Eminent Hipsters (9781101638095) (12 page)

In the sixties, during the war between the generations, I always figured that all we had to do was wait until the old, paranoid, myth-bound, sexually twisted Hobbesian geezers died out. But I was wrong. They just keep coming back, these moldering, bloodless vampires, no matter how many times you hammer in the stake. It's got to be the amygdala thing. Period, end of story.

The crowd sat through our versions of some of the great sixties soul tunes, hating them, waiting only for the amygdala-comforting Doobie Brothers hits that Michael sings, Boz's dance numbers and the Steely Dan singles that remind them of high school or college parties. They despised the old Ray Charles tune, and I started to despise them. Toward the end of the show, during McDonald's piano introduction to “Takin' It to the Streets,” I think I really made Carolyn and Catherine uncomfortable by walking back to their riser and telling them, as a way of venting my rage, that I'd been imagining a flash theater fire that would send the entire audience screaming up the aisles, trampling each other to get to the exits, ending up in a horrible scene outside on the sidewalk with people on stretchers, charred and wrinkled. When things aren't going well, the girls, standing just behind me, have to listen to my insane rants. If they're singing, I'll rant to Jim Beard, playing keyboards on
the next riser, or, if he's busy, I'll walk across the stage and harass the horn players.

No, I'm not a psycho; it was just a momentary surge of wrath. (Two days later, a bona fide psycho shot up a movie theater in Colorado.) The crowd, they know not what they do. But when I'm fighting exhaustion, putting everything into the performance and still feeling like I'm getting an indifferent response from the house, it's easy to morph into the Hulk. I guess I'm getting more and more thin-skinned as the tour goes on. It's the ATD starting to pull me down, down, down and out.

This morning, the whole band flew to Atlanta to begin the Southern leg of the tour. On the plane, I mentioned to Vince that I regretted my behavior onstage the previous night, bothering the girls with my theater fire scenario. And then Vince revealed this: Not twenty minutes before I was annunciating my terrible vision to the girls onstage, Vince happened to see Pasqual unpacking the laundry backstage so he could put it in my wardrobe case. When Pasqual tossed the weightless plastic wrapping aside, it drifted onto one of the hippie-dippy atmospheric candles in the hall. Vince alerted Pasqual to the ensuing conflagration and he was able to stomp it out. Hmm.

I also found out this: Just like almost every other band, we use a smoke machine to create a haze onstage, which greatly enhances the lighting effects. Every time one of these machines is turned on, theaters have to turn off their fire alarm systems so as not to set them off, which means for the entire length of the show. Think about that, theatergoers.

Anyway, as far as my fiery vision goes, I've never seen any evidence to support the idea of extrasensory perception. What people mistake for ESP, or a case of someone being “psychic”—for instance, someone having foreknowledge of future events or events taking place elsewhere—seems to me to be a matter of intuition based on the conscious and unconscious accumulation of thousands or millions of tiny details. Naturally, some folks are more talented along these lines than others. For instance, my wife is, certainly; I'm not. But I think I might have been pulling in a little ectoplasm last night. No?

A miserable night in the Grand Hyatt. Not a wink of sleep. How can I be the adorable host, the sensitive accompanist, the more or less competent vocalist I'm expected to be under these conditions? I guess it was a mistake to go out last night and see
The Amazing Spider-Man
in 3-D, but after being cooped up on that rotten plane . . .

And then this whole business of changing hotels. When we arrived at the Ritz-Carlton, I realized it was that place I absolutely hate at the intersection of several highways, parking lots and malls in Buckhead. Like, Oh, let's build a luxury hotel in this post–World War III dystopian wasteland. To boot, the lobby and the bar had been taken over by conventioneers from Microsoft, turning it into a scene from
Animal House
, only these TV Babies all reeked of cologne. I panicked. Minutes later, I had Vince check out and we moved down the road to the Grand Hyatt, which was at least a little better—some green things were visible out the windows and so on.

I hadn't seen a film in 3-D since, probably,
Hondo
with John Wayne when I was six or seven. I remember an arrow soaring off the screen and right into my guts. The new 3-D is better, but maybe too exciting for a late show.

