“Why not enjoy the beauty of my Mondrian”—Abuela pronounced it with a European flourish—“rather than make such a fuss?”
She had posed this question to Chris’s father a couple of months ago as the four of them ate at a North Beach restaurant near the old Mabuhay Gardens, a storied, long-defunct punk venue where his father’s band, the Flaming Dildos, had played just once, in 1979.
“I don’t see beauty. I see a bare spot, and God knows how many millions down the drain, when some hooligan rips it off your wall,” his father retorted. Chris and Lupa exchanged an eyeroll.
“Benicio,” Abuela scolded. “You are bemoaning an occurrence that has not occurred. What could be more silly?”
“Hanging an uninsured Mondrian on your wall!”
There was a performative aspect to their sniping, a whiff of Hotheaded Offspring Rails Against Coolheaded Parent [2Pxixl] that made Chris doubt whether, without him and Lupa for an audience, they would even bother.
“You know,” Abuela said with a sidelong glance at Chris, “I ironed his Mohawk. For the punk rock.”
“Here we go,” his father said.
“On my ironing board. With my Aqua Net. He would have seared his head.”
“I remember,” Chris said.
“Everyone remembers,” his father huffed. “You won’t let them forget.”
“He looked like… like a monster, to scare children,” Abuela said, gazing lovingly at Chris’s father. “But I did it, why?”
“To make him happy,” Lupa finished.
They’d driven past the old Mabuhay Gardens after dinner. The Flaming Dildos had been the first of several opening bands, their set greeted with tossed trash. Chris had searched, in vain, for video footage of it （what a world that was, with so few cameras!）。 If he had bought into the Collective Consciousness, he doubtless could have viewed the concert from a multitude of viewpoints. But Chris recoiled from Own Your Unconscious—a reaction radically out of step with his cohort. Bix Bouton was a god in Chris’s world, but Chris secretly （very secretly） sided with the boomers who viewed Mandala’s “memorevolution” with existential horror. It was possibly the only thing he and his father agreed on.
Although the Dildos’ set was lost to Chris, threads from it managed to stretch across forty-three years to his present-day life: Scotty Hausmann, the folk hero who’d revived his father’s career a couple of years ago, had been the Flaming Dildos’ singer. Lou Kline, the late record producer, had attended the Dildos’ concert and afterward taken Chris’s father under his wing. Lou’s daughter Roxy, an unsteady creature who lived in San Francisco, occasionally joined Chris and his father for dinner. But the most staggering connection was one he’d stumbled on just recently when Miranda Kline, the anthropologist, kept floating into his mind unbidden. Digging deeper into her biography, Chris had discovered that she was briefly married to Lou Kline in the 1970s! The fact brought a chill of eerie recognition—confrontation, even—as if Miranda Kline were waving to Chris, or winking, from a distance.
* * *
Abuela tied a Mondrian-patterned apron over her dress and ladled chicken stew into Mondrian-patterned bowls. Her Mondrian merch included candleholders, vases, umbrellas, tea trays, glasses, place mats, towels, throw pillows, framed posters, coffee-table books, and a needlepoint footstool—all of which comprised, in her mind, a deviously impenetrable camouflage. “No one with a real Mondrian would ever acquire such crap,” she liked to say.
“Were you on a trip?” Gabriella called to Chris as she lounged at the dinner table waiting for him to serve her. She was eyeing the suitcase, which he’d set—unobtrusively, he hoped—inside the front door.
“Not mine,” he replied.