CHAPTER 5
San Diego, California, July 1967
Will Shepherd, age six, was dreaming of Indians. Fierce and remorseless, they came at him in waves, their horses neighing and rearing, their arrows as long as spears, pointed at his heart. He loved the excitement, loved the movie in his head, loved the danger.
He heard a splash!
It didn't make any sense. Will opened his eyes, shut them almost immediately, then drifted back to sleep.
Cowboys and Indians again.
No splashes. Not in his movie anyway.
Will woke again at quarter to eight, dressed quietly so as not to disturb his still-sleeping brother, Palmer, and hurried down through the quiet house.
In the kitchen he fetched an armful of Welch's grape jelly, peanut butter, milk, and half a loaf of bread. Breakfast for one. Who needed a mother? Who needed anybody?
Will saw his face and uncombed blond hair looking back at him from the side of the shiny toaster. He had to admit it, he thought. He missed his mother a lot. He missed her terribly. He missed her making peanut butter and jellies.
He knew that she had gone to live in Los Angeles. He didn't have to suffer through the terrible fights she had with his father anymore, but at this moment he would have preferred the fights to the silence. Sometimes he and Palmer missed their mom so bad it made them cry at the stupidest times. But usually he hated her. Usually, but not today.
The splash in the swimming pool?
Suddenly Will remembered. He collected his dish and glass and put them in the sink, then ran out the screen door into sweet, dappled sunshine and the call of sparrows.
He came tearing around the corner of the blue-trimmed white clapboard house, and ran to the edge of the pool. He stopped so suddenly he nearly fell over his own sneakered feet.
And he screamed and screamed, screamed so shrilly he woke his little brother, whose face appeared at the window above him.
Will screamed so bitterly that neighbors came rushing to his rescue. They held him, and tried to shield him from what he had already seen, and would never forget.
What the six-year-old boy saw floating on the shimmering water of the pool was his father in his red-plaid bathrobe and beige trousers. On one foot was a yellow slipper; the other foam slipper was drifting as free as a lily pad.
His father's eyes were open, and staring right at him. Your fault, they seemed to tell him. Bad boy. This is your fault, Will.
You know what you did!
You know what you did!
At 5:52 A.M. Anthony Shepherd had purposefully walked outside his house and drowned himself in the family pool.
And whatever part of Will Shepherd that was worth saving seemed to drown with his father.
A few days after their father's suicide, Will and Palmer spent their final California afternoon choosing from among all of their clothes and toys. Just enough to fill two suitcases each. No more than that.
Their mother had refused to take them to live with her. Nobody told Will or Palmer why. The stupid cunt, Will thought, using bad words his father had used when he fought with her. The brothers had spent the days after the suicide with their nanny, who would not take them either, and now they were told they were going to England to people who would. They were to begin a new life with their aunts, Eleanor and Vannie, whom they had never met, but who had made the two-suitcase rule.
In loud, chaotic, swarming Los Angeles International Airport, the two look-alike blond boys sat stone-faced and bewildered, awaiting their flight with Dr. Engles, one of their father's few friends. Dr. Engles was telling them about London, and the stupid Queen and the stupid changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, just like in the poems his mother had read Will before she went away. But Will barely heard what stupid Dr. Engles was saying. He was remembering his father floating in the pool, staring up at him from some dead place.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Will did hear, “we are now ready to board Pan American flight four-eleven to New York and London.”
Dr. Engles held out a hand to take Will's. “Well?” Suddenly, Will bit it savagely, as hard as he could, drawing blood.
“Damn it,” Dr. Engles said, cuffing him with his free hand. “You little shit! You little monster.”
Will opened his mouth. His front teeth were red. “I don't want to go to England,” he howled. “Can't we stay here?”
Please, Daddy.
Please, Mommy.
Please, somebody help me.
I didn't mean to kill my daddy. I didn't mean to do it.
Daddy, please stop looking at me like that. Please, Daddy.
