The Sugar-Cane Rag(Charles E.J. Moulton) The Sugar-Cane Rag

A Short Story by Charles E.J. Moulton


There was not one childhood breakfast where a magnolia from our garden did not grace our table. In the spring and summer, it was easy to cut a blossom from one of the three trees to add to the table. In the fall and winter, however, my mother had a winter garden where she was breeding magnolias. I don’t think that my mother even knew it, she just really liked the smell of the blossom. Mom had been up for two hours before breakfast back then, cleaning everything up so that we all could sit together, chewing our toast, drinking our orange juice, smelling the fresh scent and believing we were dining in an exotic garden. Spring refreshment-scented detergent was synonymous with weekend breakfasts.

The familiar smells I had taken for granted in my childhood came rushing back to me, hitting my nostrils with a ruthless sense of stability. Memories of lunchbags at the ready, ironed T-shirts and repaired bicycles. The smell of newly cut grass, a scent flying in with the wind through the wide-open windows, a pie cooling off in the kitchen.
Me? I was way too busy being pissed off at everyone to care. My folks were dull, I thought to myself, and I just wanted to get out of there. It took years and years for me to realize what was happening.

In the years that passed, trauma literally exploded in my face in order to force me to see the connection between the magnolias and the responsibilities I had as a son. My story really is the story of the lost son that had to go through a crisis in order to find a certain harmony. Spiritually, at least, I do believe my mother reincarnated here on Earth to help me connect my darker side with my lighter side. Without the extremes that I’ve had, I don’t think the harmony I have arrived at would ever have been possible.
What I had seen as dull ten years earlier now came across as the open and honest rural heart filled with closeness and bonding, not greed and anger.
I failed to see how wonderful they were and how much they did for me.
The overdosed druggie I now had turned into had been angry at everyone. And then, at the clinic, I realized that everyone had left me. Everyone but some groupie offering to smuggle in some crack along with a one-night-stand.
I felt cheaper and weaker than a broken bicycle.
I had to go back to my roots to see where I was, who I was or if I could repair my broken dreams.

In my mind, the child I had been ran back and forth between the living room and the dining room, my toy gun at the ready, pretending to shoot my big brother, knocking down photo prints of American Gothic, the glass frame shattering across the floor. A rebel without a cause, angry at those who did not want a career. Angry at those who were happy just loving each other.
“Bang-bang! You’re a wuss!”
“Who the hell are you, Jack? Clint?”
“Make my day, Punk!”
“I’ll be outta here sooner than you and then I’ll come back and make your day!”
“You and Sally Field of the South?”
“Her name is Kimberley!”
“How’s the cheerleader in the sack?”
“Shut up, Jack!”
“I bet you’ll need a metal tool to open her snatch.”
I remembered Mom’s reaction, reenacting Miss Ellie’s part in the TV-series “Dallas”:
“I don’t want that kind of talk in my house!”
“Where the hell did you pick up those phrases, boy?” my Dad spat.
“In school,” I lied.
“What kinda friends he keepin’, Josh?”
“Dunno,” Josh had retaliated. “Got other friends.”

He had married that girl.
“You’re bourgeois! Dull! Come on, get real! Get going!”
Never looking back. The further I ran away from the responsibility of telling my parents what I was doing, the more angry did I get that this voice kept returning. The echoes of home turf made me realize who really would stick around when things got rough. Now I stood here on the porch, raising a shaky hand to my pale face, the old arrogance catching up with me.
“I found a job in San Francisco,” I had lied.
“Are you coming back?” they had responded.
“Yeah, sure!”
Yeah, sure?
They only heard from me via my accountants.
A check here. A vacation there. Show tickets.
“Are those your parents, Mr. Barnaby? Yeah? Let me take a photo!”
Off to the limo, stoned, swallowing my shame, leaving them standing at the stage door. A month later, a short and arrogant phone call from Rio.
How are you? – I’m fine. – We’re touring. I’ve got a new girlfriend. We’re recording a new album. – When are you coming home? – I don’t know. – Dad says he’s sorry. He was only joking. – That’s okay. – Are you off the cocaine? – No. – But why the scandals? – Bye, Mom. I’ll call.
Sure. I had called them “Whiffs from Bore City, America”, but they were still here. Like the European monarchies, they were not leaving. God knew I needed something I could count on. I wouldn’t have visited myself after throwing a TV out of the Hilton window.

