Evergreen, Chapter 16
January 26: Chile Symposium
Because the meal plan only covers weekdays, most dorm residents find a way to survive Saturday and Sunday on whatever they can cook up on the one-burner stove in their rooms. The cafeteria is minimally staffed on the weekend, mostly catering to curious visitors come to peer at the “hippie college in the woods” or parents here to see how their hard-earned savings are being squandered. But today at lunchtime, the cafeteria is full, primarily with participants in the Northwest Symposium on Chile, which has just adjourned after a discussion of the US-backed military overthrow of Salvador Allende’s democratically elected presidency last September 11.
At the end of book group a couple of weeks ago, Sofía had said to me, “If you’re interested in how history will judge current events, you should meet my uncle. He’ll be here for the Chile Symposium.” Now I’m sitting with Sofía and her uncle, Mauro, a grilled cheese sandwich and hot cocoa in front of me, while Sofía nibbles on a large salad and Mauro picks at a cheeseburger and fries. He’s Chilean, handsome and dark-haired, balding, and is wearing a brown sport coat, blue jeans, and a white button-down shirt. He has tired eyes and his slim frame seems more like the result of fatigue and worry than regular exercise.
“I was not in Santiago when the coup happened,” Mauro says in response to my question about his experience of the September 11 military takeover. “I had gone to southern Chile, to Pucón, a small town about eight hours south of Santiago. I’ve been an avid bird watcher hace mucho tiempo, desde que era joven, and the lakes near there are fantastic for bird watching. We heard about the coup on the radio, which is not, of course, what the announcer called it; he hailed it as ‘a great triumph of reason, a return to sanity.’ De todos modos, I knew I had to leave Chile. I had no idea that things would be as bad as they have gotten, but I knew that a military government no sería mi amigo.”
Mauro, who looks to be in his early forties, had been a professor of Spanish literature at the University of Chile, which supported Allende and his socialist economic program.
“I have a colleague at la universidad in Bahia Blanca, in Argentina, and I was able to find a ride in the back of a truck,” he says, wiping a smear of ketchup from his mustache. “There’s a border crossing about an hour east of Pucón which the military had not yet thought to close.”
“What about your family?” I ask.
“My parents are fine,” he says. “They were not supporters of Allende. We had many arguments about that. And my father works for un banco importante en Santiago. I haven’t spoken to them since the coup, but I have heard from friends that they are in no danger. My girlfriend, though . . .” He looks down at his plate, pushing the cheeseburger toward the far edge, as if it has suddenly become repulsive to him.
“It’s OK, Mauro,” Sofía says, looking at me as if she can’t believe I would ask such an insensitive question.
“Está bien, I don’t mind,” he says. “People need to know. My girlfriend, Francesca, who was also una profesora en la universidad, was rounded up along with many, many others and taken to Estadio Chile. That is all I know. My friends have not been able to determine exactly what happened to her. She may be alive and in prison, or . . .”
Sofía looks at me again, her eyes sad this time, not angry, and then says to Mauro, “When do you have to be back at the Symposium? Do you have time to take a walk around campus? Some fresh air would be good.”
“I have a meeting with some people at two, y yo creo qué the next session starts at three. So, yes, I have some time. Un paseo me haría bien.”
“Do you want to join us?” Sofía asks me.
“For a bit, sure, but I have a rehearsal at two, and I need to pick up my guitar. Maybe we could walk toward the dorms?”
“Sure,” says Sofía, getting up from her chair, leaving her salad half-eaten.
I regret missing the Symposium’s presentations yesterday. I would have a better understanding of the troubles in Chile and would be able to talk with Mauro more knowledgeably. The discussion this morning focused on the coup and its aftermath: the military attack on the Presidential Palace, the murder of Allende, and the subsequent roundup, detention, and torture of dissidents. Mauro was one of four panelists, but he had been relatively quiet. The others were American: two professors, one from San Jose State and one from the State University of New York, and a woman, Joyce Horman, whose husband, a journalist, was killed during the coup. The professors dominated the discussion, perhaps because they were not as emotionally invested in what happened as the others. I mentioned this to Sofía afterward, as we were leaving to meet Mauro for lunch, and she said that he had a lot more to say the previous day, when the session centered around the three years of Allende’s presidency. That session was marked by protestors objecting to the presence on the panel of an American businessman who had claimed that the coup could have been avoided if Allende had stepped down once it became clear that the Chilean economy would not recover from his nationalization of the copper industry. Sofía said that Mauro defended Allende eloquently, claiming that the nationalization failed because the US government sabotaged the Chilean economy by cutting off all credit to the country and boycotting Chilean copper.
