It is June 6, 1968. Mick is standing by himself in a vocal booth, one hand pressed to his ear to hear himself better above the backing track, as the tape begins to roll. The news around the world that night is that Robert Kennedy, five years after his brother, has just died of the gunshot wounds he sustained the night before. It is as if the decade itself knows that it can never return, that it has only these few years to live out its own extremes. The light on the sound buffers is a dim beige, a predawn staleness of smoke. Mick hears the music: a flat patter of bongos, a resonant thud of conga drums, a locust-like hiss of maracas. They’ve spent three days in the studio, fumbling, grasping, finally to arrive at this moment when it works. He backs up and lets out a yelp, a monkey screech, saturated in echo. He makes grunting noises from deep inside his chest, rising on his toes so that his body shakes, his hand moving down his hip to his thigh. On the monitors, the piano strikes a wide, sustained D chord and the song suddenly spreads and hovers, Mick’s lips tensed into a sneer as he begins his delivery, a song about the Devil, about violence, death magic, its glamour and mystique. His head is silhouetted by a floodlight affixed to the ceiling, so that the split ends of his hair glow a bright white, like the filaments in a lit bulb. He is Lucifer — in that moment there is no better word for how he has changed. He is an escape from everything drab, the music behind him shot through with exotic colors that have as little to do with darkness as a stained-glass window. An electric bass thuds out a pattern of syncopated triplets and eighth notes, matching the repetitive pounding of the drums, and with each note comes a twitch in Mick’s legs, a jangle of his spine, a defiant lifting of his chin, a hundred little signs to let you know that it’s not fake this time, that for the three minutes of this song the god will be real. He raises his arms, all sinew and muscle. The decade will pass, forty years will pass, and maybe you’ll hear a snatch of it through a car window, the sound of it still a surprise over a stranger’s radio, the old song sent around the planet in waves that never end.
Part Four
Q: Do you believe in God?
JOHN LENNON: Yes, I believe that God is like a powerhouse, like where you keep electricity, like a power station. And that he’s the supreme power, and that he’s neither good nor bad, left, right, black or white. He just is. And we tap that source of power and make of it what we will. Just as electricity can kill people in a chair, or you can light a room with it.
RISE, 2002
OVER THE YEARS, Anita kept in touch with Anger sporadically. She had put some money into his last film, in the seventies, but he wasn’t easy to be with and so for periods of time she would let the friendship lapse. The last time she saw him was five years ago, when she was in Los Angeles. His apartment was over a dry cleaner in a two-story stucco building in the run-down neighborhood of Echo Park. Some boy let her in. He didn’t introduce himself, and after answering the door he disappeared into another room. It was very dim inside, the curtains drawn, the walls painted a harsh red, the ceiling a glossy black. All of it was lit by old lamps that cast a pale bronze light that would have been the same shade day or night.
Anger was sitting in a chair in the living room, his legs crossed. He wore a black suit and black police shoes. He must have been at least seventy, she thought. There was a thin trace of eyeliner around his eyes.
“Hello, Kenneth,” she said.
She bent over and gave him an awkward sort of half hug, more a patting of the shoulders, and he felt resistant and dry. He looked down at his hands. Beside his chair was a Japanese folding screen and a nightstand cluttered with plastic cups.
“I was expecting you a little later,” he said. He turned away. “But you’re here now.”
“Yes, I’m here now.”
“It’s been a long time.”
She sat down and put her bag on the floor. The room was decorated with old Hollywood memorabilia: pictures of stars from the silent era, Day-Glo posters from the thirties and forties, a pair of brocade curtains with gold tassels. There was a still from Anger’s own film, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, which showed a close-up of a woman’s face, lit by a pink light, her red hair cut short like a man’s. Jezebel, Anita remembered. The Whore of Babylon. It was such a long time since she’d last seen the image, more than thirty years.
“Would you like some tea or something?” Anger asked.
“No, thanks.”
“The host is supposed to offer the guest something to drink. It’s a gesture of hospitality.”
“I’ll have some tea, then. Whatever you want.”
The room had a museum stillness when he went into the kitchen. Everything was immaculately silent, watchful. He came back with the tea on a tray: a blue and white ceramic pot, two bright green cups without handles. The cups were ornamented with tiny white and black cranes. In the dimness of the living room, they almost glowed.
She told him she had moved back to London, back to Chelsea. She hadn’t seen Keith in a long time. They had split up many years ago. She was glad to be back in London, though. New York had never felt like home.
“And what about you?” she asked.
“I’ve been here.”
“For how long?”
“Long enough. I’ve been trying to work again. There’s not much to show for it yet.”
He told her he’d moved back to L.A. at the end of the nineties. When he’d lived in New York, he’d been badly mugged several times. It was the crack years, and he’d lived through all that in East Harlem, 110th Street, in two rooms with sealed windows. It was a different city then. He’d been glad to get out. They talked about New York for a while: the way it had changed, both of them saying disparaging things that they didn’t really believe. Overhanging it all was the awareness that in the years they’d both lived there, probably ten years, they had never seen each other at all.
She looked around at the room, at the images of Valentino, the gaudy illustrations of science-fiction characters. There was nothing you could say about the past that didn’t ring false, she thought. She didn’t feel regret or nostalgia about it. Mostly she was happy that things were less urgent now, less intense.
“You’re one of those people I was always curious about,” she said. “Why you disappeared. Why you stopped doing films.”
“There’s nothing to know.”
“You called me a self-absorbed bitch in one of your interviews. I read those things.”
“I say a lot of things.”
“We weren’t thinking, most of the time you knew us. You never really understood that, how little thinking we were doing.”
“I thought you were beyond thinking. I thought you were interesting to watch. I just got tired of it. Struggling, I mean. The money. Thinking it was important to make films.”
He closed his eyes for a moment, then he raised them, looking at her with a slightly hostile appraisal. “We’re all still alive,” he said. “That’s the surprise. That was the one thing the world was always counting on, that we would all just die.”