I screamed out my shame on stage as the Frisco Kid. If you run away from responsibility, you better stick to your story until you hit rock bottom.
Still, when you come back home after hitting the big time, it’s weird that you still have to pick up where you left off, I thought to myself. It’s like the universe really doesn’t give a shit that I made it. Made ... it? Made ... what? God is only interested in love.
My heart pounded. Scared bad-ass rock-star.
The door ajar, my folks in the garden, the familiar house I now returned to as a grown man seemed strangely unfamiliar. The Lamborghini was not far away, parked in the driveway, but here I was in a place that didn’t care about record sales or fancy autographs.
Where was I now, returning by necessity? My eyes grew dim. I knew I could count on my folks. “A man goes back to make amends and finds himself remembering his sins.” I bit on my lower lip to suffocate the shame of my adolescent screams.

My feet, shoved into my lucky boots, crossed the threshold through the open door. I had purchased them on my way to the coast back then, a symbol for my new-won, fake freedom. Leather boots that had followed me around from the homeless hills of San Francisco to the offices of record producers who decorated their chest hair with gold chains, slipping under many hotel bed sheets, kicking up the covers between many groupie’s legs.

I looked into the living room, the brown couch still there under the painting by a nameless rustic painter. It depicted a barn with an abandoned wagon in front of it, a man standing there, scratching his head. Now I was scratching mine. The keys to my Lamborghini dangling from my chain-belt over thin snake-skin-leggings, my arms filled with red needle-spots from drug shots. The encyclopedia my father had bought me for my fifth birthday still graced the living room book case. The fact that he urged me to look things up there and not Google only made me even angrier. The full CD collection of 40 years of Rock and Roll had not left the lower shelf in ten years. A sting of shame hit me as I realized I had not even thanked him for it. So he called me an ingrate. And we never stopped fighting until I left.

I had invested ten thousand dollars in installing an alarm system for my Bel Air home. I was coming back to see Smalltown, America, totally unprotected and loving it. I looked back at the porch, the screen door with the mosquito net closing behind me. They trusted reality to serve them. I trusted nothing to serve me, so I had screamed myself into power.
A hard sense of poignancy hit me, walking up to the shiny dining room table. All my father had wanted was to educate me. I ran my fingers along the soft surface of the table, trying to sort out my thoughts. I had made it, sure. I was famous, sure. I had money, sure. But what had fame done for me other than turn me into a rich brat? What had it done ... to me?
I gazed around at porcellain dolls and see-through-drapes, orchids in the window and photos from family outings. Things that constituted a world I had thought hid from the success possible for a person to achieve. But that wasn’t it, was it?
My mother’s favorite past-time, nailing up plaques, inspired a smile.
“Home is where the heart is.”
The metal frame hung on the left wall, reminding me of what really mattered.

The whiff meandered up my nostrils again, so I strolled into the kitchen, waves of mixed emotions rolling into my spirit. Suddenly I felt slightly out of place in the outfit that had earned me the reputation of being Rock’s Randy Racer. The apple cake in the open kitchen window sent waves of delicious odors into the house. “There’s no place like home” another plaque above the window read, two red shoes reminding us of American culture. And now, the smell of that cake made me wonder who I really was.
I looked past the pie into the bushes. I saw no one, but mumbling voices could be heard out there. I was too ashamed to confront the owners of those voices. Maybe Josh had come over to chat? I had kept track, you know. I knew he was married with three kids. I knew that he had stepped up the ladder in the bank, his BBQ-project for the local homeless a giant success. Feeding about a hundred of them on the local square every first Saturday morning each month. He had become a sure-fire financial magnet for the local press. Wasn’t that just as good as being a rock star, especially since this rock star, me, had hit rock bottom?

My heart thumped, scared what my parents were going to say, their boy coming home? The diva eloping from rehab. But I secretly knew my folks accepted me for what I was. I shifted in my step, indecisive, the celebrity quarreling with the teenage boy. I screamed my ass off every night on stage, singing loud and obnoxious lyrics to heaps of lightly clad chicks. But I could not face Mom and Dad?
As I turned back toward the hallway, an image stared back at me in the familiar kitchen mirror still hanging there on the wall. I winced, my one eyelid twitching. The person in the mirror was a stranger, his dark spiky hair, snake tattoo and mean bad-ass upper-lip an act covering up his fear of dying.
I took a few steps up to the gilded mirror, remembering how I had styled my hair to look sexy before my first date at age 14, my mother laughing at me while cleaning up. I could relate to him. But this guy? The Frisco Kid? Was that really my stage name? Why not Geronimo?
I touched my face as if for the first time. Too many black rings on every finger scratching too much make-up on pale cheeks. Bags under eyes bloodshot from too much LSD. Cheeks that had seen too much sweat, gotten too many slaps in slimy bars, squeezed too many pillows in too many expensive hotel rooms.
The hotel window last month had Hollywood’s bad boy splattered to bits in the yellow press. He had been screaming at his managers to “pay the bastards three times the worth of that frigging thing and shut the f*** up”. The Frisco Kid that I was looking down at his shaking knees, wondering when this shaking was going to end.