CHAPTER 6
WILL WOULD NEVER forget his first few hours in England. He and his brother might as well have traveled to the moon.
Aunt Eleanor met them at the landing gate. She was a fat, fussy, powder-white-faced woman who was, Will guessed, more scared of him than he was of her. He disliked her instantly. She can't hurt me, he decided. No one will ever hurt me again, but especially not her.
She explained that Aunt Vannie had stayed home to cook a special dinner for the boys. It'll taste like crud, Will decided. England is the worst place ever.
On the way from Heathrow Airport, Aunt Eleanor never stopped talking, and the boys had little chance to observe their surroundings. Whenever they looked away from her, she would jab a finger and remind them to pay attention. Will seriously thought of biting the finger off.
“A great many people who work in London live outside the centre. Close to an Underground stop. We live in Fulham, for example, and we have ever since your mother moved out to make her fortune in America. And I suppose she did, didn't she, marrying your father? She'll inherit all his money, you know, with nothing for you except as she chooses to give it, and goodness knows nothing for us, though we never expected anything from her. Not her.”
No. Never expect anything from my mother. Will knew Aunt Eleanor taught history in primary school, and that explained why she droned on, but her smell was of sweat, and who was she to be talking about his mother? He could tell Palmer didn't like her either. He was pretending to be asleep, the little faker.
At last the cab pulled up in front of a three-story house, red brick with tiny windows and six steps leading up to the front door.
“Here we are,” announced Aunt Eleanor cheerfully, but Will thought about the trees and space and sunshine in San Diego and his chest grew tight.
There were similar houses crowding in on each other on both sides of the street, and the one tree he could see was bent and beaten by the rain, and it had no leaves. Palmer took one suitcase, Aunt Eleanor another, and Will carried his own two up the steps, straining with the effort.
Before they reached it, the front door was flung open, and a woman appeared wearing tight black trousers and a black turtlenecked sweater.
Will gave a little, muffled cry. He felt his heart pound and his face suddenly grow hot.
The woman was young, with ash-brown hair falling halfway down her back. Her eyes were blue and her skin was pale. It's my mother, he thought.
Only of course, she wasn't.
She was his Aunt Vannie, his mother's younger sister, but she reminded him achingly of the woman who once, long ago, it seemed, held him, cuddled him, told him she loved him, and then went away. And he was filled with a curious mixture of dread and delight. He wanted at once to fling himself into her arms, and to run away screaming down the street.
“Take off your shoes before you come in,” Vannie said. “We don't want dirt trodden all over the house, do we?”
The house. England. His new home. His new life. His very own horror story. It was just beginning.
CHAPTER 7
THE LEGEND BEGAN early, and it never really varied.
Will is an extremely intelligent and very clever boy, but he seems to be an incorrigible master of the Charming, Audacious, Very Big Lie! So wrote the headmaster of the Fulham Road primary school in the spring of 1970.
If he worked harder, his
marks would be much improved, but he seems interested only in sports, where he excels, and in picking fights with his classmates, where he is the acknowledged champion. I personally wonder if he is even aware of the elemental aspects of social behavior or, for that matter, the elemental difference between reality and fantasy.
Will understood the difference—but he had made his choice about which he preferred.
On weekends, Will often took solitary walks around his neighborhood. One day, when he was eleven, he heard shouts coming from a stadium about a mile from his aunts' home. Intrigued, he went to investigate. He paid a week's pocket money to get in.
There, in front of him, was a perfectly dazzling sight: twenty-two men, divided in uniform but united in purpose, were playing what they called “football” in England, but what Will knew as soccer. Only on TV had he seen the game played this way.
He had played the game well at school, but felt it had been haphazard, just a bunch of boys kicking the ball around any way they could.
