Though most of the participants were as focused as Shelly, there was the occasional alarmed glance in our direction. Donny without his mask was indeed a marvelous spectacle, like a gruesome alien out of Star Trek. After twenty minutes Donny got restless in his metal chair, so I suggested we go out into the lobby for a while and stretch our legs. “Can he drink pop?” I asked Shelly.
“Yeah, but watch him. He’ll spill it.”
Donny was fascinated by the 1940s modernist theme of the lobby, brass chip floor, coarse black-pebbled walls, a swooping Bauhaus ceiling with many hexagonal skylights. Along one wall was a row of black and white faces, celebrities mostly who’d stopped in at some time to pitch their wares on KLIK radio. I stopped before a photo of Eddie Cochran, whose voice breaks in “Three Stars,” his posthumously released tribute to Buddy Holly, J. P. Richardson, and Richie Valens, all of whom preceded him in death by one year. Even if his look and pose are all Elvis, Eddie was an original, “proto punk” as they called it now, killed by a negligent taxicab driver named George Martin, coincidentally the same name as the man who “discovered” and produced the Beatles. When the British invaded America four years later, all the great American rockers were dead or gone. Elvis had enlisted, and there was no one but Motown to stop them.
Donny surveyed the portraits, then leaned in to study a gauzy promo image of Otis Redding. I’d never known much about Otis Redding, the only songs of his I’d been familiar with were the overplayed “The Dock of the Bay,” The Black Crowes cover “Hard to Handle,” and the Three Dog Night version of his “Try a Little Tenderness,” but I’d picked up a number of his singles and LPs in the last few months and gained admiration. He was one of those double-coupon artists whose value rewards both the pocket and the ear. If you really wanted to “invest” in music, as well as ward off the zombies of the corporate age, both Shelly and I agreed, soul was the way to go.
“Do you know who that is, Donny?” I said, pointing to Otis Redding.
“Looks like Ernesto,” he said.
“Who’s Ernesto?”
“He runs the scrubber.”
“It’s Otis Redding. Remember that song, ‘Try a Little Tenderness’?”
“Oh, yeah.”
He didn’t remember. I wanted him to be a whiz kid, a genius — I wanted him to instantly count spilled toothpicks like Rain Man or calculate Martian orbital eccentricities or pontificate on the golden ratio, but those rocks at the bottom of the Clam had given him little back but the thread of his life.
We strolled down the curved halls and I looked for a pop machine. “Maybe they’ve auctioned them off already,” I mumbled. “You tired? You want to sit for a minute?”
Donny Ray sat, out of breath, his mashed head sagging, his thin arms folded over his chest. His breathing was shallow. “We’ll wait for Shelly here,” I said.
“Where are we, anyway?” he asked.
“Los Angeles, California.”
“Hmmm,” he said. “Is Mom here?”
“You don’t remember the funeral?”
He raised his head, turning his empty eye socket upon me. “Oh, yeah.”
He didn’t remember the funeral.
“Do you remember Renee, Donny?”
His head flicked to the left, then to the right. His fingers entwined into his gold chains, his raw sightless eye drifted over me. He grew very still.
“I saw her the other day,” I said, and thought of my own lost love, Sofia, her picture shimmering up before me. “She says she still thinks of you.”
His hand had wandered into the pocket where he kept his prosthetic eye. He scratched his ear, hitched a sob, and said, “I remember her.”
Shelly came striding around the corner, looking peeved. “Hey, I been looking for you guys all over. Come on, they’re loading my truck out back. Let’s get out of here, maybe we can catch the fifth at Hollypark.”
“I remember,” Donny announced to his brother, getting to his feet. “I loved her.”
Shelly gave me a look as if I’d been trying to sell his brother drugs.
“I remember now,” Donny repeated, looking up at the skylights.
“That’s right, Donny,” said Shelly. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”
31.Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?
I WOKE UP ONE MORNING TO THE SOUND OF SCREAMING, THINKING at first it was Beatriz or a peafowl in a tree. When I went outside the Island grounds were festooned with paper flowers and balloons. Picnic tables and a bandstand had been set up and parillas were stoked and lit. A pig, the screamer, lay yonder, hanging split by its back feet from a tree as a young man addressed it with a long curved knife. Two butter-brown girls with bows in their hair were playing jacks at the foot of my stairs.
“¿Hola, que tal?” I said to them. “¿Que tenemos?”
“¡Es una fiesta!” they cried in unison. “¡Mataron un cochino!”
“¿Para que?” I inquired.
“¡El hipódromo!” they shouted.
Every horse track has its pre-opening day celebration. Del Mar’s was usually the best. As a child I recalled them, for all the children and good food and fun, more fondly than Christmas. For the last two weeks track employees, tourists, and gamblers had been pouring into Solana Beach and Del Mar, and rents everywhere had soared. I noted that all the casitas were now occupied and there were several new camp dogs. From below drifted the scent of warm hay and horse dung mingled with the ocean. A bugle sounded and there was the wet flank whack of horse flesh. A woman with an apron tied around her middle came down the stairs from cabin number 3 with a covered basket and two boys about twelve sailed on past toeing a black-and-white checkered soccer ball.
Past the lone orange tree in the distance blazed a great wood fire upon which sat a bubbling black cauldron. A perspiring man with a red bandana tied round his head wrung long sheets of pig skin, fed them with tongs into the