That was why I was here, right? To reconnect. Magnolia, apples and grass. The good kind that did not produce visions. Those damn doctors at the Betty Ford Clinic were good, but they could not fix a broken soul. Would apple cake do the trick?
I hoped to find an answer inside that mirror image of bloodshot eyes that couldn’t help me buy happiness.
“Who the hell are you?” I spat at myself.
The old Jack Barnaby responded with a mean grimace, asking me why I had left in such a hurry to become the Riddler of Rock. The broken man in the mirror grinned that he was a clown without white make-up, a villain without a grimace, a Pennywise without the eyebrows. Just as fast as he came to give me the middle finger, just as fast did he disappear. I wondered if I would ever find myself again. Find the young Jack Barnaby skipping away from my grasp. His guitar in hand, his bag-pack filled with books, a folded peanut-butter and jelly sandwich in the other, he ran off to school with a belch, snapping at his father to stop trying to change him for the better.
“It’s my damn life, Pops.”

Billy Joel had been right, but I had deserted the boy in me to become a selfish bastard, shouting dirty words at sextastic teens with swelling boobs.
I looked like an empty shell. Maybe my stage-grin would convince me that leaving this place had been legitimate. It was a weird sensation, as if an evil stranger had entered a church, calling himself me, turning the Lord’s Prayer into a heavy metal song.
“Screaming Sandy,” I shouted at the guy in the mirror, “she’s always randy, she’s my candescent ear-candy, my sweet and hot sugar-cane.”
Standing here in my old childhood kitchen singing that song felt wrong.
“Sugar caaaaaaaane!”
The high C I had shouted out so many times on stage was only possible because of the countless lessons Dad had made me take at the music school. I had hated that teacher so much, but had to realize that I would never have been hired by my first band in San Francisco if not for that teacher.

“Jack!”
The voice behind me made my heart jump. I could actually feel it missing a beat. Not only did my breathing stop, my knees shaking even harder, my bones making rattling sounds like a ghost in a Scooby-Doo-episode. My throat hurt, my support aching, as if a part of me wanted to forbid me to scream ever again. It was the fear I had felt when telling my folks I was moving to California to make it as a rock-star. It was the fear that arose in me, giving both my parents the middle finger, trying to be a bad boy when I wasn’t even a loser, grabbing whatever loose change I had gathered from all the odd-jobs I’d had the last previous years. Heading for the bus, promising not to return, pretending not to hear my mother’s panicky screams, hoping her friends would not catch up with me before the bus left.

My mother’s face had grown older. There were more wrinkles there. Her hair was greyer now. Years of worrying what her boy was doing was giving her wrinkles - more wrinkles. I wondered why I had not paused to look at her after the show last year.
“Momma,” I said, my lower lip trembling, “I should write a song about you.”
But mother was more than a song. Mother was the origin.
The aging woman held up her left hand to her mouth, a very short sob popping out of her mouth. “Oh, Jack, what have they done to you?”
The rock star in me broke down, running up into her arms, my finger-tips feeling the fabric of her cotton blouse, the ribbons on her gardening apron hanging down her back, her hair freshly made up with tons of hair spray. Tears just as hot as the tears that had fallen down my cheeks, looking out the bus window.
“Why you cryin’, Kiddo?” the ticket controller had asked me.
“Get lost,” I had spat back, regretting even that.
One part of me screamed at me to go back, the other screamed at me to get the hell out and become a rock star. So I screamed my rage out bad enough to became a rock star.

