Moon Palace Read Free Page B

that his troubles had less to do with his body than with his state of mind. Perhaps I was copy, but looking back on it now, it is difficult for me to imagine that the symptoms I first saw that summer were not connected to the heart attack that killed him three years later. Victor himself said nothing, but his body was speaking to me in code, and I did not have the wherewithal or the sense to crack it.
    When I returned to Chicago for Christmas vacation, the crisis seemed to have passed. Victor had recovered much of his bounce, and great doings were suddenly afoot. In September, he and Howie Dunn had disbanded the Moonlight Moods and started another group, joining forces with three younger musicians who took over at drums, piano, and saxophone. They called themselves the Moon Men now, and most of their songs were original numbers. Victor wrote the lyrics, Howie composed the music, and all five of them sang, after a fashion. “No more old favorites,” Victor announced to me when I arrived. “No more dance tunes. No more drunken weddings. We’ve quit the rubber chicken circuit for a run at the big time.” There was no question that they had put together an original act, and when I went to see them perform the next night, the songs struck me as a revelation—filled with humor and spirit, a boisterous form of mayhem that mocked everything from politics to love. Victor’s lyrics had a jaunty, dittylike flavor to them, but the underlying tone was almost Swiftian in its effect. Spike Jones meets Schopenhauer, if such a thing is possible. Howie had swung the Moon Men a booking in one of the downtown Chicago clubs, and they wound up performing there every weekend from Thanksgivingto Valentine’s Day. By the time I came back to Chicago after high school graduation, a tour was already in the works, and there was even some talk of cutting a record with a company in Los Angeles. That was how Uncle Victor’s books entered the story. He was going on the road in mid-September, and he didn’t know when he would be back.
    It was late at night, less than a week before I was supposed to leave for New York. Victor was sitting in his chair by the window, working his way through a pack of Raleighs and drinking schnapps from a dime-store tumbler. I was sprawled out on the couch, floating happily in a stupor of bourbon and smoke. We had been talking about nothing in particular for three or four hours, but now the conversation had hit a lull, and each of us was drifting in the silence of his own thoughts. Uncle Victor sucked in a last drag from his cigarette, squinted as the smoke curled up his cheek, and then snuffed out the butt in his favorite ashtray, a souvenir from the 1939 World’s Fair. Studying me with misty affection, he took another sip from his drink, smacked his lips, and let out a deep sigh. “Now we come to the hard part,” he said. “The endings, the farewells, the famous last words. Pulling up stakes, I think they call it in the Westerns. If you don’t hear from me often, Phileas, remember that you’re in my thoughts. I wish I could say I know where I’ll be, but new worlds suddenly beckon to us both, and I doubt there will be many chances for writing letters.” Uncle Victor paused to light another cigarette, and I could see that his hand trembled as he held the match. “No one knows how long it will last,” he continued, “but Howie is very optimistic. The bookings are extensive so far, and no doubt others will follow. Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, California. We’ll be setting a westerly course, plunging into the wilderness. It should be interesting, I think, no matter what comes of it. A bunch of city slickers in the land of cowboys and Indians. But I relish the thought of those open spaces, of playing my music under the desert sky. Who knows if some new truth will not be revealed to me out there?”
    Uncle Victor laughed, as though to undercut the seriousnessof this thought. “The point being,” he resumed,