Not Fade Away Read online

  This one’s going out for Mom, brother Bob, and Victoria (that’s right: dedicated to the one I love); for Jacoba, Leonard, and Lynn; for Sylvia, Boney Maroni, and Peggy Sue; for Jeremiah, Jerry, and Jack; Freeman and Nina; Gary, Allen, Lew, and John; for Boots, Annie, Dick, Joe, and all the cats and kitties down at the Tastee-Freeze on a hot summer night; for all the players and dancers and pilgrims of the faith; in memory of Ed O’Conner and Darrell Gray; and to the great spirits of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper, R.I.P.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part One: Floorboard George: Coast To Coast & Gone Again

  I'm Glad You

  Mesologue

  Part Two: Doo-Wop To The Bopper’s Grave

  At The Moment

  Part Three: The Pilgrim Ghost

  Right Foot Nailed

  Epilogue

  Preview

  Praise for Jim Dodge

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Introduction

  KEVIN SAMPSON

  Jim Dodge lives on a remote ranch in Northern California. His is a community of potions, ghosts, myths and legends and his writing – the most imaginative of any living author – reflects the best traditions of the yarner. Magic, music and the hills and forests of deepest darkest California inform all his books. Fup, an enchanting tale of immortality and fence-posts occupies a world of whiskey stills where the lawman turns a blind eye to justifiable criminality. It’s only the dog-savaging, fence-chewing, duck-rutting wild hogs that have him stumped. Stone Junction deals with a network of philanthropic anarchists and alchemists who can do anything they want. And they do. They make themselves invisible and steal the biggest diamond in the whole world. They can beat anyone in a fair fight if they need to, and they sometimes make love to seven maidens under one full moon. Strange things are afoot in the forests of Sonoma County, we can only hope.

  Potions figure strongly in both books and it’s under the influence of another mystical ’flu remedy that the vessel of Not Fade Away receives the testimony of Floorboard George Gastin, retired hippie car thief. Not Fade Away is a rattling good yarn about a chap who’s paid to steal and destroy a perfect white Cadillac. Before steering us through the whacked-out cut and thrust of a pan-American car chase, however – and it’s one heck of a weird taxi-ride – Jim Dodge gives a precise and loving portrait of the fledgling San Francisco Beat movement.

  It’s easy to think of the San Francisco scene revolving around Haight-Ashbury, flower power and love-ins. It’s easy to think ’69. But the seeds of the hippie scene were scattered fifteen years earlier with the free thinkers, jazz musicians and dodgy poets of the North Beach community. Café Trieste and Bar Vesuvio became the hangout for every philosopher and drifter in town. It was a great time for ugly guys to get laid. You turned up, read poems and copped off. It’s a magical time magically captured at the start of Not Fade Away. Jim Dodge manages to mock the scene and celebrate it, brilliantly, both at once. In one episode a youthful Floorboard George meets Kacy, a rich, beautiful dropout at a jazz bar. His description of Big Red the saxophone player bending and sustaining his notes in a way that drains the listener’s soul is stunning. Kacy makes George take his clothes off outside the club and walk naked with her to his apartment. It’s a superbly erotic scene, neither salacious nor sentimental. He barely described the sex yet you read it with a soaring bonk-on. His evocation of high times and loose living is spellbinding – truly rock ’n’ roll writing at its best.

  That spell is cast over the rest of the story, too. It’s a fabulous fable, rich with exotic, deranged, hopeless characters. It’s rare to find yourself rooting for such a fantastic array of losers, but this is the essence of Jim Dodge’s writing. It is wonderfully humane. There can’t be a writer so besotted with his own creatures. He made them and he adores them, one and all – even Scumball, the baddie. So we meet and fall in love with Donna Walsh, trailer-trash single mom, unlucky in love, barely keeping it together. There’s the shamanistic inventor, Joshua Springfield who traverses the land, experimenting with light and sound and drugs. The Reverend Double Gone Johnson is looking for a few dollars to start his own church – the only other thing stopping him is his search for the appropriate name for his new love sect. Should it be The Comedown Tabernacle Of the Grim View? Or The Rock Solid Gospel Light Church Of The Holy Release? Whatever, it sounds like a church you’d cheerfully don your Sunday best for.