Mother raised her hand and patted me on the head.
“I always liked ‘The Sugar Cane Rag’. In spite of the filthy lyrics.”
“Mom,” I whispered. “I’ve missed you.”
“Missed you, too,” she sobbed quietly. “What made you come back?”
I paused, my eyes fixing on the dining room table.
“The scent of magnolia,” I whispered.
Mom’s lips twitched. She swallowed once, her hands involuntarily lifting to her mouth.
“So the magnolia did help after all.”
“Was it designed to help?”
“Jack, I wanted some beauty to enter our house,” she continued. “Some reverance.”
“I’m feeling that now. Better late than never,” I cried. “Right?”
Tears came down my mother’s face. She nodded, trembling.
“Come here, boy,” she said, embracing me, smelling like motherhood, smelling like home, reeking of magnolia. “Oh, it’s good to hug you.”
The hairdo was way too spiky for her, I saw that, but as for hair spray, well, she had been very generous with that, too, hadn’t she?
“You could use another hair stylist, though,” she laughed.
I leaned back, looking at her.
“I should never have left. I’ve been such a fool.”
Betty Barnaby shook her head, drying off her tears.
“Oh, come, come,” she said, causing me to laugh. It was the same expression she always used and always had used. “How much money do you have in the bank? How many albums have you sold?”
I shrugged, slumping down onto the small wooden chair by the beige kitchen table. “I’m rich, Mom,” I croaked, my voice still strained from years of shouting, even shouting at the shrinks at rehab. “But this is not about money. I thought money and fame would solve all my problems, but they have just created more problems. In fact, having this much just gave me the possibility to nourish my addictions.”
Mom walked up to me, grabbing a chair and sitting down. “Don’t you like what you do?” She chuckled, looking down, apprehensively.
I nodded. “The music’s great. The shows,” I laughed. “They’re incredible. All those people screaming my name.”
I chuckled, looking at Mom.
“Or the silly name I invented.”
Mom shrugged. “So, cut the drugs and ...” She waited, contemplating her next phrase. “... just rock!”
I chuckled. “Just rock?”
Mom nodded. “Uh-huh. Seemed to work for Elvis.”
Mom made a few moves that were meant to imitate the king.
“He fell off the toilet.”
“Come on, Jack, he did more than that.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “But getting all that attention and then realizing you have no one to care about you for you are ...” I paused, looking around, realizing that this was why I’d returned. I had to find myself again. I smiled. “Mom, I’m here to find myself. Okay?”

The sobs now were uncontrollable, the sadness bubbling up from my stomach. No, from my soul. This was deep shit.
“Holy crap, man, fame has really messed me up.”
Mom took my hand, sighing, looking at my beaten up hands. I could see every thought passing from her brain to her eyes. How had her boy turned into this confused 29 year-old brat? Why couldn’t he just enjoy his fame and be happy? She was right, but she didn’t know how mean the press could be, how lonely it could be to sit in a hotel room after a show, how selfish managers could behave, how many fights I’d had with record companies over my artistic freedom.
Mom smiled, ignoring the toilet remark, caressing her boy’s cheek, falling into his arms. “There, there.” Now, I really felt Mom and I were bonding again. For the first time in years, I felt a wave of true love passing into my soul.
“Don’t cry, son,” she sobbed. “I’m here.”
I nodded. “I know. It’s just frigging awful that it had to take an overdose for me to wake up.”
Mother sighed, looking at the apple pie, thoughts cris-crossing her brain.
“Sometimes, small town America makes a whole lot of sense.”
I looked at her, all the admiration I had never felt now bubbling up from the depths of my soul. Love I’d had in me rising like a phoenix of the rocky ashes. I looked over at the apple pie as if I was looking at the holy frigging grail. I chuckled. “Don’t it, though?”
Her head snapped back toward me. “Want a piece?”
Gleaming sparks must’ve been shooting from my eyes onto the whole world. I didn’t even have to say yes and mother was already grabbing plates and forks and cutting up two slices. I watched her dash to and fro as if I had never ever left the place. That’s when I felt God’s presence in the kitchen. Honest to God, something else was in the room. An entity. Was it God or an angel or a saint or a deceased relative? I don’t know. All I knew was that this entity spoke to me, saying: “Welcome back home, lost son!”

Sitting with my mother, sharing her delicious apple pie, tears of joy and sadness mingling and blending into spiritual depth, I felt peace. I think it must have been the first time in my life that I really felt peace in my soul.
“This is the best pie you’ve ever made, Mom,” I said. “It should win a prize.”
“Oh,” Betty said, slapping my knee. “I’ve never been interested in prizes.”
A thought suddenly entered her head as it sometimes does when an exciting situation occurs. Filled with what seemed to be giddy munching, she mumbled:
“Frank and I really enjoy the extravagance. It must cost you a lot of money.”
I played along, feeling like a kid.
“Warner Records pays most of it.”
“Aren’t you lucky!”
“Aren’t I now?” I laughed.
Mother disappeared into her dream world again, her eyes still fixed on my fingers.
“Frank likes the dancing girls. They’re a little too scantily clad for me, but that’s all right. Men need some scantily clad damsels now and then.”
I gave her a strained half-smile, sort of like my brother used to do when he was stunned. “Can’t believe you like my shows.”
“You gave us tickets for your last show, but you left in an awful hurry.”
I gritted my teeth, pain shooting up from my belly. “I’ve been such a fool”
Betty Barnaby caressed my hand, lift it and kissed it.
“Are you eating well, son? You don’t look healthy!”
“It’s the touring,” I responded. “It’s exhausting.”
“You should get some sleep,” she continued. “And I mean without strange women.”
I chuckled. “Some of them really are strange though.”
Betty Barnaby’s expression hardened. “What was that silliness at the Hilton about?”
“I got really mad at my manager for making artistic decisions without my consent, but I didn’t tell him I was hurt. I took it out on the Hilton. Poor bastards. Then I overdosed and ended up at the clinic.”
I shook my head, gazing into oblivion.
“I’ve been a nuisance.”
“Well, at least you know it.”
She put her hand under my chin and raised my head, giving me that really loving Mom-look. The kind mothers give their kids when they’ve stubbed their toe.
“At least you know it,” she repeated, incessantly.

