The Noise of Infinite Longing (25 page)

He was at the police station, in detention.

Sometimes mother could surprise. She didn’t scream, she didn’t cry, she didn’t say, as she usually did when we did something unfor- givable,What will the neighbors say?

She went to the police headquarters, the lawyer that she was, and got him out.

He was fourteen years old, foulmouthed, quick with a joke, and just as quick with the remorseful kiss on her cheek, his arms lean and longer than they should’ve been for his height, holding her. Mami, mami . . .

His life and mine were threads, the knots mother made to hold us together pulled apart, the threads running out. We came across each other once a year in my summers home, but we rarely talked seriously as he and Angeles did. I had been away from him, in board- ing school and then in college, as he was growing up.To him, I was a stranger. And after those summers, I saw him less frequently, occa- sionally at Christmases at my mother’s, but even those brief visits became more and more rare for me.

In the sixties every boy wanted to play in a band, every boy was Elvis or Lennon Jagger, letting his hair grow wild, pulled in manly ponytails, girls swooning at his feet. When my mother remarried and moved to

Texas, Amaury went with her. He was fifteen years old, living in the small town of Bryan with my mother and Leon and my younger sisters, when the Beatles arrived in the United States. But Amaury wasn’t taken with the Beatles. Not with Ringo and his ringed fingers and floppy hair; not with McCartney and his baby face and soft love songs. He didn’t sit up to watch them on
The Ed Sullivan Show
. He was driving cars full-speed down the highway between Bryan and Houston. He was getting drunk on beer from the 7-Eleven and tossing cans out the win- dow, and smoking marijuana when he could find it.

He had no drums in Bryan, in mother’s house. So he did what he could to let air into his head. He raced cars on the highway. He pushed down the worn pedal on the used sedan he had bought with money father had sent him, and shot straight through the highway, hands off the wheel. It was sweet! He got tickets, let them pile up unpaid, and he was flunking in school.

What am I going to do with him? mother asked me when I came to visit that spring of 1964.

He needs help, I said. He should see somebody.

No, she said, I won’t have any child of mine . . . Oh, God, I’m such a failure, she said, chewing her nails. She cried; she twisted her face into a grimace, as if hitting her chest with her fists, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

It’s not your fault, I said automatically. What else could I say? There’s nothing wrong with going to a shrink, I said, but it made no difference to her what I said.

No, she said, wiping tears, sniffling, now resolved, more angry than sad, we don’t need that to solve our problems. She had conve- niently forgotten that Angeles had been going to a therapist for years (against mother’s will), but I didn’t say so.

One day not long after that conversation, she was straightening up Amaury’s room when she found a stack of girlie magazines in a

drawer. She was beside herself, horrified. I doubt she had ever seen such pictures. She threw out the magazines before she told me. She didn’t even know how to tell me, how to talk about it. She knew how to cope with the girls, but this was something for a father, for a man. When Amaury came home, Leon ordered him to the kitchen. I was in the living room, trying to hear what Leon was saying. I could see him, arms across his barrel chest, bifocals firmly on his nose, Leon cleared his throat and spoke very distinctly, like a math teacher to a class of slow students, he told Amaury that either he lived by their rules or he had to leave their home.

Amaury bolted, ran up to his room, slammed the door, and refused to let me in when I followed him. Finally, he opened the door to me and sat on his bed. He was half crying, half shouting. I patted his hand, helpless. He was right and mother was right. I’m going crazy here, he said, Leon is so straight, so white-bread and dull, and this town is dead, there’s nothing to do. I knew what was coming, he wanted to go back to Puerto Rico. The next day he was on the phone to father. Father talked to mother, and she agreed, it was best for Amaury to be there with father. A plane ticket arrived within days and he was gone.

I didn’t see him again for several years.