  All of this splendid battiness is underscored by a rock ’n’ roll soundtrack that as good as jives off the page at you. Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Elvis, The Everlys, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis and so many more are written up with a relish you can taste. If the story were not so grippingly told you’d have no choice but to drop the book and wrench your dorsals doing back-drops to ‘Chantilly Lace’. George’s mission is to deliver this Caddy to the grave of The Big Bopper himself and pay the final tribute by setting the rockmobile ablaze. As he sets off on this incredible picaresque, the bump and grind of the music, music, music is never far away.

  As Floorboard George charges through the city limits and interstate highways, day and night, mile after mile sustained mainly by the 1,000-pill jar of uppers he bought at the outset, you start to get a sense of his immortality. Perhaps the drugs take their toll on the reader, too, because a pervading atmosphere of sub-reality starts to infuse the characters and places and scenarios. Towards the end of his journey George encounters crazies like Phillip Lewis Kerr, The Greatest Travelling Salesman In The World, who have a distinctly spectral feel. George starts having visions and hearing voices. You can feel his paranoia as the big world closes in on him. But above all you feel that no amount of road blocks, helicopters, FBI gooks or clueless gangsters will ever get close to George. You know he’s an Untouchable – he won’t fade away.

  With his amphetamines mine reduced to a sticky residue, George arrives at his spiritual destiny. Ghosts and legends and tragedies rend the skies. The boundaries between the real and the unreal, between myth and truth, between substance and vapour have been blurred forever. The narrator comes out of his potion-induced stupor, unsure whether he even met Floorboard George Gastin at all. Was his story told to him or did he dream the whole thing up? We don’t know. We don’t need to know. We ourselves have just come out of the trip of our lives, a hallucinatory ride through the motels and madhouses of rock ’n’ roll America. That’s about as good as you can get from words on pages.

  This is Not Fade Away. A classic, indeed.

  Kevin Sampson

  September 1999

  ‘… music, sweet music…’

  —Martha and the Vandellas,

  ‘Dancing in the Street’

  PROLOGUE

  ‘To the understanding of such days and events

  this additional narrative becomes necessary,

  like a real figure to walk beside a ghost.’

  —Hanie Long,

  Interlinear to Cabeza de Vaca

  THE DAY DIDN’T begin well. I woke up at first light with a throbbing brain-core headache, fever and chills, dull pains in all bodily tissues, gagging flashes of nausea, a taste in my mouth like I’d eaten a pound of potato bugs, aching eye sockets, and a general feeling of basic despair. This deepened with the realization that I had to get out of bed, drive a long way on bad roads, negotiate a firewood deal, and then drive back home to the ranch, where I still had my own winter’s wood to get in. If I’d had a phone I would’ve instantly canceled the meeting, but since the ranch was too far out in the hills for the phone company to bother with, and because it
had taken me a week to set up the meeting with Jack Strauss, who was driving all the way over from Napa, there was no choice. Besides, Strauss was going to front me $1000 on twenty-five cords, which was $993 more than I had, but about $4000 short of what would’ve satisfied my creditors. At the mere thought of my finances, despair collapsed into doom. Compelled by circumstance, I arose, dressed, stepped outside, and greeted the day by lurching over behind the empty woodshed and throwing up.

  The dawning sky was black with roiling nimbus, wind gusting from the south: rain any minute. I let out the chickens, threw them some scratch, split kindling, and moaned through the rest of the morning chores. Back in the house, I started a fire in the woodstove and put on the tea kettle, then scrabbled through a cupboard till I found my first-aid kit, in which, against all temptation, I’d stashed a single Percodan. Though it looked small and forlorn in the bottom of the vial, I swallowed it with gratitude. I was sending a sowbug against Godzilla, but anything would be an improvement.

  I hurt. Since I had taken neither drink nor drug for a week – another depressing realization – I assumed I’d fallen victim to the virus sweeping our rural community. People were calling this one the Smorgasbord Flu, because that’s how the bug regarded the body; in some cases the feast had gone on for weeks. The thought of weeks made my stomach start to twist again, but I bore down, fighting it back. To lose the Percodan would’ve killed me.

