The Interestings (15 page)

“What did I do?” Jonah had sat very quietly and respectfully throughout his biological father’s visit. At his mother’s urging he had offered Arthur Widdicombe a cup of hawthorn tea.

“You existed,” said his mother.

Sometimes after that day Arthur’s name would come up, but not very often, and it wasn’t as if Jonah pined for him. To say that Barry Claimes became a father figure was a wild overstatement—God knows it hadn’t happened at all back when Barry was sleeping with Susannah—though maybe his relationship with Barry was more father-son than Jonah imagined, for he felt greatly ambivalent about Barry, which was the way most sons seemed to feel about their fathers. Only when those fathers were not on the premises could they be elevated and deified. Barry Claimes was kind of a pain in the ass. He was pushy, he was demanding, and when Jonah didn’t feel like playing music into Barry’s tape recorder, Barry sometimes got annoyed, or became cold, and then Jonah had to apologize and try to get Barry to pay attention to him again. “Look, look, I’m singing another song for you,” Jonah would say, and he would grab the guitar or the banjo and make up something on the spot.

Somewhere around age twelve, it was as if Jonah Bay finally understood that what had been happening for a year whenever he saw Barry had been happening to
him.
He thought back on all those long days he’d spent with this member of the Whistlers in rented houses and hotel suites, “going creatively insane,” as they had ended up calling it, and then sitting around for hours with Barry, writing dumb lyrics, becoming afraid, being soothed, pacing, feeling his jaw tighten, swimming in pools and in the ocean, and once eating a hamburger at a drive-through and feeling the burger pulse in his hands as though the chopped-up cow still somehow managed to have a heartbeat in its chopped-up heart. (This would be the last time Jonah ever ate meat in his life.) All those sensations and behaviors weren’t those of a schizophrenic, or a “creatively insane” person, or an old soul. They were, Jonah finally,
finally
knew—and it had taken him almost a full year to know this—the sensations and behaviors of a person under the influence.

Back home in New York City for a few unbroken weeks, Jonah walked to a bookstore on the Lower East Side. Grown men and women stood around looking at novels and art books and the
Partisan Review
and the
Evergreen Review
. Jonah went to the counter and nervously whispered to a sales clerk, “Do you have books about drugs?”

The clerk looked him over, smirking. “What are you, ten?”

“No.”

“Drugs. You mean, like, psychotropics?” asked the clerk, whatever that meant, and Jonah took a gamble and said yes. The clerk walked him toward a section against the wall and pulled a book out from a tightly packed shelf, then pushed it against Jonah’s chest. “Here’s the bible, little buddy,” he said.

That night, Jonah sat in bed reading
The Doors of Perception
by Aldous Huxley, and by the time he was only a quarter of the way through, he knew that he, like the author, had been experiencing the effects of hallucinogens, though in Jonah’s case it was involuntary. He thought back to some of the different times he’d been to Barry Claimes’s place, and he took out his math notebook and on a clean page made a list of the foods he could remember that he’d eaten when they were together—not during the creative insanity but in the period of time at the start of each visit, before the insanity began. He wrote:

1) a piece of Clark’s Teaberry gum

2) a slice of pound cake

3) a bowl of Team cereal

4) NOTHING (?)

5) Another piece of Clark’s Teaberry gum

6) Lipton’s onion dip and potato chips

7) two Yodels

8) beef chili

9) C.T.G.
*
again

It all made sense, except for that fourth time. He was positive he’d had nothing to eat or drink that time, because he’d just gotten over a stomach flu. But what
had
happened that day? Jonah generally had a heightened ability to remember events that had taken place even months earlier, and he thought back to that afternoon of sitting around the house that the Whistlers had rented in Minneapolis. Barry had asked him to go mail a letter. He’d handed it to Jonah and said, “Would you take this to the mailbox on the corner for me?”

But Jonah pointed out that there was no stamp, and so Barry said, “Oh, you’ve got a good eye,” and went and handed Jonah a stamp. And what had happened then?