Operating on no sleep in my mid-sixties is way different from when I was a kid. I don't run so well on auto anymore. Just now, shaving, I noticed that I'm not thinking practically but, rather, ontologically. In other words, instead of asking myself, “Am I shaving well?” or “Am I shaving cleanly?” I was asking myself, “Am I shaving?” And then, moving on to ethics: “Is shaving the newly grown hair off my face—putting aside, for the moment, the question of whether I leave the sad little goatee alone—a good thing to do? And, even if that is so, is it the right thing to do at this particular time?”

Uh-oh: insomnia tends to come in waves. Maybe I should see if Libby can FedEx me some Ativan.

No need. I bummed an Ambien from Pasqual. I still woke up quite early, but I feel okay. Actually, some therapists recommend staying up all night as a simple cure for simple depression. It's worked for me in the past. In this case, it had the effect of wringing all that boiling, hateful venom out of my body. Last night at Alpharetta, the crowd was my new best friend. Woozy from lack of sleep, I was a combination of Samuel Johnson and Will Rogers, knocking out pithy bons mots, gettin' silly, acknowledging the audience's complicity in life's grand comedy (or so I thought). It had to be a hundred degrees onstage, but the band played like demons. When McDonald went into
“If You Don't Know Me by Now,” a middle-aged couple in the first row started making out. On cue, a crack of thunder sounded as we came out for the encore, and as we walked off, a torrent of Georgia rain drenched the happy, cheering crowd.

•   •   •

S
torm clouds here too, in Orange Beach, Alabama, on the “Redneck Riviera.” It's hot, but mainly it's that the air is heavy with water vapor, like in one of those greenhouses they use to grow orchids. The dressing rooms reek with mold, so I've decided to hang out on the bus. Unfortunately, something has come loose in the ceiling in the back bedroom, resulting in a nasty rattle, especially when the AC is on. At the same time, Vince comes in to tell me that the hotel we had booked for the two days off in Tampa has reported that, due to unforeseen construction, the rooms might be a little noisy. Fuck that. What's more, everything in the area, including the hotel where the band will be staying, is all booked up. Suddenly, the bus is more or less uninhabitable and we have no place to stay starting tonight. But I have another reason to avoid the two-day layover in Tampa Bay. I make plans to get on a flight to New York in the morning.

•   •   •

L
ate in July 2009, my wife, Libby, was helping Walter shop for kitchen equipment for his daughter. As they walked down Madison Avenue, she turned to him and said, “I know Ezra's dead. I haven't heard from him since July sixth.”

Her forty-three-year-old son had moved to Tampa several years before. Looking at his powerful, six-foot-three frame and his strong features, one might not guess that he was a troubled soul who'd had a chaotic childhood and had spent his teen
years deep inside the drug culture of the late seventies and early eighties. He'd spoken openly of his suicidal thoughts many times and had come pretty close to pulling it off in recent years. Though his relationship with Libby was tumultuous, Ezra and his mother were so close that it seemed at times as if they shared a single soul. She was tormented by the thought that he might try it again. I had come to love Ez as well and on several occasions had spent long hours on the phone trying to find a way to lift him out of his complex despondency.

Walter tried to make light of Libby's fears. When she got home, though, she tried to contact Ezra by phone and e-mail, without success. On July 30, she checked again to see if she had missed an e-mail. She finally thought to check a rarely used Twitter account and found this from July 9:

From: snarky5000

Ezra to Mom

Had a tooth pulled today—

Now the long, slow, upward march towards death begins—

Libby immediately called his numbers again, with no response. She called the main office of the apartment complex he lived in and was able to speak to the manager, Rhonda, who said she thought someone had heard him “howling at the moon” outside his apartment the night before. But when Libby sent her the Twitter message, Rhonda decided she'd better call the sheriff. At four p.m., Libby called again and asked if the officers had broken into the apartment.

“Yes,” said Rhonda.

“Is he alive?”

Rhonda said, “I'm sorry, I can't tell you that.”

