telling him. That his hands had helped create something so strong and vital, and something so important to so many people.

Then we made our way up the 405 to Beverly Hills, back to the house on Foothill Road, and while the girls were settling in I walked around the house, lost inside the music born in my studio. Terry was waiting for my mood to pass, of course.

I’m going to give Troubadour to the girls tonight, when we take them out to dinner. Shelly drew up the transfer a long time ago, one of the last things she did for me before she gave up her practice, and I think it only fitting now. My girls all live in Auckland and Papeete – and LA, and though they have been Kiwis most of their lives, they’ll have Troubadour to take them on adventures of their own, somehow and with someone to keep the journey alive, and to keep me alive in their journeys.

I guess it’s all we can do, you know? Moving outbound on their own, along their part of the circle, moving into and through the light beyond the end of the stage, making music of their own lives along the way. I know they’ll begin their journey in Avalon, but of course I have I wonder what they’ll find out there, under the stars.

A week later we went out to her on the seaplane, as I had one last duty to attend. 

I had three small urns with me. My two Jennifers and Warren. My time would come, but not yet. We cast their ashes to the wind, and then watched them drift away. Outbound, on the next leg of their journey.

© 2017-24 | adrian leverkühn | adrianleverkuhnwrites.com | fiction, plain and simple, every last word.

Starship \\ We Built This City