Don't I Know You? Page 7

  I felt an odd lurch of the heart leaving him there. In a way, it was the most intimate encounter with a local we had had for months. The look in his eyes when I had held him on the road.

  By then it was three or four a.m. We groped our way through the entrails of Istanbul until we found ourselves in an empty parking lot beside a white building with a domed roof—a planetarium? It seemed like a safe place. We tucked the van up against one wall of the building, punched the lock buttons, and settled in to sleep.

  Naomi and Scooter sprawled over the bare foam mattress, having left the blanket and sheets behind with our friend. In the front seat, unwilling to curl up together, Nick and I tipped our heads back and fell into exhausted sleep.

  * * *

  A voice, high, nasal, and very loud, was keening in my ears. Now someone else is hurt and calling to us, I thought. Why are there so many injured Turkish people everywhere? Then I woke up: It was dawn, and the muezzins were broadcasting from the top of the slim minarets directly above us. We had accidentally pitched camp at the base of the Blue Mosque. As Naomi and Scooter rolled down their windows a guard spotted us and headed our way, hand on his nightstick.

  “Turn the key,” I said to Nick. “Go, go!”

  We wheeled out of the lot into the first stirrings of dawn in the city, and a teeming market. There were plenty of freaks in the crowd, hippie girls peeling oranges and thin-chested guys in drawstring pants. We pulled over to one and asked him where to find a place to stay.

  “Go to the Pudding Shop, on Divan Yolu, two streets over, and ask anybody there,” he said. “Want an orange?” said the girl, whose eyes were rimmed in kohl. We took it.

  The Pudding Shop was Istanbul’s Carnaby Street, the place everyone went as soon as they hit town, for silty Turkish coffee, rice pudding, yogurt, and news of where to head next. By the door was a message board advertising bus rides to India for $35. I wrote down the days and times. Travelers heading west after a winter in India hung out at the Pudding Shop too, bringing back a whiff of the real thing—the Eastern vibe, their eyes clear and shining with it. They weren’t going back to grad school, or fighting in Vietnam. They weren’t getting a law degree or planning a wedding. They lived in palm huts on the beach at Goa or begged and meditated. Or they set up three-stool roadside cafés, where they served crepes and fresh coconuts for a couple hours a day and then closed shop. They seemed in no hurry, and always knew where to buy the most resinous hash or the best hand-knotted carpets without getting ripped off. They knew which beaches you could camp on and where the police were hassling people. Some were just long-haired hustlers in djellabas, but a few were evidently in possession of bliss. At least, they had the charisma of having achieved a degree of ease in the world. I was so far from that.

  In Istanbul I felt myself in the suburbs again, on the outskirts of a new consciousness. This was where the new world and its strivings bumped up against the indifferent East. It was one thing for us to believe that we could easily shed the conventions of the West, coming from Canada, where the mortar was barely dry in the walls. It was another thing to wander through the Grand Bazaar of Istanbul, imagining that we could change anything about a world this rooted and strong and deep. The hippies looked slightly silly here, like bugs or monkeys, creatures out of their proper habitat. The “revolution” made more sense in the countryside than in cities, built on history, catacombs of human memory.

  But in 1970 the young mistrusted history. We wanted to shed our human past in order to be lighter and more transparent—more like the pop icons of the time: butterflies, rainbows, and daisies. We wanted to become innocent, weightless citizens of nature.

  Istanbul made me homesick for history—a history I didn’t even have. It would have been easy to keep going back in time, to sign myself up for a magic bus. But I caught a complicated, seductive scent of what lay east of Istanbul, and wasn’t sure I was up to it. And this time Nick wanted to turn back too.

  Scooter and Naomi stayed in Istanbul while Nick and I drove alone across Europe, bypassing Paris without comment, picking up hitchhikers sometimes, to London, where we delivered the van to the owner’s brother. He did check under the seats for drugs. We spent a few days in London, doing normal things together, even scoring rush seats to see a production of Hair. But when we collected our mail at the American Express counter, I saw that Sally had written Nick a postcard. He pocketed it to read later.