Here, there was symmetry, geometry, coordination in attack, a beauty as inevitable as the waves of the ocean. One man, controlling the ball with his feet, moved forward; another raced to his side; a third began a run down the wing, received the ball from the second man without breaking stride, and veered toward the center of the field, pursued by an opponent who dived at the attacker's feet and managed to push the ball to one of his teammates.
And then, suddenly, everything reversed, like the tide going out. Defenders became attackers, attackers defenders, a whirling mass; Will was reminded of a kaleidoscope his father had given him when he was five.
And the noise! Each time there was a reversal, each time one team threatened the goalkeeper, the crowd roared, as though they shared the breath coming out of the athletes' mouths, and when eventually a goal was scored, the roaring rose to such a pitch Will thought his ears would burst and his heart explode.
That night his mother came to him in his dream, and while he watched in horror, she kissed his father's open dead eyes, and laughed at Will. Her teeth were red, dripping blood.
You know what you did, Will.
It's all your fault.
One morning, several days later, he found a lost dog on the streets of Fulham. The dog was male, a tan-and-brown runaway. Finally, he had a pal in shitty old England.
“C'mon, dog. C'mon with me,” he said and patted the side of his thigh several times. “C'mon, Lassie.”
Will wandered into a municipal park and the lonely mutt followed like his shadow. He didn't know why he was feeling angry, but he was. The feeling came over him a lot actually, ever since he'd left California. Ever since his father had killed himself. His father's suicide was a really bad deal for Will. He still felt responsible, but even worse, he'd convinced himself that was how he himself would end up.
He sat down by a small pond. The dog was still with him. His new buddy.
Will finally shook his head at the mutt. “Big mistake, staying with me,” he said. “Bad luck follows me around. I'm not kidding.”
The dog gave a whimper, and put out its paw.
But Will was getting angrier about lots of things. His father, his aunts, Palmer. He felt as though he had a tight belt around his chest. His head was tingling. He was seeing mists of light red.
Will reached down into the cold, shallow water and pulled out a fist-sized stone. Without a hint of warning, he whacked the dog on the side of the head. He struck the dog a second time, and it fell over moaning. One sad, brown eye looked up at him. He kept hitting the dog until it was dead.
He didn't know why he'd done it. He liked the dog. At any rate, Will found that he wasn't angry anymore. He felt okay. Actually, he didn't feel much of anything.
He had even made a little self-discovery; there was a distinctly good part in him, but also a bad part.
There were two Wills, weren't there?
CHAPTER 8
WILL KNEW FROM the start that he had greatness in him, and that he wasn't really impressed by it. But others sure were.
Will Shepherd was the youngest ever to play for the Fulham School's first eleven. When he was just eleven, he persuaded the coach to let him train with the team; he was immediately selected and, oblivious to the jeers of his teammates, who were older than Will by five or six years, he became the team's leading scorer. Their top striker!
When he was twelve, Fulham won the London school league championship, and did not lose again until after Will left the school. As a fourteen-year-old he scored nine goals in a game his team won 12-0.
Will was wispy and long-legged for his age, but surprisingly well balanced. He was extraordinarily fast—he ran, his coach said, “as an arrow flies.” He ran like southern California half-backs and wide receivers in American-style football.
Will practiced every day, every spare hour, until the ball seemed almost an extension of his foot, or at the very least a satellite body attached by an invisible wire. He sometimes practiced as much as sixteen hours on a Saturday or Sunday. The field was his home, not that shitty place where his aunts and Palmer lived.
Local newspaper reporters made him a schoolboy legend around London. They always commented on his reckless style, highly personal and unusual, which they attributed to his being American-born.
But that wasn't the reason at all. What none of them understood was that Will secretly worked on, and perfected, his individualistic style. He had. Will decided it was essential to be different, to be noticed, to stand out, rather than to be viewed as a loner. Will understood precisely what the game meant in his life: English-style football meant not being lonely and afraid; this new kind of football meant not thinking about his sodding mother and father ever again.
Football was his only weapon. It was going to save him. It had to.