  Feeling slightly more in command after my show of will, I choked down some tea and dry toast, damped the stove, and then oozed out to my ’66 Ford pick-up to begin the long drive to the meeting with Strauss in Monte Rio.

  The truck wouldn’t start.

  I took the long-bladed screwdriver off the dash and got out. Hunched down under the left fender-well, I beat on the electric fuel pump till it began clicking.

  The truck started at the same moment as the rain. I switched on the wipers. They didn’t work. I got out again and pried up the hood and used the screwdriver to beat on the wiper motor till the blades jerked into motion like the wings of a pelican goosed into flight. I was on my way.

  My way, I should explain, is always long. I live deep in the coastal hills of Sonoma County, out where the hoot owls court the chickens, on a nine-hundred-acre ranch that’s been in the family for five generations. The house was built in 1859 and still lacks all those new-fangled modern amenities like indoor plumbing and electricity. You can reach the ranch on eight miles of mean dirt road that runs along the ridgetop, or by a two-hour pack from the coast on a steep, overgrown trail. The nearest neighbor is seven miles away. Where the dirt road hits the county road, it’s another six miles of twisty one-lane blacktop to the mailbox, and nine more to the nearest store. I live in the country because I like it, but bouncing down the dirt road that morning, my brain shrieking at every jolt, I would have rented a townhouse condo in a hot second, faster if it was near a hospital.

  To distract myself from misery, I tuned in a San Francisco station and listened to the early morning traffic report – already snarled up on the Bay Bridge, a stalled car blocking the Army Street on-ramp – but for once it didn’t console me. The Percodan, however, was getting there, or at least the pain seemed to be moving away.

  By the time I hit the paved county road just past the Chuckstons’ place, I was feeling like I might make it. The rain continued, a determined drizzle. Lulled by the smoothness of pavement, mesmerized by the metronomic slap of the wipers, perhaps a bit lost in my appreciation of the Percodan, I didn’t see the deer until I was almost on top of him, a big three-point buck with a rut-swollen neck. He leapt clear in a burst of terrified grace as I simultaneously hit the brakes and a slick spot on the road, snapped sideways, fishtailed once, twice, and slammed into a redwood stump on the righthand shoulder. My head smacked off the steering wheel and recoiled backwards just in time to meet my .20-gauge flying off the gunrack. The twin blows knocked me goofier than a woodrat on ether. I dimly remember feeling lost in some pulsating forest, looking for my mind, tormented by the knowledge I needed my mind to find my mind and that’s why nothing seemed to make the tiniest bit of sense. Then a blessed rush of adrenalin burned the murk away. I opened the truck door and slid out, jelly-legged but standing, hurting but still alive.

  The drizzle on my face was refreshing. I paused a moment, then started walking toward town, holding my thumb out even though there was no sign of a car in either direction. I’d gone a half-mile before I realized my best move was to walk back to the Chuckstons’ place. They had a CB I could use to call for help. I needed help.

  The rain thickened from drizzle to drops. As I walked, I absently kept touching my head, thinking the rainwater was blood, brain leakage, or something equally vital seeping from my skull.

  I stopped when I got back to my truck. I hadn’t checked for damage, and was suddenly taken by the wild hope it might be driveable, a hope horribly dashed by a closer look: the right-front fender, mashed against the wheel; the tie-rod badly bent; steering knuckle broken. I trudged on.

  Nobody was home at the Chuckstons’ place – they’d probably left early to gather sheep – but the spare key was still where it had been when I’d taken care of their house the summer before. I wiped my muddy boots on the welcome mat and let myself in. I turned on the CB and tried to think who to call, somebody with both a CB and a phone. Donnie. Donnie Schatzburg. He came right back like he’d been waiting for me all morning.

  I explained what had happened, gave him the location of the truck, and asked him to call Itchman’s Garage in Guerneville to send out a tow – if not Itchman’s, Bailey’s on the coast.

