went to my brother as a long-haired eighteen-year-old who had just dropped out of college, his conversation rocketing back and forth between complex string theory, Timothy Leary, and how the Beatles’ Abbey Road was the new gospel, in what I knew now, but not back then, was one of his uncontrolled, manic rants.
It went to how he had once visited me at Cornell – after he was released from the psychiatric home in Hartford – and how we took a weekend trip to Montreal. I recalled how we had trolled for girls along Sherbrooke Street, near McGill, and how Charlie had ended up screwing our waitress back in the hotel room after he’d convinced her he had taught Eric Clapton all he knew, and air-played her the opening riff from Cream’s ‘Sunshine of Your Love’, while I pounded the pillow over my head in the other bed, alone.
My brother could charm the birds out of the trees.
It’s easy, Charlie always said, with that sly, mischievous grin. If you ask every chick you run into if they wanna screw, now and then one of them says yes! Even when you look like me!
Eventually, winding through the wooded canyons around Lompoc, my thoughts roamed here:
To the last time he had any kind of relationship with our dad.
It was maybe twenty years ago, Charlie’s last chance at a real life before he permanently gave up.
Somehow, he had persuaded my father to dispose of his design samples by sending them down to Miami, where Charlie had set up a rack in a women’s hair salon near his mother’s dance studio, selling them as one-of-a-kind creations.
It was only a wobbly metal rack in the rear of this cheesy salon, crammed with colorful velour and cotton cashmere sets – my dad’s particular genius. But to Charlie, it might as well have been the epicenter of the apparel world. He held court, shuttling back and forth between hair stations, his own hair bound neatly into a ponytail and dressed as cleanly as I’d ever seen him, the blue-haired women eating out of his hand. He’d mesmerize them with stories about his famous father in the rag trade, the glamorous women he screwed while in LA, celebrity rockers he did coke with, lurid tales of his years on the road, all the while pushing oil stocks on the Canadian stock exchange.
He was turning dozens of sample sets each week at fifty to sixty bucks a pop. Real money in his pocket for the first time in his life. Living in a decent place on Biscayne Bay with Gabby and his infant son. He had an exuberance I’d never seen before – a twinkling in his eyes.
For the first time he was making it – in the real world.
And with his father, who had let him down a hundred times.
Later, he took me back to the storage room where he kept his stock. Charlie’s mood shifted. He started ripping open shipping cartons, his voice accusing and familiar. ‘Look at the shit he’s trying to pawn off on me,’ he said, tearing out newly received merchandise still in plastic bags. I could see rips, flaws, mismatched color panels mixed in with legitimate samples. ‘You see the kind of business I’ve got going here. These people don’t want crap. I’m selling “one of a kinds”, not this garbage. And look –’ he ripped an invoice out of the box. ‘He’s fucking billing me for them! He’s not even giving me terms.’
Everything always came back to this: Charlie trusting himself in our father’s hands, and Lenny pulling the rug out from under him again. ‘I can’t sell these, can I?’ He looked at me for confirmation. And, yes, there were a few seconds, the prior season’s returns that had probably been in someone’s stockroom forever, design prototypes with busted zippers and mismatched panels.
‘It would be hard,’ I said, agreeing.
‘He’s trying to screw me again, isn’t he?’ Anger rushed into my brother’s face. ‘You know what he did? He had his accountant call me up and demand payment. His accountant! I’m his son, for Christ’s sake. He just can’t stand to see me successful . . . We’re selling fifty to sixty a week of these, and he doesn’t want me to take his luster away from him so he’s trying to shut me down.’
To me, it was probably just the shipping manager throwing in the kitchen sink. My father probably didn’t even know about it.
‘I’ve got a fucking kid, for God’s sakes!’ His voice shook with rage.
But to Charlie it was like he had personally hand-picked them to ensure he would fail.
A fight ensued, and weeks later, my dad stopped shipping to him for good. There was a huge battle over payment. My dad called Charlie ‘an ungrateful sonovabitch’. Charlie threatened to come up north and kill him.
They never spoke again.
He took Gabriella and Evan and moved out to the coast. Ten years later, when my father – drunk and down on his luck – drove his Mercedes into the waters of Shinnecock Bay, he wouldn’t even come to the funeral.
I got off the freeway at Pacific Crest Drive. Pismo Beach was a quaint, sleepy beach town tucked under rolling hills of dazzling gold and green, leading down to rocky bluffs overlooking the Pacific.
Grover Beach, where my brother lived, was its seedier next-door neighbor.
I’d been out there only once before, five years ago, when I brought the family while we were vacationing in San Francisco, four hours to the north. Up to then, my kids hadn’t even met my older brother. They’d only met Evan, their cousin, the couple of times we had brought him east.
Their place was a tiny, two-bedroom apartment provided by the state with a single bathroom and pictures covering up cracks in the plaster in a downtrodden two-story building across from abandoned railroad tracks.
That visit, we sat around for most of a day, listening to Charlie and Evan banging on their guitars, belting out barely recognizable rock tunes in hoarse, off-pitch voices, amid my brother’s rants about how his father had ruined his life and how by the time he was Sophie’s age, fifteen, he was already whacked out on LSD.
It was scary.
We watched them apportioning out their cache of colorful medications on the kitchen counter. Gabby said how she was once a beauty queen back home and had never bargained for this kind of life, and how she might just go back to Colombia, where her family would gladly welcome her.
My kids were a little freaked out. We took them out to lunch, to a café on the main street overlooking the beach, lined with surf shops, tattoo parlors, and oyster bars. Charlie said it was the first time they’d been to a restaurant other than Denny’s in years.
We left the next day.
I drove down the long hill toward the ocean and turned on Division Street. I found Charlie’s building a half block down, the familiar blue Taurus I had bought for him parked beneath the carport out front. I pulled into the next space and sat for what seemed like a full five minutes.
What could I do for them here?
My mind went back to something.
The day Evan was born. Back in Miami. Kathy and I happened to be in Boca, so we went to see them at the hospital. Charlie was so different than I’d ever seen him before. Cradling his little Evan in his arms, in his blue blanket, looking like any doting new dad, but with his wild, Jerry Garcia hair and bushy beard. He let Kathy hold the baby for a while, and he and I went down to the cafeteria.