O

ld San Juan had the life he wanted, late nights, late mornings, and it had the club Gatsby, a popular joint in its time, and there

he met his first girlfriend, a go-go dancer with lush blond hair and a figure to go with the hair, with the boots and the skimpy outfit. She fell all over him. He was seventeen, eighteen, wiry, with rock ’n’ roll fea- tures, the lean body, the leather pants, hair grown long, falling in waves, like Jim Morrison’s, eyes that sent lightning bolts, but he had still the gentle manners of a boy who worshiped and feared women

(his mother, his sisters), afraid to touch them. He had finished high school in San Juan, had started a new band with a couple of classmates, and was getting noticed in the nightlife columns of the local newspa- pers. They called the band The Living End, and Angeles had created their logo, curlicues painted across Amaury’s drums. The Living End was soon a headliner, playing at sorority balls, at the hotel clubs, and in the all-night bars in Old San Juan, when Old San Juan was the drug- store of the city, junkies and pimps and drug dealers on every corner.

We were big, Amaury liked to believe even years later. We were in demand, could choose the club, the night, the music. We filled those places.

He was living in an apartment in Old San Juan, a palace with four bedrooms and two bathrooms, the way Amaury remembered it, and he had gigs and soon girls all over town. First, there was the go-go girl, and then there was Millie, and then Sally, an American who worked as a waitress in San Juan. For girlfriends he didn’t lack. But he was a monogamist, never two-timed any woman—I am not like father, he would say laughing. They just came to him, and they were beautiful, all of them, blond, morenas, black.

But not one of them really took his heart.

That belonged to the music, to the band, to the school of broth- ers that they were.

The big break came, NewYork.

Nights in Harlem, in clubs so dark you couldn’t see the audience, clubs with names he could not remember, and long nights in a bar- ren, heatless loft on West Fourteenth Street, women, waitresses, singers, barmaids, marijuana as plentiful as water. Drugs—it was the sixties. Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, that was his life.You know, he said, you stay up all night, sleep a couple of hours wherever you hap- pen to fall, and go to work in the docks in the morning. He got a job in a factory downtown, loading up boxes, just to make sure he had

some change on him.

The band was just on the verge—marquees, big money, a record contract. Close, so close to making it. And then, just a year or so in New York, it happened. Capitol Records wanted to sign them. The big, big break was right there, he could touch it, just on the horizon, across the country. They had to go to Los Angeles, do the meetings, meet the bosses, sign the papers.

It was a sure thing, their manager said.

There was a house in the Hollywood Hills ready for them, the manager said.

Amaury and Sally put their load into a new Triumph that Amaury bought for the trip.They crossed the nation, the universe. Stopped at the sights. Slept in roadside motels. Drove into Los Angeles, the neon sprawl, craned their necks looking up at the famous Hollywood sign— H O L L Y W O O D—like thousands of dreamers and suckers, often one and the same, had done for years.They spent a night or two at the house in the Hollywood Hills, but that was temporary.They got a place in Hollywood, a run-down two-room apartment, and Amaury got a day job, another factory job loading boxes, nine to five, breaking his back.

The day came for the meeting with the recording executives. It was a big record studio. The band, all five of them, the boys and the black singer, were swept up an elevator to a carpeted office.They sat in the reception room for a long time. The Beach Boys were there (the Beach Boys!), waiting just like them. Finally, they were called in. They were ready to sign on the line.

The man at the desk looked them over. A big desk, window behind him, Los Angeles below, laid out into eternity.

We’ve discussed this thing, he told them, and we’ve decided you’re not for us.

Silence, footsteps outside the door muffled by carpets.

You want to play Puerto Rican music, and clearing his throat, the man went on. Your singer, she’s not right. Amaury thought, She’s black! That’s what he means. I’m afraid that won’t sell here, the man said. He’s not even looking at us, Amaury thought. Now Amaury heard him say, If you could change your singer and play American music, maybe we could have a deal.

Silence. But, Amaury finally said, we were told this was a deal. The man looked at him and said, Maybe you want to check some-

body else, other record companies, but we can’t do this. We didn’t know ...

Amaury heard nothing else. The words evaporated. He didn’t believe he had heard what he had heard. They stood up, all five of them, The Living End, and one by one, they walked out.

It took no time for the band to break up. How true that name, The Living End, turned out to be, Amaury said later. For a while, in L.A., the band had gotten some work in strip clubs, in gay clubs, in places down in the Valley. But after a few weeks, each had started going his own way. George played the piano in clubs. Carli went back to San Juan.Amaury had no money to return anywhere. He and Sally stayed awhile longer—he working at the factory, she waiting tables— but his spirit was broken. The split in the band finished him, and he took Sally back east, and eventually they left for Puerto Rico.