Last night, I joined Sofía at a concert sponsored by the Symposium that featured an American folksinger named Malvina Reynolds. Reynolds, in her seventies, sang in a plain, unmannered style, strumming a nylon-string guitar as if she’d just found it beneath her chair. She specializes in protest songs, although they sound more like children’s songs, particularly “Little Boxes,” which Pete Seeger made popular and which she sang in English and Spanish, in honor of Victor Jara, a Chilean folksinger who was killed in the days following the coup. Reynolds also sang some of Jara’s songs in Spanish, which were beautiful, more musical than Reynolds’s blocky, simplistic melodies, but their meaning was likely lost on the almost entirely white audience.
I have little tolerance for the self-congratulatory sing-along anthems favored by upper-middle-class liberals. Reynolds’s folkie protest songs have an irritating sing-songy quality that may be a reflection more of her age than anything; she sounded more like a Unitarian Sunday-school teacher than a revolutionary. These are sentiments that should be delivered with a bellow above a raging rock band, instead of in a frail, half-spoken whisper with unadorned folk guitar accompaniment. When Dylan went electric with the Band, it would have been the perfect format for his protest songs, but I guess by then he had tired of politics. I don’t understand why artistic political sentiments have to be delivered in a narcotic, easy-to-digest form. Even Marvin Gaye’s politically charged What’s Going On? has a hypnotic, mellow groove you can get high to late at night without disturbing the roommates.
“Everyone knew that something was going to happen, we just didn’t know when,” Mauro continues, unprompted, as we leave the CAB. The rain has stopped, although the skies are as dark and forbidding as they’ve been for most of the week. We walk together, but our paths might seem drunken if viewed from above, as we veer in different directions to avoid the wide scatter of puddles.
“I was more worried than Francesca was. I was . . . am, a member of the Communist Party in Chile, whereas she wasn’t so overtly political. But she worked with Victor Jara on some theater projects, and that likely made her suspect. Jara was brutally murdered in the same stadium she was taken to. I asked her to come with me to Pucón, but she had a performance she couldn’t miss. And we disagreed about what might happen if the military seized control. She, like many people, thought that they would just banish Allende and give power back to the Christian Democratic party. But I had a premonition of something worse. I don’t know why. I just . . . I wish . . .”
He pauses for a minute. Then he turns to me and says, “Nixon was behind the coup. We’re sure of it. Do you think that he will survive the Watergate scandal?”
“Do I? I don’t know,” I say, startled. “There’s nothing about Watergate in the news these days. I know the judge has some tapes, and that motions for impeachment were introduced in the House, but that was before the holidays. I haven’t heard anything since. We’re kind of out of the loop here. The local Olympia paper is useless. I used to watch the late TV news when I could, the Seattle station, but there would have to be major news for them to report anything about Watergate at this point.”
“Well, I hope they get him,” Mauro says. “He has destroyed my country.”
I start to respond with something like, “He’s not doing a bad job with ours,” but I realize that Nixon’s criminal hijinks pale in comparison to the mass torture of dissidents in athletic stadiums.
“What’s the session this afternoon about?” I ask, as we descend the steps in front of the Rec Center, heading toward the athletic field. The sky is growing lighter, almost milky. The cloud cover must have opened up somewhere, allowing in a bit of sunlight, turning the forest in front of us from a dark, smoky gray to a lush, emerald green.
“It’s about the future of Latin America and the implications of what happened in Chile for the rest of Latin America,” Sofía says.
“Many fear that the coup will inspire similar actions in other countries,” Mauro says. “Argentina in particular. The Peróns have returned to power, and the US has never liked them. Many feel that the US will be inspired by its victory in Chile to interfere in more Latin American countries. It’s useless to try to predict the future, so I’m skeptical about this afternoon’s session. I’m afraid it will be dominated by academics who claim the gift of foresight. But it’s an important discussion to have, especially if Nixon is allowed to serve out the remainder of his term. He will jump at any opportunity to remove the Peróns, although Juan Perón understands the dangers he faces, probably better than Allende.”