  Donnie was back in five minutes with ugly news: both of Itchman’s trucks were already out and had calls backed up, so it was liable to be a couple of hours at best, and there was no answer at Bailey’s.

  Donnie kept asking if I was all right, and offering to come over and lend a hand, but I assured him I was broken but unbent, which was much more jaunty than I felt now that the adrenalin was wearing off. I asked him if he’d call the Kozy Korner Kitchen in Monte Rio and leave a message for Jack Strauss that I’d crashed and would call him at home as soon as possible. Donnie said he’d be glad to, and I signed off with heartfelt thanks.

  I walked back to my wreck to wait for the tow truck. Why I didn’t arrange to wait at the house I still lack the wit to explain. The rain had turned hard and relentless, a three-day storm settling in. I hunched up in the damp cab and considered my situation. In the brightest light I could imagine, it was bleak. I wondered if I could possibly risk using my Visa card. I was pretty certain I’d violated my credit limit long ago, and was sure I hadn’t paid them in five months, but this was an emergency. I could ride into Guerneville with the tow truck, rent a car, go to a motel, call Strauss for new arrangements, sleep, meet him the next day and pick up the $1000 in front, buy flu drugs, drive the renter home, stay in bed recovering till the truck was fixed, cut wood like a maniac, sweat profusely, spend most of the money I’d make just to pay for the truck repairs, but without the truck I couldn’t cut wood, and no wood, no money. Money. I checked my wallet. One piece of bad plastic and seven bucks in cash. I leaned my head against the steering wheel and whimpered. I wanted my mommy.

  That’s when I heard the roar. My head snapped up, instantly alert, senses flared. Through the rain-blurred windshield a grey hulk took form, grew larger, denser, the roar taking on a mass of its own, all of it coming right at my face. Without thinking I hit the door and rolled across the road. I came up on all fours in the drainage ditch, poised to flee, fight, shit, or go blind.

  A large truck was hurtling down the straight stretch of road. I threw myself against the embankment, pressing myself into the root-clotted clay. At the moment I moved, the truck’s rear end locked up; it shimmied for a heartbeat, then the rear end came around in a slow arc, 180°, rubber squealing on the wet pavement, water squeegee’d into a thin roostertail. The whole mass of the truck shuddered against the brakes and slid to a smooth stop, direction rever
sed, its back end no more than two feet from the twisted front bumper of my truck. I stared, flash-frozen in the moment. It was a tow truck, a big tow truck, all painted a pearly metal-flake grey. Within a thin-line oval on the driver’s door, written in a flowing ivory script, it read: THE GHOST.

  I felt like I was filling with helium, hovering at the threshold between gravity and ascent. I heard voices chanting in the rain, women’s voices, but no words came clear.

  There was vague movement behind the fogged side-window of the tow truck, then the door flew open and a ghost leaped out.

  I died.

  Death laughed and sent me back.

  I felt rain on my eyelids. It didn’t feel baptismal, holy, or otherwise spiritually endowed; just wet. I felt a warm hand clamped firmly to my wrist. Another touched my cheek. I opened my eyes. Instead of a ghost, it was the tow truck driver, his face and form obscured in a hooded, wind-billowed poncho, the grey oilcloth lustred with rain.

  ‘Well, well: life goes on.’ That was the first thing George Gastin said to me. He seemed genuinely pleased.

  I groaned.

  ‘Yes indeed,’ he continued, ‘it does go on, don’t it now, moment to moment and breath to breath. Looks like Death shot at you and missed and shit at you and didn’t, but you’ll likely live. Your pulse is outstanding and your color’s coming back. Just take it slow and easy. You’re in the good hands of the Ghost and the situation is under control … or as much control as usual, which – truth be told – is hardly at all, just barely any, one wet thread. But it’s certainly enough for our purposes this glorious morning, so hang on here and we’ll see if your feet still reach the ground.’

  He eased me to my feet, a steadying hand on my shoulder. I was soaked, shivering, weak, confused. Everything but his voice and touch seemed blurred. I took a deep, trembling breath. ‘I’m sick,’ I told him. ‘Flu. Wasn’t hurt in the wreck.’