Amber Recollects
Amber walked into the kitchen at that moment. We talked a little about gardening. She got a lot of trees from the National Arbor Day Foundation, she said. She told me about some flowering hawthornes she'd been raising for six years that were ready for transplanting, and offered me one for my backyard. I warned her that my thumb was not very green. She said that her success rate was less than fifty percent, too.
"No biggie. If they die, it's not meant to be," she said.
I first felt mildly jolted by the statement, even though Amber was talking about trees, not people. As I've replayed it in my mind over the years, however, I've always found its simplicity and detachment to be strangely soothing. Death matters, of course. It is a biggie — at least to us survivors. But to think of death as what happens when life is simply not meant to be is very Zen. Very Amber, I'd bet, in that she seemed to be able break things down to their essential truth. No bullshit. What can be more true than the fact that to the dead, death is the realization of what is meant to be.
Anne mention that I was writing a book on the impact of substances on families and communities. Amber was intrigued.
"We've got, what, three friends left?" she said, turning to Teo. "What didn't get 'em in overdoses got 'em in AIDS. One friend got hit by a subway he was so high."
I asked her about Jimmy Reilly, a cousin of hers who in my mind had become emblematic of kids whose unlimited promise had been destroyed by drugs. Jimmy, a gifted guitar player, died of a heroin and alcohol overdose in the late Sixties. He had been clean for a while, I'd been told, and was working as a groundskeeper and getting his life together when he decided he could use a little smack on weekends.
I'd corresponded with Alan Merrill, a musician and songwriter who played with Jimmy in a local band called The Kaleidoscope. It was later renamed Watertower West after a secluded spot in Hastings where kids went to smoke grass. Watertower West became the house band at the Cafe Wha in Greenwich Village for a time (as well as at several of Timothy Leary's parties). Merrill had fired Riley from The Kaleidoscope, but later set him up with a guitar student of his, Soupy Sales' son Tony, who was forming Tony Sales and the Tigers with his brother, Hunt. Evidently Jimmy didn't last long with the Sales' band either. Jon Pousette-Dart, who was the bassist for Tony and the Tigers for a couple of years emailed me that he thought that tales about Jimmy playing with the Tigers were a "fabrication." In any event, Jimmy was not a member of the Tigers when the band appeared in Tiger Beat magazine or on the "Hulaballoo" TV show in 1966. Riley was evidently leading the tenuous existence of an addict whose habit gets in the way of success.
"He was soooo talented," Amber said. "It was almost like a gift-from-God type of thing."