“Are you still living in Argentina?” I ask.
“No, I’m in Vancouver at the moment,” he says, “staying at a friend’s house, making a little money teaching undergraduate Spanish and Latin-American literature at Simon Fraser. But for how long, I don’t know. I was afraid of what might happen in Argentina. Perón is old, and could die at any moment, and after that? Who knows? And I couldn’t find work in Buenos Aires. There was an opening for a job as personal secretary to José Luis Borges, but I was told that he recognized my name from an interview I’d done with him many years ago, and he refused to meet with me. Apparently, he took a dislike to me at that interview, some questions I asked that he was not pleased with. He may also have seen my review of El informe de Brodie in Ercilla, which was much less kind than it could have been. Or he may have found out that I’m a Communist. At any rate, my friend in Vancouver grew up in Santiago, and I thought it might be easier to get residency in Canada than the US.”
I understand little of what he’s talking about, but it’s good to hear about something outside the Evergreen bubble, and the short discussion of Nixon and Watergate is more than any I’ve had since I returned from break.
While we’ve been circling the athletic field, the sun has come out and the sky is changing color. In one corner of the field, mist is slowly rising from the unmown grass as if the warmth has let loose a plague of microscopic locusts. When we reach the turnoff for the dorms, I bid Mauro and Sofía goodbye.
“I’ll see you on Monday for book group,” Sofía says, reaching up to give me a peck on the cheek and quietly whispering “thank you.” I’m not sure what she’s thanking me for, but I smile and touch her shoulder gently as she turns to walk up the path after Mauro.
“Can we try ‘Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire’?” Angelica asks. “Lucas knows the chords.”
The Willowberry barn has been commandeered for the first rehearsal of Angelica’s new band: Alma, Gabe, me, and Charlie, the Fabulous Family Fruit Stand Band’s drummer. When I arrived at Angelica’s dorm room a couple of hours ago, expecting a walk up to a rehearsal room on campus, she announced that Alma had asked Charlie to join us and that we were going to drive (in Sandy’s car) to rehearsal at Willowberry, which would be able to accommodate the expanded group. We picked up Gabe in the ASH parking lot, an electric bass slung across his back. I had expected an upright bass, and when I asked him about the change, he said, “There’s a bass amp at Willowberry. I figured it would be easier to bring this than trying to fit the upright into Sandy’s car.”
I was annoyed that nobody bothered to tell me about the change of plans. There is no way my acoustic guitar will be able to hold its own with drums, electric bass, and piano. Gabe, perhaps reading the frown on my face, said, “You can probably borrow one of Ezra’s electric guitars.”
This might have eased my mind if I had played an electric guitar more than once or twice before. But when we got to Willowberry, Gabe helped me set up an amp and showed me how to turn the pickup selector on Ezra’s Guild Starfire to the neck pickup for a rhythm sound and back to the bridge pickup for solos. This helped, but I was unaccustomed to the Starfire’s slinky electric strings and low action. I kept hitting the strings too hard, creating an unmusical thwack and accidentally bending notes out of tune. When I tried playing the solo to Bonnie Raitt’s “Love Me Like a Man” that I had learned from the recording, and which I had practiced only on acoustic guitar, I wildly overshot the bends. Alma counted the song off faster than the recording, so I was already struggling when it came time for my solo; I flubbed the first lick and then got a little ahead of the band trying to recover, ending the solo with a wayward bend that hooked an out-of-key open string, leaving an atonal chord hanging in the air. When I tried to cover it by turning the volume down on the guitar, I twisted the knob the wrong way, which added a piercing slab of feedback to the mess. This might have been funny if I hadn’t felt so hapless. When I turned to Gabe to mime an apology, he was smiling, but I couldn’t tell whether this was kudos for inadvertently stumbling upon some wild Hendrix-ism or enjoyment of my klutzy blundering. The rest of the band acted as if they hadn’t noticed, but I wasn’t fooled.
The next song, the Delfonic’s “La-La Means I Love You,” sung somewhat ironically by Angelica, was a little better. Angelica had showed me the chords at our last lesson, which was good because I would have been stumped by the weird modulation in the bridge. Charlie kicked the song off with its signature drum fill and Gabe came right in with the bass line, so I followed them, playing backbeat chords with the snare drum for the most part. I kept flubbing the timing of the syncopated riffs that lead into the chorus, but, again, my ineptitude seemed to be forgiven.