Jonah had licked it. This counted as eating something, didn’t it? The stamp-licking had been
planned.
At age twelve Jonah looked back on the previous year of his life with the dreadful comprehension that over all that time he had been slowly fed drugs by a folksinger—
psychotropics
—and his mind had been stretched and distorted, his thoughts pushed into the mesh of a perceptual net whose shape had been changed by the hallucinogens Barry Claimes had been giving him for his own purposes. There were residual effects: moments when Jonah still woke up in the night thinking he was hallucinating. When he waved his hand across his field of vision, he could occasionally still see trails. He was on the edge of thinking his mind had been shattered for good, even though he wasn’t schizophrenic, just fragile. Fragile and prone to seeing images that weren’t quite there. Also, he had increasingly confused ideas about reality, which now seemed to him a not fully graspable thing.

So not long after that, when Jonah’s mother wanted to take him to California, where she was to perform in the Golden Gate folk fest, he declined, saying he’d outgrown being a folksinger’s kid walking around backstage with an all-access pass around his neck. He had thought this would be the end, but it was not. Barry Claimes called Jonah from the folk fest, because he still had Susannah’s home number. “I was so disappointed not to give you another banjo lesson,” said Barry on the long-distance call. Deep in the background came the sound of applause; Barry was phoning from backstage, and Jonah could imagine him taking off his aviator glasses and rubbing his watering blue eyes, then putting them on again, doing this half a dozen times.

“I have to go,” Jonah told him.

“Who’s on the phone?” asked Jonah’s babysitter, coming into the room.

“Come on, don’t do this, Jonah,” Barry said. Jonah didn’t say anything. “You are an extremely creative person, and I love being around your energy,” Barry went on. “I thought you had an interesting time with me, too.”

But Jonah just repeated that he had to go, then quickly hung up. Barry Claimes called him back a dozen times, and Jonah didn’t realize that he could simply not answer. Each time the phone rang, Jonah answered. And each time, Barry Claimes said he cared about him, he missed him, he wanted to see him, Jonah was his favorite person, even including all the folksingers he had known—even including Susannah and Joan Baez and Pete Seeger and Richie Havens and Leonard Cohen
.
Jonah reminded him again that he had to go, and got off the phone, suddenly producing one of those horrible vomit burps that seem in danger of turning into actual vomiting but don’t. The next day, Barry called three times, and the day after that he called twice, and the day after that, only once. Then Susannah returned from the road and Barry no longer called at all.

A few months later, Barry Claimes abruptly left the Whistlers and then struck out on his own with an album of political songs. The chorus of his one hit from that album was an antiwar ballad that was spoken more than sung:

“Tell them you won’t go, my lad

to the land of the worms and the spaded dirt

Tell them you won’t go, my lad

for you’ve got a life to live right here on earth.”

The first time Jonah heard the song on the radio he said, “What?” but no one was in the room to hear him. “What?” he’d said again. “Dirty dirt” had been traded up for the superior term, “spaded dirt.” Jonah didn’t even know what “spaded” meant, but the central ideas and the unusual melody of the song had been his, and then Barry Claimes had worked on it and structured it and made it into something of his own. There was no one Jonah could tell, no one he could complain to about the injustice. Certainly not his mother. His music had been stolen and his brain had been manipulated, and he was in skittish shape for a very long time, though he tried very hard to hide it. Sometimes at night he would see remnants of etchings in the ceiling, and he would lie awake and wait them out, relieved when the morning came and the room was again bland and normal. “Tell Them You Won’t Go (My Lad)” had a bit of staying power near the middle and then the bottom of the charts; and whenever the song came on the radio, Jonah felt as if he were going to explode, but he kept himself carefully contained, riding it out. Finally the song disappeared, only to return many years later on every “best of the oldies” compilation album ever sold or given away during fund drives for public television; and eventually the acid flashbacks faded in frequency and intensity. One day Jonah was alarmed to see a pattern of menacing leaves and vines on a white wall, but then he realized that it was only wallpaper.

By the time they all entered Goodman and Ash Wolf’s apartment building, the Labyrinth, in the fall of 1974, what was left of Jonah’s flashbacks had been tamped down to very, very occasional frequency, and his obsessive thoughts about Barry stealing ideas from him and almost liquefying his brain had also lessened. He had other things to think about now. He was in high school, he was in the world. Jonah had known, roughly since first grade, that he liked boys—liked thinking about them, liked “accidentally” touching them during games—but it wasn’t until puberty that he allowed himself to recognize the meaning of that thinking and that touching. Still, he hadn’t done anything yet with any boy, and he couldn’t imagine how it would ever happen. He wasn’t about to tell anyone his desires, not even his great friends from Spirit-in-the-Woods, and he thought he might well end up living a monkish life. His life also probably wouldn’t involve music, even though he had been told repeatedly that he had the talent for a big career. His music had been taken from him, siphoned off by Barry Claimes’s greed.

