“Honestly, Jason, I think I know who Dennis Wilson is. I grew up during those days. You’re the one who shouldn’t know who Dennis Wilson is,” she said, now annoyed. Gage laughed.
“I didn’t realize you followed popular music,” I said.
“How much do you have to follow to know the Beach Boys?” she said. “It’s not like the Beach Boys are obscure. I mean Nancy Reagan liked the Beach Boys. I think that disqualifies them from ‘cult’ status.” Gage really guffawed at that. I was unused to my mother being so sarcastic, but I can’t say I didn’t completely deserve it.
I began, calmly, patiently. “The Beach Boys’ extreme commercial popularity is precisely one of the reasons they are cult figures. Cult objects are one of two things: genuinely undiscovered artists and objects that deserved recognition — often with music that is quite conventional, quite as poppy as what is on the charts, but just unheard — or they are famous mainstream artists with secret counterlives in which they created risky, edgy experimental work. Work that very possibly deconstructs their more commercial work. That’s the thing — the perversity of it. The subversive, even courageous, quality. And the price must be paid: sometimes they almost ruin their careers. Usually they get destroyed by their label and the mainstream press. This sort of cult stuff is almost always unconventional, formally radical, hugely ambitious, drug-fueled follies that destroy the artists emotionally and physically. But I don’t expect you to understand my appreciation for the Beach Boys.”
My mother nodded, smiling. She paused for a moment as if she were about to speak, but I had not finished.
“Dennis Wilson is the double whammy, because even though he is well known as the only good-looking Beach Boy, as a musician he is an obscure member of this very famous band—”
“I met Dennis Wilson once,” she said softly.
“—and his solo records are therefore truly cult—” She smiled at me. I stopped for a second. She sucked daintily on her pipe.
“What?”
“I said I met Dennis Wilson once,” she said.
“Are you serious? When?” I said.
“I met him in a bar in Venice Beach. In 1979, I think. Or maybe 1980.”
Okay. A bar in Venice Beach. Do I ask her what she was doing in a bar in Venice Beach? It was pre-me, my mother to be, how can I really imagine that? She is unformed, she is waiting-to-be in my mind. So she started to tell this tale about some scummy bar called the Blue Cantina.
“It was where the surfer guys hung out. And bikers. Hells Angels too.”
I struggled to envision my mother among drunken Hells Angels. But I said nothing. You don’t want to remind them of their audience at this point, at least not until you get the goods.
“Living in Southern California was pretty depressing in those days. You know, everything was less than it could have been. Just casualties everywhere, drugs and venereal diseases. All dissolute and sleazy — that’s what it felt like in 1980. Anyway, I was by myself and I noticed this very tan guy in his late thirties. He was still handsome despite having uncombed hair, a ratty beard and a bloat around his eyes. He wore, I remember, a white linen shirt, which was unbuttoned and hung open. And white painter’s pants. His body was still muscular, his belly was still trim. If you didn’t look too closely, he would seem just fine.” She put down her pipe and picked up her wineglass.
“He kept staring at me, and it was then that I noticed he was barefoot. He had wide, filthy, beat-up feet, and I remember thinking, Why would they let him in with no shoes and pretty much no shirt? He came over to where I was sitting. I knew this would happen because I did make eye contact with him, which is the equivalent of an open invitation in a bar like that.”
I could’ve been spared, couldn’t I, the knowledge that my mother knows the lingua franca of seedy biker bars?
“He said hi. I looked at him up close, and he seemed very familiar. Somewhere behind the beard and the shaggy hair. His neck was kind of short, but he was quite striking. And so familiar.
“‘I’m Dennis,’ he said.”
“No way,” I said to Gage.
“I realized it was Dennis Wilson, the cute drumming-and-surfing Beach Boy. He sat down on the banquette across from me and put his hand on the table between us. I wasn’t hiding very well my thrill, and how extremely impressed I was that I was talking to Dennis Wilson, however barefoot and disheveled. And drunk, which I also realized. In fact, he was sort of eyeing my drink.
“‘Would you like another?’ he said.
“‘Sure,’ I said, draining my glass. ‘A grapefruit and vodka with salt on the rim.’
“‘Would you mind covering it? I’m short right now.’ I shrugged and bought us two drinks. He retrieved them from the bar but this time sat next to me, on my side of the banquette.”
“No way,” I said, whispering now. For a moment I entertained the fantasy that she was about to reveal that I was actually the love child of Dennis Wilson — no doubt one of many — thus explaining not only my sense of her caginess but also my fixation on all things pertaining to the brothers Wilson — Brian, Carl and Dennis. But of course I wasn’t born until 1983, which means I was conceived in 1982, and this story we were hearing just somehow doesn’t feel like the beginning of a three-year love affair, you know? No, it sounded like something other than that. She took another toke on her pipe. As did Gage.
“Anyway, I felt sort of bad for him. I had heard how both Dennis and Brian Wilson would go on benders for days at a time. They would tell people in bars, Hey, I’m a Beach Boy, buy me a drink. And sometimes they would even play piano for free drinks. But he didn’t say anything about the Beach Boys.”
“Are you sure it was him?” I said.
She sighed.
“Okay, okay, go on. Please.”
“There was a jukebox. He went over and put a quarter in. He asked me if I wanted to dance. That old Procol Harum song, ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale,’ started playing.”
“Wait, did he pick it or did you?”
“He did.”
“He picked a Procol Harum song. What were the other songs on that jukebox?”
“I really don’t know, Jason.”
“Then what happened?”
“He said, ‘I love this song.’
“I said, ‘What does this song mean?’
“He said, ‘It doesn’t mean anything. It feels something.’”
“Right. Wow. Did he put the moves on you?”
My mother smiled at this question. “No, not really. I mean he was probably more interested in getting drunk than getting laid.”
“Yeah, right.”
“But it was somehow a sweet moment — the afternoon light, the innocent song and this sad guy swaying with me. The world was going from bad to worse, I had been in L.A. way too long, Ronald Reagan had just become president, but America was still a place where you could dance with a barefoot rock star in a nowhere bar in the middle of a weekday afternoon.”
So there my mother was, telling me about her moment with Dennis Wilson. And my mother had no business being in L.A. in 1980 and saying she had been there too long. But what did I actually know? She graduated from college in 1972. And she had me in Washington State in 1983. So there are like eleven years I know nothing about. I recall her once saying she left California after she finished school. That she had a falling-out with her parents, and she didn’t keep in contact with them. But I don’t remember asking for any specifics. Here was a perfect opening to pin her down on some things, but I said nothing. She smiled her vague, receding smile, half apologetic, half fuzzy with substance, and the conversation was over.
Okay, so here’s the thing. You don’t question these sorts of details, why would you? But what kind of fight do you get in with your parents where you never talk to them again? And moreover, who is this woman, drinking in bars, alone, on weekday afternoons? I’m no genius about people, but something is definitely up.