I didn’t reach for music until I was out of Indiana. First Croft and I reclaimed our cars, and he showed me his house, another beauty nestled at the end of the drive, where the Watermelon Sugar property nearly ran out. A fire lane cut across another twelve acres, then opened onto the interstate, up from Louisville, Kentucky. If the wind blew right you could hear the trucks. It was then that Croft mentioned, just an afterthought, that the farm was in the fight of its life, against a creature less chimerical than Rachel and Jeremy. The legislature meant to extend the highway across the property, a four-billion-dollar contract for local construction-one which, Croft said, would cut only ten minutes off the trip to Chicago. We considered this together, tipping our ears to catch the distant whine of tractor trailers. Then he showed me inside, and we lit his kitchen, and he made me a plate of spaghetti. He offered a guest-room bed, but I wanted to drive. He told me I could use his phone and I nearly did, then decided I’d call Abby from somewhere west of here, somewhere nearer to home, when I’d sorted out more of all I’d have to explain.
At the door Croft hugged me, awkwardly, and I hugged him back, awkwardly. There was nothing to accept or refuse in the embrace. Isabel Vendle’s nephew wasn’t the mother I never had, any more than a rotting typewriter was. He wasn’t the father I never had, either. Abraham was the father I never had, and Rachel was the mother I never had, and Gowanus or Boerum Hill was the home I never had, everything was only itself however many names it carried, and so I hugged Croft and I went out to pilot my car through the woods, back to the serpentine road. I was lost a few times on the way to Bloomington, but I never stopped and asked for directions. There was no one to ask. And I wasn’t in a hurry.
It was after midnight when I skirted Gary, Indiana, birthplace of the Jackson Five. In Illinois I stopped for gas and noticed the wallet of discs on the backseat. Once on the road I groped one into the mouth of the car’s player, the first to fall into my hand-Brian Eno’s Another Green World. Prog rock-troll music, Euclid Barnes would have called it. I’d listened to this record my whole life since discovering it in the cut-out bin on the eighth floor of Abraham and Straus, at the dying record store there, behind the stamp and coin collecting department. Using Brooklyn skills, I’d boosted another copy, a commercial cassette, from the Main Street record shop of Camden Town, then played it endlessly one night as I made love to Moira Hogarth. I adored the record’s harmless spookiness: Eno’s keyboard washes, John Cale’s sawing cello, Robert Fripp’s teardrop fretwork. And I always associated it with driving, with miles rushing beneath headlights and my eyes. I associated it with one drive in particular.
This was the winter of my expulsion from Camden College. After Richard Brodeur’s letter, I’d been forced to return to the campus once more, to collect my belongings-books, bedclothes, stereo-all crated in the attic of Oswald House. So Abraham had, in his typical, infuriating, silent way, driven me north, in a borrowed car. The school was closed then, for the long, fuel-conserving winter break. Still, at my insistence, Abraham had waited in the car, while I found a security guard who could unlock the dorm’s attic. I didn’t want my father to set foot on the grounds.
Returning, we’d driven through a Massachusetts blizzard, wind swirling flakes in a tunnel of white around the mole-eye of our windshield. Our silence was total. My shame at Abraham’s presumed disappointment could only be stemmed by stony, preemptive fury of my own. When the storm was at its height, our car inching through the polar cyclone, navigating by the taillights of a wavering truck whose treads ground a path through the slurry, I’d reached into the backseat, into a carton of books and cassettes and, as tonight, pulled out the Eno, and put it into the car’s player. The music made an ideal soundtrack to the blizzard’s unreality. I suppose Abraham was actually struggling with a vivid amount of danger, but Another Green World ’s supernatural placidity seemed to acknowledge his effort and to calm us at the same time. Eno sang I can’t see the lines I used to think I could read between -
Earlier, the first years of high school, when the Clash and Ramones were first thrilling me and Gabriel Stern and Timothy Vandertooth, I’d bring a record home and play it for Abraham and ask him, “Do you hear it? How great it is? There’s never been music like this!”
“Sure,” he’d say. “It’s wonderful.”
“But do you really hear what I’m hearing? Can you hear the same song I do?”
“Of course,” he’d say, leaving me perfectly unsatisfied, leaving the mystery unplumbed: Could my father hear my music? By my college years, though, I’d never have asked, even if we weren’t on that dour voyage home. Those lines of inquiry were shut down, so I barely troubled to speculate what Another Green World might mean to Abraham, whether he felt it shaping our pummel through the snow. Eno sang, You’d be surprised at my degree of uncertainty -
I considered now that what I once loved in this record, and certain others- Remain in Light, “O Superman,” Horses -was the middle space they conjured and dwelled in, a bohemian demimonde, a hippie dream. And that same space, that unlikely proposition, was what I’d eventually come to hate and be embarrassed by, what I’d had to refuse in favor of soul, in favor of Barrett Rude Junior and his defiant, unsubtle pain. I’d needed music that would tell it like it is, like I’d learned it to be, in the inner city. Another Green World was like Abraham’s film: too fragile, too yokeable-I wanted a tougher song than that. I knew stuff B. Eno and A. Ebdus didn’t, and I couldn’t afford to carry them or their naïveté, any more than Mingus could afford to carry me or mine.
The collapsing middle was what Running Crab had fled out of. It was the same space the communists and gays and painters of celluloid imagined they’d found in Gowanus, only to be unwitting wedges for realtors, a racial wrecking ball. A gentrification was the scar left by a dream, Utopia the show which always closed on opening night. And it wasn’t so different from the space Abraham raged not to find opening to welcome his film, a space the width of a dwindled summer, a place where Mingus Rude always grooved fat spaldeen pitches, born home runs.
We all pined for those middle spaces, those summer hours when Josephine Baker lay waste to Paris, when “Bothered Blue” peaked on the charts, when a teenaged Elvis, still dreaming of his own first session, sat in the Sun Studios watching the Prisonaires, when a top-to-bottom burner blazed through a subway station, renovating the world for an instant, when schoolyard turntables were powered by a cord run from a streetlamp, when juice just flowed. I’d come to Indiana not to see a typewriter, or meet Croft, but to walk that back road in dusk and see the middle space the Watermelon Sugars had wrested from the world, before the makers of highways wrested it back, just as I’d gone to Katha’s house to see the pallet she kept for her sister, to hear M-Dog’s rhymes. A middle space opened and closed like a glance, you’d miss it if you blinked. Maybe Camden had been one once too, before it was poisoned with cash. It bore the traces. In the same spirit, on Rachel’s principles, I’d been pushed out like a blind finger, to probe a nonexistent space, a whiteboy integrating public schools which were just then being abandoned, which were becoming only rehearsals for prison. Her mistake was so beautiful, so stupid, so American. It terrified my small mind, it always had. Abraham had the better idea, to try to carve the middle space on a daily basis, alone in his room. If the green triangle never fell to earth before he died and left the film unfinished, it would never have fallen-wasn’t that so? Wasn’t it?