Libby took a Valium, stared out the window for a while and then lay down on the bed. At six thirty, an Officer Sepulveda called.

“Is this Mrs. Fagen?”

“Yes.”

“Are you alone?”

“Yes.”

“Your son's dead,” said the detective. “Gunshot wound to head.”

“How long ago did he . . . ?”

“Well . . . he's covered with bugs.”

“No! I want to die too—”

As far as we've been able to find out, Ezra took his own life on his birthday, July 23. Our lives have never been the same, and never will be.

After spending a day with Libby, I flew back to Tampa, played the damn gig in Clearwater and got back on the bus for the ride to Florida's east coast. Libby escaped to Mexico, where she has friends.

No one was waxing the floors or vacuuming when we walked into the lobby of the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel in Hollywood, Florida, at three o'clock in the morning. Like the Hard Rock in Vegas, it's a casino, and it was jumping. Several hundred people were gaming and playing the slots.

The Seminole's main claim to fame is that Anna Nicole
Smith, the blond creature whose tragic life was, thanks to reality TV, also a parody of a tragic life, died in room 607 from an overdose of downers. I remember that the teaser for that mind-boggling, heart-whipping show on the E! network was “We don't know why it's funny—it just is.” Wow.

There's a folded piece of cardboard on my night table here in room 1247 displaying a quote from Aerosmith in a script font that reads:

Dream on

Dream on

Dream yourself a dream come true

Not exactly Yeats or Auden, but, as Gore Vidal used to say, shit has its own integrity. I opened up my iTunes and had Paul Desmond, playing live with Brubeck in the late fifties, put me to sleep.

After the Seminole gig, we rode five hours to Jacksonville. I sat up front with Geoff, watching the white line. At four a.m., Vince and I walked into the large, smelly lobby of the Bellevista. After a trek down yet another endless, hallucinatory corridor, we opened the unpainted pine door to an oddly shaped room in which pastel furniture and drapes made of some toxic polymer resin had been installed. Moreover, the room had all the signs that it had recently been the site of a fire, as if someone had tried to dispose of a corpse in the tub with charcoal lighter fluid and a Zippo (there's that motif again). Fleeing the Hotel
Grindhouse, I picked up my bags and headed back to the bus, determined to live the insect life and never get off again.

A lot of the malls and the condos are much nicer now than when I was kid in postwar New Jersey, at the beginning of all that. But, like many of my generation, I'm afraid I'm still severely allergic to all that “plastic,” both the literal and the metaphorical. In third world countries, lefties associate it with the corporate world and call its agents “the Plastics.” Norman Mailer went so far (he always went so far) as to believe that the widespread displacement of natural materials by plastic was responsible for the increase in violence in America. Wood, metal, glass, wool and cotton, he said, have a sensual quality when touched. Because plastic is so unsatisfying to the senses, people are beginning to go to extremes to feel something, to connect with their bodies. We are all, Mailer thought, prisoners held in sensual isolation to the point of homicidal madness.

Some early Zappa:

Me see a neon

Moon above

I searched for years

I found no love

I'm sure that love will never be

A product of plasticity

A product of plasticity

Now, a half century later, I'm not so sure about that. The Babies seem awfully comfortable with simulation, virtuality and Plasticulture in general. People adapt; they mutate. That's
what evolution's all about, isn't it? The concept of love may mutate as well. Some late, oft-quoted Yeats, always bracing:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,


Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

In the morning, Vince located a pleasant hotel in nearby St. Augustine, the Casa Monica. Unable to find the room service menu, I ate in the hotel dining room.

“How was your breakfast, sir?” the waitress asked.

“Fine,” I said. “Except, sitting here in this truly lovely room with the old Spanish woodwork and the big chandeliers with the strings of tiny glass beads hanging down, and with the Florida sunshine streaming in the windows, why does every passing second seem like a thousand years?”

Okay, I didn't say that, but I thought it. And I wasn't even particularly depressed, except for that sort of morning ennui. In the elevator, an old couple, the guy wearing a T-shirt advertising some bait and tackle shop, got off on my floor by mistake and started arguing about which one was the bigger idiot.