Picking up our empty plates and walking to the dishwasher, she continued:
“Your brother keeps playing your songs to the little girl, you know. The twins want to be you when they grow up.”
“God help them.”
I laughed. It was the laugh of realization. The kind of laugh that accompanies a spiritual awakening, a man’s eyes wide open, his iris seeing the world for the first time as it is.
“I do not want them to turn into me.”
Betty shook her head. “You’ve made it to the top. You have to admit that.”
I sneered, filled with disgust at how used and abused I had been on the road.
“The top is not all it’s cracked up to be, Mom.”
My mother looked at me, trying to make heads or tails at what to think. Part of her was overjoyed to be holding my hand. The other part was confused to hear that being famous was actually just a bunch of crap and lies.
“I told you to stay away from crack. Pardon the pun.”
“I know you did,” I whispered back, “but it’s not just the drugs. Mostly, it’s the pressure of never being alone, giving up your privacy, fighting with managers, dealing with lies being published about you in the press. I’ve been coupled with people I did not even know existed, just because we happened to be photographed at a party together. And one of them was a guy. So Variety said I was now officially gay.”
She sat back again, sending me proverbial daggers.
“What about a girlfriend?”
I laughed. “Some of them have been loose acquaintances.”
She nodded, angrily. “Do they make you happy?”
I shrugged. “Depends.”
My mother closed the dishwasher door and walked up to me again.
“Find a sensible woman that keeps you grounded,” Mom said, softly. “Tour the world, buy fur coats and champagne, if you want. But keep one foot on the ground, boy. It will save you a whole lot of trouble.”

A painful silence came over the kitchen now. Years ago, that painful silence would have caused me to slam my fist down onto the table and elope, asking them all to shove it. Now, however, I knew she was telling me the truth.
I nodded, looking up at her.
My mother smiled, positioning herself on the chair again.
“The clinic called,” my mother crooned calmly.
I looked up, raising one eyebrow. “Okay.”
My mother nodded. “You had obviously given them our number or something. They rambled something about you hating your life and wanting to get back to the roots. The nurse figured that you would be heading home. So when we saw your car, I figured you had come in here. You were always too much of a coward to face me after we had a fight. You knew we’re always in the garden. But I guess you wanted us to find you.”
“Where’s Dad?”
“In the back.”
“So why isn’t he here?”
“He sent me to scan the area for moody rock-stars,” she laughed.
I laughed, this much honesty just going down into my heart like, well, like sugar cane.
“What did we do to you, Jack?”
Mom looked at my hands, studying them, wondering how my hands had become body-parts so damaged by punches and alcohol. Biting her lips, she looked up at me, wanting to reprimand me for being such a bad boy. I knew she was right. I realized how old my hands looked. Tattoos everywhere, rings. Her own hands were wrinkled. This ... was drugs. A decripit 29 year-old finding himself back at the fort with arrows in his butt.