I ask Angelica if she’s going to play guitar on “Cold Blue Steel”—we had worked up a simplified rhythm guitar part she could play while singing—and suggest that she use the spare vocal mic on her guitar.
“I’ll try. But why don’t you play rhythm, too, in case I screw up.”
This is a relief. If all I have to do is double her, I’ll be less likely to embarrass myself. Angelica’s guitar mic is much quieter than the rest of the band, so I turn my guitar down to match hers, which makes the Starfire easier to control, more like an acoustic. On the record, the song ends with a long saxophone solo, and Angelica suggests this would be a good place for a bass solo. I try not to take it personally, hoping that her arrangement idea is not the result of my clumsiness on “Love Me Like a Man.”
“How about we make it a vamp with the IV chord and the riff?” Gabe suggests. “That’ll make it simpler and we can jam longer.”
It takes Angelica a while to get used to singing into one mic and playing guitar into the other, but after a couple of false starts we make it to the bass solo, and when Gabe is done he nods at me to continue. After two passes through the solo form without embarrassment, I nod to Alma, who takes the song out with the repeated riff. This feels like a success, and we all seem to agree. Charlie even mumbles, “Third time’s a charm.”
“That was beautiful.”
I turn at the sound of Jenny’s voice and see her on the other side of the barn, applauding.
“Sorry to interrupt, but can we try a three-part harmony on that line?” Jenny asks.
“The beginning of the chorus?” Angelica asks. “‘Do you want to contact somebody first?’ That line? That’s such a weird harmony. Do you think we can find parts?”
“We can try,” Alma says.
Jenny sits next to her cousin on the piano bench so they can share a mic, and Alma says, “Can you play guitar for us, Lucas? Let’s start from ‘Come with me I know the way.’”
The first pass is a disaster, Alma and Jenny erupting in giggles, but the second time is better and the third sounds almost like the record. Alma says, “Let’s sing it a couple more times so we’ll remember it.”
By the time they’re satisfied, Gabe has put down his bass and Charlie has abandoned his kit. Angelica walks to the piano and the three singers share a laugh and a hug. We seem to be taking a break, so I walk over to the corner where I’ve stashed the Starfire’s case, and Jenny follows.
“It’s been too long,” she says, giving me a long, tender hug that ends with her fingers reaching up under my hair to stroke my neck, an intimate gesture that feels more suited to a reunion of lovers. I’m a bit embarrassed—I wonder if anyone noticed— but also thrilled and more than a little confused.
“The three of you sound great singing together,” I say as we break the embrace, avoiding mention of the last unfortunate time we had seen each other.
“I think so, too.”
“I hope it’s OK with Ezra that I’m borrowing his guitar. He wasn’t around, but Alma said he’d be fine with it.”
“Oh, he won’t care. And he’s gone for a while, so . . .”
“Where’d he go?”
“Mexico . . . Tulúm. He has friends down there, and a band to play with at some resort. He’ll be gone a couple months, trying to make some money.”
“He’s not in school?”
“Not this semester. He took a leave, and he may not go back. He’s been wondering what he’s doing at Evergreen. He just wants to play music.”
“I can dig that.” She has barely moved away from me since the hug, and I can feel her warm breath. The skin around her lips is flush, rosy.
“Sorry I haven’t made it to any of the square dances lately. I’ve been busy, I guess . . . Tracy says you stopped playing with the Sea Slugs.”
“I did. I’m working on some other things, so . . . Do you see him much? Tracy, I mean.”
“Not really. He, uh . . . you probably heard what happened.”
“No, I . . .”
“Hey Jenny, do you want to sing ‘Love Has No Pride’ with us?” Angelica calls out.
“Sure.”
She smiles and walks away. It’s uncanny how often our interactions mirror each other: beginning with abrupt affection from Jenny, a bit too intimate, and ending with a quick retreat, leaving me confused but aroused.