T

he year he broke his left leg in a dozen places in a car crash on Avenida Ashford was the year, 1972, he gave up the drums,

Sally, and all hope. He was twenty-four years old.

He had had a ten-year joyride, and it ended right there, at two in the morning.

He was drunk, driving alone, and his car, a big old guzzler he had borrowed, drove straight into a huge tree. Still conscious, he put the gear in reverse and pushed the pedal, but the car, instead of moving back, slammed the tree again. His arm was caught in the wheel, one leg was crushed against the door, but he tried again to reverse the gears and again he rammed the tree. He fell into the windshield, like a bird shot from the sky, his body sprawled, twisted, bleeding.

This is what happens when you drive drunk, he said when my father arrived at the hospital, making fun of father, who had driven drunk too often, making a point while lying in so many broken pieces on a gurney on the way to the operating room. He was half out of his mind.The operation lasted six hours. Mother arrived from Texas. She called me (I was living then in North Carolina) and told me that Amaury had had an accident but that he was going to be all right. His head was not injured but one leg may be shorter than the other. She sounded calm, the way she became, her nerves stilled, when the worst news had to be delivered. When he was eight years old he fell off a horse and fractured his skull, his ears bleeding. She came home and ran up the stairs to find him almost dead, but even so she didn’t scream or cry. I didn’t see him that time either (where was I?). At the time of the car accident I was a thousand miles away, listening to my mother’s voice, trying to imagine her at the hospital, trying to imagine my brother lying unconscious on a hospital bed. There was no way for me to really know the moment, the scene. I didn’t see the pulp, the bandaged body or the scarred face. Nor did she tell me about it.

He walked on crutches for a year.

What a slide I had, he said later, many years later. I had hit bot- tom. A bottom that you can’t imagine.

Everything about his life has a glaze about it for me.Years over- lap, cities, girlfriends, clubs in San Juan and NewYork, in Los Ange-

les, day work in the factories. Mother would have preferred it if her son had liked the law, or even medicine like my father, or architec- ture like Angeles, or newspapers likeTití Angela and me.While I was off making money, buying a house and getting promotions at news- papers in the United States, he was broken down, in debt, unem- ployed.

It’s the small successes that kill you, I thought. He wasn’t just talking about the band and I knew it. It could have been anything. Those little successes feed bigger dreams and you think you can make it to the top, better, higher.You think you can go on forever. But you’re always afraid in the back of your head that the last gig will come, and you won’t even know it.

T

he bottom came fast for him. He was no longer a boy drum- mer, a half-deaf drummer, a bandleader. He was not quite twenty-five years old. Now he was facing the United States Army and Vietnam.The draft came calling.There was no way he was going to Vietnam. That would turn him into a head case. My father, who was familiar with the mind games the draft board put the boys through, coached him, rehearsed him every step of the way. Amaury was to pretend he was crazy. For three days, the military had him in an office near El Morro, in one of the buildings they had in the fortress grounds in Old San Juan.The army was trying to figure out if this boy with a lame leg and a bad ear could be shipped off to Viet- nam. What’s Vietnam? Amaury asked the officer across the desk, feigning, ducking. He was playing roulette with his life, scared to death. What’s that, Vietnam? Where? You want to send me there? Fine with me, I don’t care, I’ll go. Sure I’ve done drugs, LSD, uppers, downers, you name it. Later, recalling the interrogation, he mimicked himself, his eyes rolling, his body jerking, his words slur-

ring. Three days of these questions, his mind was pummeled. They finally let him go, and he left the windowless room and walked into the ocean-smelling air of Old San Juan and went home and slept for a long time. He had escaped.

But to what?

Sally went back to New York. He didn’t. He got into the Inter- American University in Puerto Rico, and thought he might become a veterinarian (I liked dogs, I liked animals, was his explanation). Another girl took Sally’s place, but Amaury had no drums to play, no band. My father paid for his school and set him up in an oceanfront condo in El Condado, with a balcony where birds nested and left their droppings.