CHAPTER 9
Spring 1985
For a year and a half, Barry Kahn worked my piano-playing fingers to the bone. We started with lyrics, and the theories behind them: Bob Dylan's theory, Joni Mitchell's theory, Rodgers & Hart's theory, Johnny Mercer's theory. Barry's basic theory was that hard work conquers mediocrity.
He made me write and rewrite, forcing me deeper and deeper into my past until there were days when I wanted to beg him not to push me so hard, to let me rest. But I didn't ask for a bit of mercy. I secretly wanted to be pushed even more.
He was remorseless, and so was I. “You're denying,” he'd say. “You're hiding in cheap rhymes and phony sentiment.” Or: “You're not feeling anything. I know it because I can't feel it. And if I'm left cold, just think what an audience will do. They'll crucify you, Maggie.”
“What audience?” I asked him.
“You don't see an audience? You don't feel an audience that has to hear your songs? If you really don't, then get out of here. Don't waste my time.”
So on I went until at last we were both satisfied, and I was able to turn to the art of composing. Here too he was strict and unyielding, but music came more easily to me than words. I felt comfortable with it. One day he said I could turn it on and off like water from a faucet. I think he was a little jealous. I kind of liked that—competing with him, being on his level.
Last came the singing, and Barry was a true master of this. He taught me phrasing, accenting, diction. How to sing in front of an audience, how to use a mike in a recording studio. I had, he told me, a natural voice, unlike any other singer's, but it was in this area that it was hardest to judge. “The public alone will decide,” he said. “Who could have imagined Bob Dylan's voice capturing an audience's heart—until it did? Your voice is edgy, openhearted. Lots of sudden shifts of mood intonation to fit your lyrics. You can sound caring, cold, bored, maternal, loving. I love your voice!”
He did? Finally, a compliment. I memorized it, word for word.
I practiced in the nearby Power Station recording studio, not only performing my songs but acting as a gofer, going on endless sandwich-and-coffee errands. I wore a long black overcoat down to my boots; I wore it everywher
e. I was “tall blondie with the coat, can you get us sandwiches?” I was “sure, no problem. What do you like?”
I resented being treated like that, figured Barry would never do it to a man, but he insisted it was an important part of the job, and if I didn't like it I could go elsewhere.
There was, I knew, no “elsewhere.”
There was Jennie, of course. The “motormouths” were alive and well.
There was Lynn Needham, who had turned into a real pal, an occasional sitter, my official New York tour guide, my shoulder to lean on.
There was our West Side walk-up, the den of iniquity, which had only one really cool feature—a turn-of-the-century bathtub built right in the kitchen. I loved taking hot bubblebaths in the kitchen!
There were occasional dates, but nothing even close to anything serious. I began to remember what I'd felt like before Phillip—too tall, too gawky, a little tongue-tied, inadequate for all the wrong reasons, not big enough breasts, too many bad hair days. But really, what it all came down to, was that I was afraid to get involved again. I didn't want to have to tell anyone what had happened with Phillip—no, to Phillip. I had this huge scarlet M on my chest, and I didn't think it would ever come off, wash off, whatever.
Nope, there was no “elsewhere.”
CHAPTER 10
SO, I WAS the coffee-and-sandwiches person, but do you know what—it was so much better than my life had been. It really sucked sometimes, I hated those despicable runs to the Famous deli, hated being “blondie with the coat,” but I also loved it. It was writing, composing, learning. I was part of something that on occasion could be very beautiful and moving.
One morning at the “music factory,” my buddy Lynn Needham peeked into my cubicle/storage bin. “You better drop everything, except maybe that hot coffee. Mr. Wonderful calls.”
Barry tried to reserve some time for me at the end of most days, so this was an unusual summons. I hightailed it to his office. His time was still precious.
“I've got good news, and unfortunately, bad news,” Barry said as I entered the room where I had once auditioned to be his gofer.