Cherry (2 page)

Courtney Hodell first bought this book for Viking, then spent years cajoling it into existence. Her customarily brilliant edits were indispensable. So were the ongoing confidence and readings of my friend and agent Amanda Urban, the final pass by Paul Slovak, and the tireless appraisals in this and all efforts from my assistant, Betsy Hogan. Plus Don DeLillo.

My son, Dev Milburn, endured the writing process while acing junior high with a grace that threw my own adolescence into stark relief. As a kid and an anthropological presence, he was (and is) a wonder.

During several long winters, three families welcomed and sustained us—specifically John Holohan’s clan, Jack and Mary Hogan, and all the Pascales (Chuck and Lynn, Neal and Deb, Tony and Millie). Childhood friends who shared stories and pictures along the way were Vanette Atchley, Cindy Cannon, and Bob Perry.

Finally, three pals served as constant touchstones: Mary Ellen Blade, Patti Mora, and Kent Scott.

—To all these, I bow my head.

P
ROLOGUE

ONE
Elementary’s End

TWO
Midway

THREE
Limbo

FOUR
High

PROLOGUE
California 1972

N
O ROAD OFFERS MORE MYSTERY
than that first one you mount from the town you were born to, the first time you mount it of your own volition, on a trip funded by your own coffee tin of wrinkled up dollars—bills you’ve saved and scrounged for, worked the all-night switchboard for, missed the Rolling Stones for, sold fragrant pot with smashed flowers going brown inside twist-tie plastic baggies for. In fact, to disembark from your origins, you’ve done everything you can think to scrounge money save selling your spanking young pussy.

It’s best if you set out on this quest with friends equally young, because then all of you will be carried through several days’ sleepless drive and infrequent pee-stops across massive scorched desert by a collective hallucinogenic insomnia that turns the gigantic cacti into (alternately) first a guitar-toting mystic and then a phantom hitchhiker and finally into a spangled matador cutting veronicas above the sand floor. You will be carried past these metaphorical monsters by the fire and wonder of your collective yearning toward your chosen spot, the black
dot on the map at which your young-muscled bodies will be fired. In this case, Los Angeles.

Los Angeles. You’ve never been there, never been to any city that newscasters mention on TV. Still, in the three months since you’ve decided to head for California, you like to lie on the bare floor your mom let you yank the carpet out of and then lacquer black while you say the city’s name over and over as in prayer. Los Angeles, Los Angeles. You know almost nothing about the place, so while you’re waiting for your friends to come in a blue truck to ferry you off, you stare at its spot on the map, as though peering close enough will split the small dark seed of your future and reveal whatever self you’re fixing to become.

You know this won’t happen, of course. You’re not exactly stupid. You’re only standing in your shitty yard on the brink of what will be a vaporously hot morning waiting for the blue truck with questionable fuel pump and worn brakes to take you the fuck out of there. You look up the road. Nothing: a pink sky, the same warped curve of blacktop leading to the stop sign. The map you got in a neat rectangle at the Fina station now surges in your hands under the light wind.

So much comes from California, and now you’re going there, to the origins of things. The LSD you call orange sunshine looks like baby aspirin and comes (in name if not in fact) from Orange County, California. It’s just one more totem of the Golden State that set you yearning for it.

If you had your druthers, you’d all be setting out for northern California, San Francisco specifically. That’s where Haight-Ashbury is (The Hate, your right-wing sister calls it). On TV and in
Rolling Stone
magazine and in books like
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,
you’re told this place is aswarm with longhaired boys—blond and anorectic looking. These boys are not like the meat-eating, car-disemboweling, football-watching, squirrel-murdering boys you grew up dodging spitballs from. These west coast boys subsist on brown rice and ceramic bowls of clear broth in which sheer ideograms of seaweed float. Unlike the boys of your town, who (for the most part) read nothing but the football scores, or (for the
surfers anyway) the tidal charts of the newspapers in order to paddle out just before the best waves break, these California boys have rooms lined with books. They know their astrological rising signs and the names of constellations and how to weave plain old string into beaded macramé belts that you can sell outside rock concerts for some bucks apiece.

These boys occupy more and more of your conscious thought. Lying on your Sears trundle bed with the Mexican throw you picked up on a surfing expedition, you picture their long torsos and shirtless chests above their low-slung Levis.

San Francisco has other myths that recommend it, other draws besides the bead-bedecked boys. The only two books you own by living poets come from San Francisco’s City Lights Books—a dwarfish little pamphlet by Allen Ginsberg and its companion text by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. They fit neatly in the cardboard box you’re taking to Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, you’re waiting for courage. You hope to marshal enough of it to go inside and say goodbye to your daddy, who has decided to deal with your final departure as he’s dealt with the past three years’ occasional departures. He ignores it. There’s nothing so dire that Daddy can’t let it slip by with a stoical stare. Before you have to meet that gaze and turn from it so the weight of it is borne on your back for all the days you live away from this house, you try to get your hope-machine pumping.

The map usually does it, staring at it. You drag your ragged thumbnail along the trajectory you’ll follow across the state of Texas (
ear to ear,
as your daddy says), the whole yellow desert you’ll pass through ending finally in a vast wash of royal blue. The Specific Ocean, you call it, for you’ve learned there’s often a slanted truth in words you blur like this.

You finally sit your bony ass down on the concrete porch where the night’s chill of heavy dew seeps through the butt of your jean shorts. You try for a few minutes to refold the map as it was in the wire cage at the Fina station. But it’s a dismantled mechanical bird in your hands with no Tab B or Slot C to make sense of. You mean to write a poem about that, too, but it keeps coming out all wrong in the ticker tape that clicks through your head. You very much dread saying goodbye to your
daddy, who has, in fact, ignored your upcoming trip so well that even your emptied room and the plates you stood wrapping in
Leechfield Gazette
classifieds escaped comment.

There Daddy sits in his straight-backed posture, all right angles on the faux leather chair in clean khakis and shiny black shoes. Six in the morning: all dressed and no bar to go to. He is not smoking. Not smoking for him is a form of pouting. He’ll also turn down food when he’s mad. Say, Y’all go on, I’m not hungry. It’s his way to say that nothing anybody has interests him one sliver.

When you bend over to hug him, he smells of coffee dosed with whiskey. His mere presence in its dogged absence makes you cry, and the tears fall from your face to his khaki back where they hit and darken the weave. Behind him there’s an entire wall of books that first set the engine of your yearning in motion and over many years of reading and study led to this disapproved-of departure. Next to the wall of books is a painting of the seacoast at High Island that your mother did in the early fifties before you were born.

Maybe it’s no accident that you have camped at that very spot a hundred nights, sleeping-bagged under Meekham’s Pier, so you could be there when the good waves rolled in with the main tide just before dawn. Maybe that painting of Mother’s kick-started this longing for the sea that your readings of
Moby Dick
only augmented.

You dab the back of your hand against your eyes so you can better see the wrinkled majesty of your daddy’s profile against the white wall. He’s looking off into the painting like old Ahab scanning for whale, but the corners of his mouth pinch down. And while you know it’s his standard look—nothing personal—the innate distance in it fuels your own diffidence. It’s what keeps you from talking to him overmuch or questioning his whereabouts or offering details of your own. You sense his actual, upcoming geographic distance from you as a keening whine in the base of your skull.