At Spirit-in-the-Woods Jonah often got high with his friends, but he did it defiantly, knowing that
he
was drugging himself, and no one else was doing it. And he didn’t ever use hallucinogens. Until this summer, Jonah hadn’t come upon Barry Claimes in a couple of years, and in that time Jonah had changed and lengthened. He’d let his dark hair grow very long, and since camp ended he’d begun to cultivate the vaguest start of a beard that he didn’t quite know what to do with: Shave it? Ignore it? Shape it into a Fu Manchu? He gave himself a perfunctory glance in the mirror on the morning of the first casual Spirit-in-the-Woods reunion, and with a razor he scraped the skimpy thing off, like a cartographer erasing a land mass from a nascent map.

“Good,” said his mother when he appeared in the kitchen area of the loft. “I wasn’t going to say anything, but this is much better.”

She was at home more frequently lately, sitting at the table with a cigarette and a newspaper and a sheaf of contracts. Susannah could still fill concert halls, though smaller ones. She was now sometimes booked in the auditorium upstairs, as opposed to the main stage. Lately she’d been playing the occasional suburban venue with expensive pots of fondue and two-drink minimums. Her audiences were aging more dramatically as the seventies ground on, becoming consumers of soothing foods and increasingly sophisticated wines; but of course Susannah was aging too. Jonah sometimes looked at his mother and saw that while she was still beautiful, with a physical appearance like no one else’s mother, she no longer resembled the winsome hippie girl in the poncho he recalled from his early childhood. Jonah held a particular memory of sitting beside her on a tour bus during an overnight ride, his head leaning against her shoulder, the filaments of poncho wool brushing against his eyelids in the dim, sleeping bus. Like many female folksingers, Susannah Bay’s power, which was sensual, gentle, intermittently political, had always seemed at least partially to reside in her hair. But now her long hair made her look a little old, and he was afraid she was going to get that middle-aged coven-member look cultivated by some older women with long hair.

Jonah was protective of her, even as she had never been particularly protective of him. He hadn’t allowed her to protect him, hadn’t told her what had happened with Barry Claimes, so what was she supposed to have done? Amazingly and horribly she remained friendly with Barry, and they occasionally appeared in folk shows together or went out to dinner in the city or on the road. Jonah couldn’t believe he had to hear stories about Barry even now, after having been drugged and terrorized and robbed of his music by him for a full year in his childhood.

Since Jonah had begun spending those relieving summers at Spirit-in-the-Woods, he was determined to place his friends at the center of his thoughts, not that man. Summers in Belknap were extraordinary, as his mother had assured him they would be, but this year Susannah had shown up with
Barry
, for God’s sake, and Jonah had been so furious he hadn’t known what to do. He’d stormed off from the hill and headed back to his teepee, where he lay in the suffocating dark; luckily no one followed him there, though he supposed he hoped someone would—a boy, a comforting boy.

Now, Jonah and the others stood in a gold elevator car in the Labyrinth, rising. The Wolf parents’ design taste was handsome, Jonah had always thought since the first time he’d gone over to Ash and Goodman’s apartment two years earlier, though also heavy and effortful. The walls were painted deep and brooding colors, and there were various hassocks scattered around. The Wolfs’ dog, a loping golden retriever called Noodge, nosed his way into the group, excited and needing attention, but was finally ignored by everyone. Ash and Goodman’s parents were gone for the day to visit friends out at the beach, so Jonah and his friends spread out, commandeering different rooms. The Wolfs had a fine stereo system with enormous speakers, but Jonah wasn’t impressed. In his mother’s loft downtown, with the spare white walls and plain wood floors, the stereo system was sleek and Danish and far better than this one. If there was one thing Susannah Bay cared about, it was quality of sound. The Wolfs’ stereo was just one among many high-end appliances. Jonah thought about how Ash and Goodman had been raised among a riot of objects. If either of them fell, they would be cushioned; everything they needed over the whole of their lives was here for them in the Labyrinth.