Alma starts “Love Has No Pride” with the piano intro from Linda Ronstadt’s record as Gabe, Charlie, and I pick up our instruments. Angelica has put down her guitar, so I grab my acoustic instead of the Starfire and step up to the mic she was using for her guitar. After Alma sings the first verse, Jenny sings the second, standing next to Angelica now. The trio harmonies are shaky on the first chorus, Angelica searching for a third part between the cousins. The second chorus is better, and after Angelica belts out the bridge, the third chorus harmonies are nearly perfect.
I’m more comfortable playing the acoustic guitar than the electric, and when we try the song again, Angelica suggests I take a solo, adding an instrumental verse before the bridge. When I make it through without screwing up, improvising a simple melodic line that partially outlines the chords, my anxiety disappears.
After a second time through “Love Has No Pride,” Angelica suggests we go back over the previous three songs we’ve done, and Jenny remains in the band, adding harmonies to the chorus of “La-La Means I Love You” and the last line of the verses on “Love Me Like a Man.” I return to the Starfire, but, with the focus on vocal harmonies, the band’s volume has diminished, and this makes the electric guitar easier to handle. We take “Love Me Like a Man” a little slower this time and I play the solo without any mishaps. I even nail the ending lick.
The girls decide to spend the rest of the rehearsal working on vocal harmonies, so Charlie invites Gabe and me to join him in the house, disappearing upstairs after lighting the burner under the teakettle.
“I guess I’ll have to get an electric guitar,” I say to Gabe, taking a seat at the long, messy kitchen table.
“You don’t have one? I figured you were like an ex-rocker or prog-rock nerd who’d gone folkie—‘back to the land’ kind of thing.”
“No. I mean, I’ve listened to plenty of rock ’n’ roll, and my high school pals were into Yes and Zeppelin. I’ve even been to Tull and Grand Funk shows.”
“Called it.”
“But by the time I started playing guitar a little over a year ago, I was into other stuff. I could probably fake the riff to ‘Aqualung’ and ‘Smoke on the Water’—I mean, who can’t?—but not much else.”
“Seriously? Just a year? You’ve come a long way.”
“Thanks.”
“If we keep rehearsing here, you can probably borrow that guitar of Ezra’s. I think he has a couple.”
“Jenny says he’s gone to Mexico for a few months.”
“Yeah, that lucky mofo. I sure could stand to get out of this rain for a bit.”
“No shit. Hey, do you know about this thing that happened between Jenny and Tracy, or Tracy and Ezra, I don’t even know. Everyone seems to know but me.”
“Jenny hasn’t said anything?”
“She started to tell me about it, but we were interrupted. I haven’t talked to her much since December.”
“Maybe she assumes you already heard. There was a party at Willowberry, and, you know, Jenny didn’t live here first quarter, but she spent a lot of time here, because of Alma and Ezra. I guess Ezra had just told her he was going to Mexico after Christmas break. Maybe she was pissed at him, or drunk, or she just figured she was free to do whatever she wanted. At any rate, she ended up in Ezra’s bed with Tracy. I think Ezra was jamming out in the barn and Jenny probably figured she was safe as long as she could hear the music, or something. Anyway, she and Tracy got into some kind of argument. I don’t know what it was about, but there was yelling, and someone heard your name, and Angelica’s. Ezra had just come into the house and heard them, and when he got upstairs he found Tracy stumbling half-naked out of his room and Jenny in tears. Ezra and Tracy went at it for a couple minutes before they were separated, by Charlie or Sid, I’m not sure. I think Alma was in the middle of it, too.”
“Shit, that’s intense. Did anybody get hurt?”
“Not as far as I know. I don’t think that was the problem.”
Charlie returns with a lit joint and offers it to Gabe. I decline the invitation to partake, as usual, but accept a mug of peppermint tea, which Charlie sets on the table in front of me, pushing some dirty dishes and old newspapers aside. He and Gabe start talking about the latest Little Feat album, Dixie Chicken, and the band’s New Orleans–influenced rhythm section, resuming what must have been an earlier discussion about trying some of Little Feat’s grooves on Angelica’s songs.
“Do you know what we’re talking about?” Gabe asks me.
When I shake my head, Charlie goes into the living room and puts on Dixie Chicken, cueing up “Fat Man in the Bathtub.”
“Dig this groove,” Gabe says to me as we join Charlie.
“This is the shit,” Charlie says. He plays “Fat Man” again and then flips the record over.