There was a long pause, mostly me thinking about myself leaving, somehow surviving on the streets of California with no money until that band I was in finally paid off.
“It was just me chasing rainbows,” I croaked, looking up. I bit my lip, closing my eyes to avoid the pain of something not even there and nodding, “but I only found a sugar-cane rag.”
“Frank never doubted you would come back,” she said, picking out her hanky from her sleeve, “although he said you could do without the make-up, he really enjoys your work.”
She chuckled again, shyly and jokingly at the same time.
“He always says that if you make yourself up, you might as well try doing something like Kiss did in their shows. He deliberately ignored that Joker-movie. But he does say how happy he was that he made you take singing lessons. With or without the horror-songs.”
Betty leaned forward. “I think it scares him, to be honest, and I don’t think he likes his boy scaring him. You might want to try something new. Why not romantic ballads?”
“There’s money involved, mother,” I said. “That’s my problem. I have become an enterprise. I have no control over anything anymore. My managers all say that if I change my image, I will lose everything. I don’t even believe that. They do, though. So they threaten to cut the money off if I want to try something new.”
I shook my head, not letting my old impatience arise.
“I ... wanted to ...” I was on the verge again of trying to defend myself, but that train was way too far away from the original station to even consider that. “I created the Frisco Kid as a sort of a ...” I winced, trying to find the right words. “... Riddler of Rock. My first album made sense. Then I turned into a cash register. It’s like being in prison.”
“You could do worse.”
I shrugged, admitting she was right.
“It’s your brother’s favorite,” my mother smiled, crying again. “He sings that song in the shower. I even think he wants to be you. And to think that you teased him to tears.”
“A girl I used to take to receptions called me at the clinic offering to smuggle in some LSD, telling me she could pretend to be a nurse.”
“I hope you declined.”
“I hung up on her.”
“Too much sex?”
Here, we were entering a danger zone, one that still could switch into rage.
“No, the sex was fine,” I contemplated, my mother’s wrinkled hand feeling temporarily safe and secure, like a cure from sin. The sting of speaking to my mother about this was weird, but, as I had said, shame and humility had long gone down the toilet with or without Elvis. I looked up, the same eyes that had gazed into hers ten years ago now repeating the act, a connection being made. The young Jack thanking her for his lunch bag now awoke into my soul. “I felt like a weak loser being offered some drugs from a groupie during rehab. It felt like hitting rock bottom. I couldn’t even heal myself. Even rehab was not safe. I knew I had to go back. If not now, then when? I couldn’t go back after I died. Then I’d be busy figuring it all out with my angels. Or the angels figuring out how to make it work next time.”

Me and Mom, we must have missed the screen-door opening and closing. That happens when you disappear into another world, the world of love and truth. Suddenly, though, Frank Barnaby stood there in the kitchen doorway, his belly jumping from trying to suffocate relieved sobs.
“Ki-... Kiddo,” he cried.
“Papa?”
“Where’ve you been all these years?”
I shot up from my chair, leaping into my father’s arms. The sobs this time were louder, the embrace tighter, the slaps more intense. Manlier, maybe, but that manliness was just a disguised need for love. My father’s arms had always been long, embracing my thin frame what felt as three times around my body. His grasp was tight. Tighter than anyone had embraced me, in fact. Ever. Holding his breath, it seemed to me he feared letting me go. Maybe he would lose me again if he unwrapped his arms around me. Love being the thing at the centre of everything, it had been lacking in my life. As the embrace unlocked, the puffy looking man gritted his teeth through tears. “I should give you house-arrest.”
That must’ve broken the ice. We found ourselves not knowing if we should laugh, cry, sob, guffaw or scream. So we did all five.
Five strangers appeared in the hallway during that scene. They belonged to the immediate family, of course, and had Jack Barnaby stuck around instead of taking off to become the Riddler of Rock, he would have known them.
My face, ridden with red spots, color for once on it instead of white paint, saw my brother with whom I had played catch many summer days. I still saw the small scar I had given his cheeks. His left cheek still had that small but visible wound from the fall of the swing our father had built for us in the garden.
I had blamed myself, of course, but Josh had insisted it wasn’t his fault. His children, the twins? Two boys that looked like spitting images of him, little sneer-eyed rebels.
“Jack,” Josh smiled. “You’re back.”
I let go of my parents, walking up to the family, feeling as if I was taking part in a Hollywood movie come to life. My brother’s face broke into that strained grin I knew so well. A family thing. It was a grin I knew Josh displayed when he was unsure what the counterpart would say. A strange mixture of joy and fear came spooking up in his heart. I was sure they felt the same way.
I stretched forth my hand. Josh looked at it, his strained grin now turning into an honest-to-God backslapping smile.
“What’re ya doin’? Give yo’ bro a hug!”
I felt that stronger than ever while embracing Josh, the guy who had defended me on the school yard in spite of everything, helped me out with homework and even snuck in the right answers for test questions in his bag-pack lunch-box.
As we unlocked the hug, I heard a high voice trumpeting up from below.
“Are you the Frisco Kid?” the little girl with a huge toothgap squeeked.
I nodded, suddenly feeling I was bonding with my family through new family members. “I guess,” Jack nodded, leaning downward. “And you are?”
“Penelope Barnaby,” she spat, “but people call me Penny B. Sort of like Penny Lane. You know, the Beatles song? You probably know those songs better than I do, me being so young and all. Anyway, you can call me Penny or just Pea for short. Dad calls me the pea because I’m so small. This is my father Josh, you know him, my brothers Carl and Lewis, named after my father’s hero, the runner Carl Lewis, who was awesome, by the way. This is my mother Kimberley. And together, we’re all the Barnaby’s.”
I looked up at my brother, now filled with giggles instead of sobs. It was exhillarating. And a wonderful realization that the best time I had in years was not signing four hundred autographs in one evening, screwing groupies, shooting up, or singing in front a crowd or ten thousand kids. It was simply laughing with my family.

