Nichols - A Ghost in the Music

JOHN NICHOLS was born on July 23, 1940, in Berkeley, California. During his childhood years, Nichols moved frequently, living in California, Vermont, Connecticut, New York, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. At the age of 23 he completed his first novel, The Sterile Cuckoo. Published in 1965, it was greeted with great critical acclaim, earning for Nichols the reputation of a significant new voice in American fiction. The following year, his second novel, The Wizard of Loneliness, was published, solidly establishing Nichols as one of the foremost writers of his generation.

In 1968, after having lived in New York for over five years, Nichols moved to a small community near Taos, New Mexico. His interest in this region and its social, economic, and racial problems became for Nichols a great source of inspiration. He wrote several more books, both fiction and nonfiction, which examined the history and the physical beauty of the American Southwest. Perhaps the most famous of these works is his Mexican Trilogy, which comprises The Milagro Beanfield War (1974), The Magic Journey (1978), and The Nirvana Blues (1981). Also published during this time were If Mountains Die: A New Mexico Memoir and Nicholss fifth novel, A Ghost in the Music (1979) which was written between the second and last parts of the Mexican Trilogy and which represents a visible break from Nicholss other work at that time as it does not have for its theme the Chicano and his social and political problems. He is also an accomplished photo-essayist, whose work in that vein includes The Last Beautiful Days of Autumn, On the Mesa, A Fragile Beauty, The Skys the Limit, and Keep It Simple.

His most recent novels are American Blood, Elegy for September, and Conjugal Bliss.

ALSO BY JOHN NICHOLS

Fiction

The Sterile Cuckoo

The Wizard of Loneliness

The Milagro Beanfield War

The Magic Journey

The Nirvana Blues

A Ghost in the Music

American Blood

An Elegy for September

Conjugal Bliss

Nonfiction

If Mountains Die (with William Davis)

The Last Beautiful Days of Autumn

On the Mesa

A Fragile Beauty

The Skys the Limit

Keep It Simple

Contents

Reissued in Norton Paperback Fiction 1996

Copyright 1979 by John Nichols

All rights reserved.

ISBN 978-0-393-34950-4 (e-book)

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 10 Coptic Street, London WCIA IPU

For Leo Garen

Corpulent Odysseus, good friend.

When last seen, he was slouched in a
smoking blue pickup filled with dry
pion, rattling along an October
aspen-flanked dirt road one thousand
milesand a million heartachesbeyond
the Hollywood pale.

Lchaim!

Im sitting alone

By a pink telephone,

Waiting for someone to call;

But a ghost in the music

Thats drifting like smoke

Doesnt know how to dial at all

A Ghost
in the Music

In a real dark night of the soul, once said F. Scott Fitzgerald, it is always three oclock in the morning.

Thats when the phone rang, and I knew, even before fumbling for the receiver, that it would be him. Bartotherwise known as my dadBart Darling. Sometime writer, theater and film director, actor, real-estate mogul, stunt man and poet, songwriter, perverse womanizer, masochist, health faddist, worrywart, child in a grown mans jeansI always knew it was him when he called. At the hours he chose, the ring inevitably had an urgent, breathless quality to it, almost as if he were shouting into his mouthpiece long before I picked mine up. And often when I did press the apparatus to my ear, he was already in such high, loud gear that I could almost set down the instrument and listen to his actual voice traveling cross-country from wherever he happened to be situated.

Pop?

Marcel, he groanedand hes the only person Ive ever known who positively roars when he groans: Im in trouble!>

Talk about copilotsBarts was Trouble. A high-risk player, he had spent his life teetering on the edgeof madness, bankruptcy, immense wealth, stardom. And even if he was not in desperate straits, he always claimed to be, for effect, because he hated boredom, because he wanted people to be excited by him, by his life: he needed everybodys attention. Personally, I often surmised that it was guilt which made him begin our phone calls with some declaration of disaster. A guilt traceable to me, to our relationship together. After all, I was Barts illegitimate son who did not even use his fathers last name, the only known offspring of his wench-drenched existence. And my guess is he usually felt he had to have a reason to call, justifying a simple need to chat by inventing one trauma or another, thus legitimately catching my attention; and, by depersonalizing his need, making it possible for him to reach toward me.

Over the years, I had gotten used to the histrionics. By now, I just accepted them as his way of saying hello. Always he was sick; an old girl friend had committed suicide; his prostate would be scraped on Monday. Such calamities I took with a grain of salt. And anyway, Bart exaggerated unmercifully. And he always survived. Including some tight squeezes that might have felled more ordinary men. I mean, over the years people had constantly told me that the way Bart lived, he should have been dead at thirty. But look at himthe rakehell! Fit as a fiddle and going hell-bent-for-leather at forty-seven, with a liquor bottle in one hand, and a gorgeous woman on his arm, howling like Hemingway, Ruark, Paul Bunyon themselvesnever slowing down. Secretly, I knew Bart was a dozen times healthier than myself. I often had a vision of him sneaking wheat germ and honey early in the morning when nobody was looking. I knew for a fact that he jogged and swam, played tennis, and worked out in gyms whenever he could find them. And I occasionally suspicioned that all the liquor he downed was in actuality stage booze, water tinted with grape juice or food coloring.

I grumbled, So youre in trouble, so what else is new?

No, this time Im not fooling around, I aint crying wolf; this is for real. Marcel, you gotta listen to me, my days may be numbered

Somehow, in our talks like this, I always felt like a grownup confronting a not particularly ingenuous child. Pop, I said, do you know what time it is?

Time? He seemed amazed that that could even be a consideration. Didnt everyone else follow the same schedule as Bart Darling, i.e., no schedule at all? I could picture him dazedly glancing out the window, startled to discover stars, a full moon, and werewolves creeping. Or else, bewilderedly focusing on the room lights, he was flabbergasted to learn that a brightness he had mistaken for sunshine was actually General Electric induced.

Geez, he said. I didnt realize. I forgot. What time is it where youre at?

Where I was at was New York City. Where he might be, I could onlywith trepidationguess. Was the sun still shining? His call originating from Rangoon? London? Azerbaijan?

I said, Here its three A.M. Where are you?

Me? I dunno oh, sure in the living room. Again, I imagined him casting around, befuddledsurprised to find himself in an actual place. Confined by walls. Its temperature perhaps controlled by a thermostat. For when Bart got going, mainlining nervous energy and ideas and not a little sauce into the bargain, the actual world melted away, and he existed entirely inside his undisciplined noggin.