“I thought you were coming back tomorrow,” Bobby said.
Anger was bent over the kitchen trash, scraping at the pot of burnt noodles. “I came back today,” he said.
“Shit.”
“What’s been going on?”
“Shit. I thought you were coming back tomorrow. We were going to clean everything up tonight.”
Something about his stoned eyes revealed several shifting layers of falseness. They would change in an instant from rational self-assurance to befuddlement, blankness, and then become for an even briefer moment panicky, apologetic, as if they could read Anger’s suspicions, but only for an instant before they resumed their rational self-assurance.
“Here,” he said, reaching for the pot in Anger’s hands. “Let me clean that up.”
“I don’t think it’s worth either of our time, Bobby. Why don’t you go relax? We don’t have to make a ceremony out of this.”
Bobby’s eyes were simply confused now. It was as if whatever he was trying to conceal from Anger had at last been concealed from himself. He didn’t know what any of this was about anymore. He was trying to grin knowingly, to acknowledge Anger’s sarcasm, but in his eyes there was also some helpless appeal for sympathy.
They were calling them the Love Generation now: these kids who didn’t doubt themselves even when they were wrong, who would try anything, who acted as though life was an idea and not a block of time with a beginning and an end. It was impossible to disagree with them — they were what Anger believed in — but he saw that they were lost, and so a part of him wanted them to get into trouble, to find out how serious their rebellion might actually be. Later, when Bobby had disappeared, making off with his camera and almost all of the footage they had shot that year, he would wonder how he could have ever been so credulous about the Haight-Ashbury, about the whole thing of peace and flowers, about whatever he’d thought of as the opposite of thanatomania.
That evening, some more people came by in a van. The two girls were still there, as was their returned friend, the boy who had left his boots and suitcase in Anger’s bedroom. Bobby was sitting on the floor of his room, playing one of his exotic instruments, a Greek bouzouki that made a thin, percussive plinking sound. The others sat with their bare feet curled beneath them, passing around a skull-shaped pipe, inhaling its smoke with tight-lipped frowns, then turning a silent gaze on the next member of the circle. On the ceiling, a mirror ball — one more gift from Anger to his protégé — threw pinprick stars on their faces and on the frescoed walls. The girls’ bushy hair hid their foreheads and obscured their eyes. There was something darkly sexual to Anger about their hair. It hung not in tresses or curls but in hanks, as raw as the hair on their bodies.
He stepped over their circle, ignoring them, aware of himself as a stranger in his own apartment. He began rifling through some of the trunks he kept in Bobby’s closet. It occurred to him that even if he found something missing, some proof that Bobby had stolen from him, it wouldn’t matter. Bobby would just lie, it would just be one more fight he couldn’t afford to have. What mattered was the suspicion itself, the feeling that Bobby had been stealing from him all along.
There in its yellow envelope was the ripped and bloodstained T-shirt that Bruce Byron had sent him in the mail almost a year ago.
It was wrinkled and dry, as soft as a dustcloth. When he shook out its folds, it gave off a thin dust of dried, rust-colored blood. He held it in his hands, a tight shrewdness in his lips. The tastelessness of what he was about to do now was so extreme that he failed to acknowledge it.
“This is what happened to the boy in my last film,” he said, turning around, offering it up like an artifact to whoever would look.
The girl he leaned over reached out her fingers. Beside her, the girl in the lumberjack shirt was looking at him mischievously, as if waiting for the punch line. Anger looked at Bobby, gravely convinced of the threat he was making, but the look on Bobby’s face was blank, his skin gray, his eyes two black pupils that seemed blind.
There was no way for Anger to play this remark off now as some risqué joke that the others were too tense to laugh at. There was no way to make any sense of the situation at all.
In the vestibule outside the front door, Anger had to step around a clutter of shoes and boots that had been left there by the upstairs neighbors. It was too cold outside for the clothes he was wearing — a sweater but no jacket — but he kept walking, past the huddled group of kids outside the corner grocery with its dim brown light. He walked all the way to Golden Gate Park before he realized he had forgotten his keys.
He hurried back at a half jog, then a self-recriminating walk, then a half jog. There was the same group of kids, witnesses now to his absurdity. In the vestibule, he stared at the lock for a long moment and rattled the door, but there was no point, it wasn’t going to yield, and Bobby wasn’t going to let him back in.
Part Three
“You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.”
THE DEVIL, 1968–1969
ANGER HAD BEEN THERE for close to two hours now, waiting for them to get started. He was watching them from the control room, not filming yet, just standing behind the sound engineers on their stools, dressed in the same flared black pants and purple acrylic shirt he’d been wearing every other day for more than a week. Through the soundproof glass, he could see Mick trying to teach the new song to Brian. Brian was very stoned and Mick seemed almost embarrassed by his perseverance, humoring him, smiling and shrugging his shoulders as he demonstrated the simple beat on his acoustic guitar. “That’s the other one,” he said. “You’re thinking of that other bit.”
It was disappointing to watch them tonight, in spite of the other times he’d seen them drain the air from a room just by stepping into it. They were struggling — he had always thought the whole point of them was their effortlessness. It was clear that if Mick was going to rouse himself out of mediocrity tonight, he was going to have to be far more ruthless with Brian.
The studio was like a concrete bunker, with a shabby red carpet on the floor. Styrofoam cups and beer bottles rested on the amplifiers and the soundproof panels, which were orange or brown or green. Finally Keith arrived, coming into the control room, wearing dark sunglasses and a torn white shirt.
“Keep taping,” he said to the sound engineers. “Just keep it rolling. Let’s not miss it this time.”
The engineers did not look up from their panel of dials. Keith was looking at Anger now.
“Did you come over with Mick?” he said.
“No, they sent me a car.”
“Right, good. The star treatment.” He turned and looked at the others through the soundproof glass. Brian was looking steadily into Mick’s eyes as he played something on his guitar, the two of them working their way into further and further complications, further from any possible song. “You should ring up Anita sometime,” Keith said. “She gets bored. She keeps asking about you.”
He walked into the booth then, with his sunglasses still on. As he passed a pair of carpeted sound buffers, he picked up his guitar with such fluid indifference that it might have been a jacket or a set of keys. Without a word, he sat down in the chair next to Mick and started playing, not even looking at Brian. He looked at Mick, nodding his head, taking up the song in a completely different style, as if he’d been there all along, sifting through the variations.