  There was also a letter from my friend Jane saying that she’d just found a big apartment on Queen Street with a third bedroom. Were Nick and I looking for a place to rent when we got back? No, I replied, with one line on a postcard of the Tower of London and its guillotines: Nick and I have broken up. I gave the card to him to mail.

  The next day we parted on a London street, almost casually. I made my way to the airport alone and flew home to Toronto. The moment I pushed through the subway turnstiles on the way to see my parents, my heart began to race and a feeling of panic overtook me. When I got home, my older brother greeted me at the door in his slippers; our parents had just left on a trip to the Corning Museum of Glass in upstate New York, and he was taking care of the dogs. His marriage was on the skids too, he said, almost cheerfully. Then he gave me an Ativan, my first.

  I had never had a broken heart and for a long time I couldn’t recognize what was wrong with me, or why home didn’t feel the same, would never feel the same. I kept seeing the green runaway pigs, the propane tanks as they rolled across the highway to Istanbul—that moment just before you grasp what is about to happen to you. I went to doctors and made them listen to my heart. They gave me ECGs. Nothing turned up.

  That was the year I started doing book reviews for a local newspaper—eight paperbacks a week culled from the picked-over jumble on the editor’s desk. I lugged them home in a cardboard box, and found I had opinions on everything—the I Ching, concrete poetry, pop-up books, erotica, a new edition of the Rand-McNally atlas. I filled my days with reading, and the sight of my words in print reminded me that I had a voice after all.

  By spring I wasn’t over Nick, but something had shifted: The world was a book I still wanted to open.

  The Rehearsal

  The slightly round-shouldered boy onstage could be a drifter panhandling at a stoplight, except for the expensive guitar strapped around his neck. As he tunes it he looks down, and his long hair swings right across his face. Then he walks to the lip of the stage, shading his eyes. It’s late on a February afternoon in Toronto, 1971, and Massey Hall is empty but he’s looking for someone out in the darkened auditorium.

  Sitting near the back is a middle-aged man with a square, handsome face. He’s wearing black zip-up galoshes and hasn’t taken off his overcoat or plaid scarf. Now and then he cranes his neck back toward the lobby doors. He has a strange feeling that his ex-wife, Rassy, might show up for the sound check too. He half hopes she will. It’s been years since they’ve spoken in person.

  Neil spots his father and waves.

  “Dad, could you hear that okay?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “The guitar sounded too loud to me.”

  “Isn’t it supposed to be too loud?”

  He laughs. A voice comes over the PA.

  “Neil, try backing off the mike a little.”

  “Man, this hall is so live,” he says in the direction of the voice. “I sound like Meat Loaf or something.”

  “Do you want to try it standing up instead?”

  Neil gives the voice a lopsided, glinty smile. “Standing up?”

  “Oh right. Sorry.”

  When Neil turns around, Scott can see the outline of the back brace he has worn since the operation, except for when he performs. He’s being more cautious now, trying to let his body heal properly. There are physical things he wants to be able to do around the ranch.

  Another voice comes over the PA. “Like the rug?”

  Neil looks down and for the first time notices the rose and blue Turkish carpet. “Oh yeah. Nice.”
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br />   “And if you start keeping time in those boots, it’ll help muffle the sound.”

  “Cool. Thanks, Ed.”

  No one sees the doors at the back of the hall open, as a young blond woman in glasses slips into the last row. She takes out a notebook and a pen.

  His father watches Neil gingerly lower himself onto the wooden chair, tune his guitar, and begin to sing.

  Sailing heart-ships through broken harbors

  Out on the waves in the night …

  This was the reason Scott had set the alarm for five a.m., to get his daily column out of the way early so that he could sit here alone in the dark and listen to his son. Neil’s voice, sweet and sharp at the same time, carried so much feeling even when the words stayed mysterious. It had taken him a few years to figure out that song lyrics don’t work like paragraphs in a story. They mostly trace feelings, in the way that a map records the names of towns and cities. But now he thinks his son is a good writer, very good in fact. Maybe he’d learned a thing or two from his dad, sitting for hours at the old Remington, typing on the yellow three-carbon sheets of copy paper the newspapers used back then.