“Hell,” he said, swallowing tears, “we have a politician in the family.”
The woman standing in the back of the group was a brunette, probably the kind of lightly chubby brunette I would have loved hanging around with in my early days on the road. She gave me a bright and utterly dimpled smile.
“The boys are huge fans, Jack,” Kimberley chirped. “They have been dreading this moment, wanting to make themselves up for your arrival. But you didn’t announce yourself, so I guess you’ll have to wait for that one.”
The rock star looked down at the two ten year old boys, now realizing that they had a slight resemblance to Elvis and Jesse Presley, had the two ever had the luck of growing up together and not one of them dying. They even had kiss-curls.
“I’ll give you a crash course in make-up-art.”
“Give them some Kiss-faces,” Frank Barnaby sang.
“You don’t like mine, Dad?”
Frank smiled, patting his son on the shoulder. “I love having you home!”
The boys were scared, he could see that now. They were in awe, really afraid of meeting someone they had seen on TV.
“Look at the guys,” Josh said, chuckling. “They’re petrified.”
“No, we’re not,” Carl retaliated.
“We’re just amazed to see the Riddler of Rock in the house,” Lewis filled in.
“He’s in da house,” Josh rapped.
Kimberley chuckled, embarrassed to hear her hubbie try performing.
“Leave it to the professionals, Josh,” she said.
“Hey,” I crooned. “Your husband could serve as a cool guest at one of my shows.”
“Really,” Penny chuckled. “Daddy in a rock show?”
I shrugged. “Why not?”
There was a silence among us before I continued, looking at the twins looking at me.
“Guys,” I said, trying to calm them down. “I’m just a person like you. I played hide and seek in the garden with your father. My own father made me take singing lessons. If he had not, I would never have had this career to begin with. Thanks, Dad. My mother’s apple pies gave me the confidence to go out and try becoming a star. Thanks, Mom. But basically I’m just a guy like you.”
“Okay,” the twins nodded.
“But I’ll give you backstage passes and show you around the stage before the show, if that’s what you want.”
The kids, trying to look cool, lowered their eyebrows, simultaneously chirping: “What?” in perfect unison like the twins in Alice in Wonderland. “That’s awesome.”
“But there are a few things I am not proud of. Being a rock star is cool. Singing to big crowds is cool. Inspiring people is cool. But I left my family without even saying good bye and I stayed away for a decade. That’s not cool. I’ve been an asshole.”
“We still like you, Uncle Jack,” Penny lisped, grinning, “even though you are an asshole. But, really, I think you’re making all that stuff up. You’re actually not that famous.”
I shook my head.
“Your car is cool, though,” Penny nodded, matter-of fact.
“Ain’t it, though,” I agreed, looking out onto the driveway.

The garden was the centre of avid activity that day, neighbors popping out from every corner to hear me speak of the money-obsessed record business and how I had literally lost all control over my own show and where to go on tour with it. I had a dozen other people mesmerized as I told about how I needed to change artistic track before I lost my mind. Naturally, I knew that saying this gave about five guys in the group a free ticket to blurt out sturdy advice in how to manage my career. I knew, though, that it was advice that I could count on being genuine. Genuine was a feeling I had not felt for a long time.
Would I move back home? Would I change my career path? Become an author or a music producer? Change my act? Who knew? All that did not matter. What mattered was that I had connected with my past, brave enough to admit that I’d made a mistake.
Then and there, sitting in my parents garden, I heard the birds sing, I smelled the magnolias. The scent of freshly cut grass reached my nostrils. Laughing with the neighbors, sharing my mother’s fresh apple pie, I realized that Dorothy had been right all along about that one place in the world that mattered most.
The lost son had come home, the scent of magnolia reminding him of the true joys of newfound love.

