IT WAS LATE ONE NIGHT all the way across the country, in their only gig at the Fillmore East, of all places, that Spencer Willmont let them all know of his change of plans. He’d been absent at rehearsals in hotel rooms all the way across the country. He’d missed two radio shows in the past week, one in Columbus, Ohio, and the next in Morgantown, West Virginia—at each the whole band had showed up in the studio and waited around for hours for him to arrive before the DJs had to tell them they could perform with him or without him and regardless of their talents together they had to admit they couldn’t go on without him—they were a totalitarian nation absent the Great Leader.
“I know we have all these shows scheduled,” Spence said to TR. Julia was sitting on the sidelines, as ever, not saying anything. “But they’re recording in the South of France and they need my vocals.” Though she didn’t know it, the winter before she started playing with them, Spencer had opened for the Violent Blossoms, and the Blossoms had just rented out a whole house east of Grenoble to record what they were certain would be their groundbreaking, big-sound record. Whoever could afford to pay for travel out there would have a place to sleep and they could come play on the next record and who knew what else after? Who knew. Julia thought that between that night and when he left Spence would come to her room, as he had been doing for the past two months, after every show. That night, she didn’t see him at all. After the show he didn’t stick around backstage. He didn’t come to her. The next afternoon she saw TR in the lobby. Somehow she knew just from looking at TR’s sycophantic face Spence was already gone. The heat of the summer day blazed in Midtown Manhattan. Julia took an hour to walk from the Plaza up Fifth Avenue, toward the Met. She decided to go into the museum. Somewhere in the statuary, amid the white Roman alabasters of kings and generals, Julia slumped onto the floor and cried for almost half an hour before a guard came along to tell her she had to go.
She had to go.
Julia couldn’t even bring herself to find the rest of the band in the big apartment down on Houston and Attorney Street where they’d holed up before the show they were supposed to play at the Fillmore East. Spencer Willmont was on a plane for the Alps to the far east of the French countryside, headed for some little town called Bourg d’Oisans, where he would go record with the loudest, most flamboyant rock band any of them had ever heard. A decade later the Rolling Stones wouldn’t even be old yet, but the Blossoms would be all but forgotten, one record reissued by Rhino Discs in the eighties to modest sales, a vinyl copy of which Julia also moved up to the guest room. The Cherubs were to scatter to the winds. With some luck Spence hadn’t known about a couple thousand dollars TR had socked away knowing that a day like this would come for the band. When Julia snuck in later that day to grab her stuff and find some cheap way back to her parents’ house in Mt. Airy—she had nine dollars and thirty-seven cents in her pocket, which on the day her son moved back into her house four decades later would buy her a copy of The New Yorker or a cup of coffee but not both—the rest of the band was sleeping off the damage they’d done the night before, but TR was up scrambling eggs in the kitchenette in the place.
“Want some?” he said. “Got some of that good chorizo from the market down on Second Ave. It’s spicy. Spicy might be just the thing right now. Burn your mouth like the memory of fire.”
“What the fuck kind of person,” Julia said. She was standing with her back pressed to the cold plaster wall next to the range TR cooked on. There was a high-pitched ringing in her ears from all the shows they’d played in the last month, a literal sound in her head that would never subside. Like the tinfoil and images of her father, it wasn’t a memory, it wasn’t over, it would never end. She didn’t even know what she was wearing—a pair of bell-bottoms she’d never seen before, a thin halter top though it was November, and a big old Sherpa sheepskin coat that might have been Spence’s, or might have been someone else Spence had slept with’s. She tried to picture herself party to the thousand-year-old statues she’d just been crying amid at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan, stone and silence—what was it that Rilke had called music, the breathing of statues, the quiet of images—what someone would have seen if they’d seen her then, but she couldn’t get above it. The sharp smell of Mexican sausage leaking out into sizzling eggs brought her right back.
“So here’s the thing,” TR said. “I socked a whole bunch of money away knowing this was going to happen. I mean … not knowing knowing, but you know—knowing. Knowing character is destiny, that kind of knowledge.” Without taking his hand off the spatula or his eyes away from the eggs on the stovetop, TR reached into a brown paper bag on the counter. “Your share,” he said.
TR pulled out a thin stack of bills. It had a rubber band around it, which made the edges curl up. He handed it to her. In Julia’s fingers it was hard to describe how thin it felt, like the absence of substance you felt when you had filo dough in your mouth. Her hand told her she was holding a paltry sum and TR could see it in her face.
“Count it,” he said. It was two thousand dollars. It was hard to believe that two thousand dollars, enough to live on for months, as debt enough to break you, amounted to so insignificant a stack of hundreds. It was the objective correlative of that whole period—enough to live on but in your hand so thin you almost couldn’t feel it. “He’s in a little town called Bourg d’Oisans. It’s easy to find. France is lousy with ex-pats these days. You can get there no problem. I’ll write it all down for you if you decide you wanna go. You could. Easily. Or you could keep that and start what comes next here in the States. Free of Spence. Character, destiny. The good ol’ United States aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. The Cherubs, they dead.”
Julia took the bills and shoved them into her pocket, their fibrous paper crumpling against her hand. She went back to her room. She had a decision to make, should I stay or should I go. For years she’d wanted change and now she was the agent of her own change. It occurred to her as she sat in that room that she never had made a decision of this size before. Never actively made it, anyway. She bolted her father’s hospital after seeing that blood on the floor. She left her home in Philadelphia for Syracuse University because she was accepted to Syracuse University with a scholarship and that was what she should do. Even the thin wild mercury decision to head west to the coast with Willie, then back plinko-circuitiously across the country east with Spencer’s band, had felt less like decisions than non-decisions: If Spencer Willmont asked you to join his band, you joined his band! If Willie Schtodt asked you to travel to San Francisco, you traveled to San Francisco. Now she had a choice to make, to head back home to the land she knew, or to thrust east across the ocean, back to the very country where her father had left his sanity behind him, along with any real prospects of his family’s happiness, and of course she should’ve known then she couldn’t and wouldn’t do it.
Of course, she knew even then she’d one day end up being the kind of Julia Sidler or Julia Steinberg or Julia Goldfarb or Julia Feinberg or Julia Steinsteenowitzowitzsky who would spend weeks cleaning out a basement of all her expensive vintage instruments she and her husband could now afford so that her thirty-year-old son could move back in to live with her, but first this, for the space of those moments in that life in those nanoseconds not captured on film and not able to be captured on film or video or selfie or even in words or images, she could imagine it, it was possible, it was present and it was real and it was who she was—is—would forever and always not be.