  Five columns a week. When you have to write a column every day, you get economical. And you can’t half care about the words; they’re either on the money or not. But what is clarity, in a song? Sometimes he doesn’t know what the hell the lines mean in some of Neil’s songs. When you’re old enough to repay, but young enough to sell? It doesn’t seem to matter, the phrases still turn a key inside you and the feelings come. Like Blake’s poems, childlike and deep. Although he’s not sure Neil read much poetry when he was growing up. All the books were in his office, off-limits whenever Scott was working. Which was most of the time.

  The opportunity to give his son Songs of Innocence and Experience had come and gone long ago.

  As for the hair, his hobo hair, Scott had taken a pass on that early on, and so had Astrid. She was always careful not to act like his mother. She never criticized Neil. The split from the boy’s mother had been bad, but Astrid and Neil got along pretty well now.

  Anyway, his hair had always been goofy, even as a kid. Better hanging in his face like this than the damn pageboy he wore back in Winnipeg when he was in that school band. The Rogues. No, the Squires. For some reason he remembers a word, the first one Neil latched on to as a baby: “dombeen.” It meant pudding, celery, porridge, and sometimes cats. An all-purpose word. He could write a song called “Dombeen.”

  A few rows behind him, the woman in glasses writes in her notebook. She has moved closer to the stage but sits a tactful distance from Scott.

  Now the lighting guy is trying out different filters, from warm to cool. They’re going to film tonight’s concerts and the director, whose horn-rim glasses are duct-taped on one arm, prowls around the wings looking worried. Nobody can see Neil’s face on camera, he says. How can they get him to put his hair behind his ears?

  Neil sits patiently on the edge of the stage, knocking the spit out of his harmonica. He was never a complainer, Scott remembers. Even when he had polio as a boy and was in terrible pain at times, he didn’t make a fuss or cry, he just got quieter. After the first bad day in the hospital, all he said was “Dad, this is the worst cold I’ve ever had.” Scott had been the same himself as a boy, when he came down with the Spanish flu the year so many people died of it.

  Generally speaking, the Youngs were good at not crying. That was reserved for stories, or songs.

  Neil stands, hitching up his jeans. He’s too skinny, Scott thinks. And he looks like he’s already shouldering a lot for a twenty-five-year-old kid. True, he and Rassy had gotten married around the same age, but that was back when people magically became adults overnight. They turned twenty-one, found jobs, bought houses, had children, wore ties. Things are different now. The young stay younger longer. So do the older ones, or at least they try to. He’s been guilty of that himself.

  He walks out into the lobby to see if it’s still snowing outside. The two Astrids, his wife and Neil’s sister, will come later to catch the first show. Neil tactfully made sure that Rassy’s ticket was for the second show. Scott still wishes they could all go somewhere afterward as a family again. Maybe to Ciccone’s, their old spot, on King Street West.

  He steps outside to a cold, clear sky. After coming down thick and cottony all day, the snow is starting to let up. He smokes half a cigarette, his eleventh of the day, and goes back to his seat. Someone else is sitting in the darkened auditorium, he notices, a blonde with a notebook. Probably a reporter. He moves to the other aisle.

  Up on the stage, a tiny woman in white jeans and cowboy boots has appeared out of the wings holding a milkshake container.

  “It’s called a smoothie,” she says, handing it to Neil. “But with yogurt. I hope you like yogurt.” In Toronto, in 1971, yogurt was still an exotic import from unknown Slavic countries.

  “Hey, I’m livin’ on a ranch now,” he says to the jeans girl. “Cows are my people.”

  “It has papaya too. It’s supposed to give you enzymes or something.”

  “Thanks, tastes good.”