I could not remember seeing her before. The local girl. Suddenly, though, this amazingly beautiful woman turned up in our garden, introducing herself as Jeanette, the neighbor’s daughter. She had a chirpy, frisky kind of quality, bouncy and bright and the kind of woman I felt attracted to anyway. Long sandré-colored hair, C-cups and sparkling eyes. But this was not about the looks. Her aura flabbergasted me. I felt connected to her, whatever that meant. Had I known her in an earlier life?
She recognized me, of course, telling me she had bought the “Riddler of Rock” -alcum recently via Amazon just because her brother had loved it and told her she had to buy it, as well. She was honest enough to say that she had hated my act before that, but actually found out she loved “The Sugar-Cane Rag” and had become a fan. I told her my long story, what an asshole I had been and how I felt I was the lost son that had finally come to his senses.
She told me she was a full-time healer. It had been a conscious choice she had made after finished her Masters degree in Psychology. So she studied homeopathy and alternative medicine and had even travelled to Bosnia and Hawaii to get shamanic training.
So, there we were, two people literally sensing we were falling in love. She knew it and I knew it.

My parents had long since left the garden, Josh and the family were back home. The neighbors were all gone to nourish the stomachs at their barbecues. Jeanette and I still sat there when the moon had risen, the stars clearly visible, the scent of magnolia making the Barnaby residence smell like a Chinese Tai-Chi symposium.
Eventually, the subject of magnolia came up. How could it not? The moon and stars shone on all of the trees and the whole place highly influenced our emotional states. I casually mentioned how I thought magnolia was somehow important to my spiritual awakening. Jeanette smiled a knowing smile. That beautiful and strong way women smile when they’re emotionally further than you. Not thinking they’re further. Knowing they’re further. To this day, I believe that women are here to guide us men into the light. Somehow, I believe some of us would never ever see the light if it were not for women.
Well, I just had to know what was going on. So she told me. After what I had told her about my life, she gathered that it had been my mother’s unconscious decision to spread magnolia around the house. This made me curious. What did it all mean?
Jeanette grinned. “It inspires diversity and can only find its way to harmony through trust. It’s the original tree of love, pollinating and thereby finding God through sex. It’s the tree of independance, Jack.”
“Have I not been independant, Jeanette?” I inquired. “I mean, I left home to become a rock-star. I rejected my parents, rejected everything.”
“You left because you couldn’t handle being controlled,” Jeanette whispered, tenderly. “But you never really dealt with your issues. You kept running away from your problems, which essentially meant you were dependent on these issues. True independance means not running away from your problems. But the way I see it, by giving in to love you have achieved the happiest form of liberation possible. True love is the highest form of universal independance. You are now the complete picture.”

I think my spiritual awakening process started at the moment in the moonlit shade of those mangnolias. Not only did I realize that my mother had been there to save me from escaping into addictive rage. I also sensed the eternal connection between everything and everyone through the quantum electro-magnetic energy of creation.
We kissed under the stars that night, Jeanette and I. The kiss was so intense, y’all, that I nearly exploded out of my skin. None of my one-night-stands or rock-tour-groupies had ever granted me such bliss. When I slipped under Jeanette’s covers that night, my gender entering her womb, I realized the true love I had been seeking all along. It was unproctected sex made out of the need for love, the yearning for human affection, the vibrating on the same frequency. It was a lovemaking that would result in a new life in nine months time. I realized that shame had been the downfall and that sex could be the salvation.
Deepak Chopra had said, I knew that much, how connected sexuality and spirituality were. Bridget Nielsen continuously stated that sexual energy could be transformed to heighten a spiritual awakening.
After all, Jeanette kept telling me after our divine sex, the universe continuously made love to itself. Like attracting the bees spreading pollen, lovemaking creating babies, confidence creating partnerships, talents complimenting each other, the moon revolving around the Earth, the Earth around the sun, the sun around the centre of the milky way and the milky way around the centre of the universe, the universe around the centre of other universes, the multiverse swimming in the fountain of another world.

I had been right about the magnolia. My mother admitted that she never had consciously understood the meaning of magnolia until later. But she had wanted to inspire me to find my own inner peace and harmony through the liberation of true love.
Jeanette and my mother regularly continue our family tradition of the Barnaby Saturday breakfast. I am often recording or going on tour, rehearsing and sometimes shooting a movie. I know now, however, that I made the right decision to move back home to Louisiana. I changed my rock act, now performing with a new band as myself without the make-up. Sometimes, we do swing-numbers, sometimes we rock, at times we try the blues. We have even been known to play showtunes.
What I enjoy the most is coming home to see my wife and daughter between gigs. I help my father in the garden while my wife helps my mother in the kitchen. My daughter loves spending time with my niece Penny, although she tells me that Penny is quite the chatterbox. When Penny talks too much, though, Magnolia tells her openly to be quiet. Thank God my daughter manages to be what I was not as a child. That means that she does not carry any ancestral burden.
Magnolia, my daughter, was named after the flower that still graces our dining room table. And I show her again and again how to stand her ground, finding her true liberation in the heightened awareness of true love. Just like the universe, Magnolia is wonderful.

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