“We could try something like this on ‘Cold Blue Steel’,” he says, moving the needle to “On Your Way Down.”
The slow, funky groove starts with a piano intro I can imagine Alma playing, and the bluesy electric guitar fills on the verse sound like something I could pull off. My attention drifts as Charlie and Gabe discuss the particulars of the groove, and then Charlie puts on another song, a funky uptempo song called “Two Trains.” At the end of the first chorus, a shrieking laser beam of a guitar line drills a hole into my forehead and I’m suddenly riveted to the music.
“Holy shit, who the hell is that?” The searing slide guitar is like nothing I’ve ever heard, and I realize that I’ve mistaken its sound on the previous songs for organ.
“Far out, huh?” Charlie says. “That’s Lowell George. He’s also the lead singer and main songwriter.”
“Hey guys, what’s up?” Angelica, Alma, and Jenny walk into the room, shedding wet jackets, and Charlie turns down the volume on the stereo.
“Cranking Little Feat again, huh?” Alma says, smiling. “Charlie can’t get enough of it. I don’t think there’s been another record on the box since he got it.”
“You guys about ready to go?” Angelica asks, looking at me and Gabe. “I should get the car back to Sandy.” She has her guitar with her, but mine is still in the barn.
“Sure, I just have to get my guitar,” I say.
“Could you grab my bass while you’re at it?” Gabe asks me.
“I’ll walk out with you,” Jenny says. “Hey, Alma, Ezra wouldn’t mind if Lucas borrows his guitar for a while, right?”
“Course not,” Alma says. “You know how he is with his stuff. You could probably keep it, Lucas, and a few years from now he’d wonder whatever happened to it.”
“I’ll get your bass, Gabe,” Jenny says.
As we walk to the barn, she asks, “So, you dig Little Feat?”
“That’s the first thing I’ve heard, but I like it.”
“We’ve got tickets to the Dylan show in Seattle next month, with the Band. We might have an extra. I can ask Alma if you want.”
“That’d be great.”
“So, Angelica asked me to sing with the band. I’m excited. The Fruits are in limbo with Ezra gone, although we have a gig coming up in a couple weeks. It’s not the same, though. Sid is into this crazy, raucous Velvet Underground and Iggy Pop stuff. And rehearsals have been getting really loud. But I like what Angelica’s doing and our voices blend well, I think. Plus, I’ll get to see more of you.”
“I’d like that,” I say, smiling. “Did she tell you she signed us up to do one of those noon concerts in the Library? Sometime in March.” Once again, I instinctively respond to Jenny’s flirting by changing the subject.
“That’ll be fun,” she says. “We’ll have to rehearse a lot, I suppose. Maybe next time you could stay and hang out for a while. You could stay for dinner now, if you want. Alma is cooking tonight.”
“Thanks, but I need to get these guitars back to my place, and it’s been raining pretty steadily.”
“Too bad the shuttle doesn’t run by here. But you could always spend the night, too, if you get stuck sometime . . . after a rehearsal, or something.”
Jenny has been standing in front of me for the last few minutes, almost as if she’s blocking my path to the door. Her jacket is open and water is slowly dripping down her neck into the cleft visible between her breasts, a strand of hair curled onto a slope of skin. She rises up on her tiptoes and gives me a quick, moist kiss on the lips. I have a guitar in each hand, and I’m tempted to put them down and embrace her, but before I recover from my surprise, she pulls away and walks to the door.
Angelica raises her eyebrows as I walk into the living room.
“You got everything you need?” she says with a grin, almost daring me to answer.
Long Beach, 1965
“Mom, why can’t I sing?”
“What do you mean, honey? Of course you can sing.”
“The teacher said I can’t sing.”
“What teacher, Miss Leeper?”
“No, the music teacher.”
“Oh. Do you want to sing?”
“I don’t know. Can you sing?”
“Of course. I sing in church every Sunday. You’ve heard me.”
“But I sing in church too, sometimes.”
“You see.”
“But the teacher said I can’t sing.”
“Well, you’re still growing, aren’t you?”
“Am I?”
“Of course. When you’re fully grown you’ll be as tall as your dad. Your vocal cords are growing, too. Maybe you just need to wait until you’re older, until your vocal cords are fully grown.”
“Can Dad sing?”
“What do you think?”
“No.”