  He watches his son lazily flirt and wonders how things are going with the new one, the actress. But a movie actress with her own ambitions, trying to settle down with a musician away on tour, somebody whose father didn’t exactly stick around—that’s not going to be easy. Even if Neil has turned out to be more of a homebody than Scott ever was. Not many twenty-five-year-olds want to buy land, or can, for that matter. Three hundred and forty thousand dollars he paid for the ranch, in cash. But it was a smart move, Scott thinks, not to get too caught up in L.A. Although you can smoke a lot of pot out in the country too.

  Land. The best thing he ever did when he came back from the navy, Scott thinks, was to buy those acres up around Omemee, through the vet land deal. Neil was eight or nine, and he spent the summer days fishing off the Mill Street Bridge. Then there was the one long season at Lake of Bays, when all their friends visited. Laughter and drinks late into the night on the porch. That’s what he thinks about whenever he hears Neil sing “Helpless”—those summers up north with everyone there.

  That was before the newspaper column, when all he wrote was fiction. It felt good being able to raise two boys just by writing short stories and sending them off to magazines. Getting rejections along with checks in the mail from the Weekend or the Saturday Evening Post. Some for $3,000—a lot of money back then. Surely Neil has some good memories from those days in Omemee, before his dad disappeared.

  He doesn’t regret leaving so much as the fact that he didn’t talk about it to the boys. He should have said, “Remember, you can come live with me whenever you like.” He assumed they knew that. Anyway, frank talk wasn’t the custom then. Now he knows that when a father leaves a son at the age of thirteen, everyone can seem to carry on fine, but it changes things pretty deeply. It meant, for one thing, that over the years they got in the habit of being out of touch, and so they have to work around that. Not that Neil seems to hold it against him. It’s never come up in conversation, at least.

  Onstage, Neil is singing “Cowgirl in the Sand,” his voice cutting through the words with an almost bitter sound.

  Old enough now to change your name

  When so many love you is it the same …

  When Astrid gets here, he will definitely suggest they all get together afterward, at Ciccone’s. To catch up. A lot has happened since Neil left town five years ago, in that goddamned Pontiac hearse—the cops had to call him in the middle of the night when they found it abandoned in L.A., with parking tickets due. Scott was sure that going to California was a foolish move and that Neil would be home before winter. But two weeks after he arrived Neil had somehow found himself a band and paying gigs. The next thing he knows, the first CSNY album is out and sells a million copies. Then his son—his skinny, chaotic, floppy-haired son—is playing Carnegie Hall with people like Jack Nicholson paying a lot of money to hear him perform.

 
; That was when it hit him. He was standing on the street in front of a Carnegie Hall poster with a red Sold Out banner across it, and the words “Tonight. Neil Young—Folk Singer” at the top. Scalpers were selling tickets for $100 (you couldn’t buy an obstructed seat for that now). As the tears came he stared at the poster and wondered how life had brought the two of them to this point. Later, sitting in the audience four rows from the stage, he felt too self-conscious to cry.

  After the show, backstage, he stood apart from the people swarming Neil. Jack Nicholson came over to him. He had long muttonchop sideburns. “Your boy is very special, I hope you recognize that. You should be celebrating!” he said, clapping him on the back.

  Scott did recognize it. He just didn’t show it. That’s why now, in the rehearsal, the sound of Neil’s voice wraps around his heart like a lasso.

  * * *

  The snow has stopped well before the first concert, and Massey Hall is full of almost too-reverent fans. They applaud the smallest moment, including a request from Neil onstage not to take photographs when he’s singing.

  “It kinda distracts me from what I’m trying to do here,” he drawls. “When the song is over and something’s happening, like, people are applauding, then you can take your pictures, okay?” They laugh and applaud again. He’s wearing yellow work boots and a plaid shirt that hides his back brace.

  Scott sits near the front with the Astrids on either side. Maybe it’s the hometown effect or the acoustics of Massey Hall, but Neil’s voice sounds especially strong, and he attacks each number with a somber force. He seems to be singing to them from far inside the songs. Most are unfamiliar.