I said, "Huh?"

"You are an adult," Mama said, but in a tone of voice that meant Like h.e.l.l You Are. "You have a child. It is time you took responsibility. Out of respect for your father's feelings, I tolerated you under our roof. But your father was a more generous Christian than you had a right to expect, and he's gone now, G.o.d bless him. You can go to work and take care of yourself. You and your things and your boy had better not be in the house when I get back."

As she walked for the bus, I hurried after her, still carrying Oliver, who was fidgeting. "Just let us stay until he starts first grade in the fall," I said. "How could I get a job before then? What would we live on?"

I shouldn't have done that. I shouldn't have crawled to her. She is my mama and somewhere in my chest full of hate I must still love her a little, but I should never have crawled to her.

She looked back at me and said, "I don't know, but if you think you'll use some of your father'sinsurance money, you can forget it. It all comes to me, and I might give a few thousand to Mikey if he needs it, but never to you. Not after what you did."

Mama got on the bus and went away. She should be in Des Moines by now. She's probably giving Mikey and the relatives all of the smiles and hugs she's been h.o.a.rding since we came to Topeka.

Oliver is asleep as I write. He doesn't look like a b.a.s.t.a.r.d. Just before I put him to bed, he hugged me around the legs and said, "Happy burfday, Muvver." He can talk better than that, but not when he's sleepy.

Absolutely, I thought. Happy G.o.dd.a.m.n birthday.

How am I going to be able to alterthisreality? If I deny Mama's existence, will she be unable to come back and throw us out?

I had thought that it would be nice for me and Oliver to have the house to ourselves for a while, but I was wrong. I can smell Daddy's cigarettes and beer even though he is dead and buried. I expect to see Mama frown at me when I get a gla.s.s of milk even though she has gone to Des Moines. Even when they aren't here, they're here.

Time for us to go, Oliver. Where to, though, beats the h.e.l.l out of me.

I wish we could go to England. That's where all the rock 'n' roll is these days. All you need is a rubber soul, baby, and I surely do have that.

I was a ball and chain bolted to Mother's ankle. If it hadn't been for me, she would have gone to London. She would have found a way.

As it was, she had to pick me up from kindergarten every day and then take me along as she searched for a job. That alone ensured that she was rejected by several employers who might not have rejected her otherwise. Amazingly, though, she found something a few days before Grandmother was to return. A small pop radio station happened to need someone to handle paperwork at just the time that Mother happened to be looking, and thus she became the lone secretary at KKAP, "The Hop of the Heartland."

The management and disc jockeys were stuck in 1959, but that was okay because Mother was too.

(Not quite fair. At this point in her life, Mother was as progressive as it was possible to be in Topeka. It was at her suggestion, in fact, that KKAP finally decided to take a bold step forward and start playing the Beatles.) That solved one problem. Mother had a job, and she was scheduled to start with a training day on Friday, May 28, the day after Grandmother was to return. That left only two other problems: where to live, and what to do with yours truly.

Neither was solved by the time Grandmother showed up. She came home from the bus station in a cab on the evening of May 27, and Mother began to tell her about the job.

"And I suppose you want me to baby-sit your brat while you're off making your fortune," Grandmother said.

"Well, no," Mother said, looking at me anxiously. She still didn't completely trust Grandmother alonewith me, and I felt the same way. "But tomorrow's his last morning of kindergarten, so maybe you could just have him tomorrow afternoon. That would give me the weekend to find a regular sitter."

I wanted to scream,No! Not even one afternoon! but I knew that wouldn't help matters. Either that, or I was just too scared of Grandmother.

"You're forgetting one important thing, Mich.e.l.le," Grandmother said grimly. "You and Oliver don't live here anymore. You not only don't have a free baby-sitter, but you've lost your free housekeeper as well."

Then she went back into our bedroom, pulled the drawers from the dresser and bureau, and began flinging our clothes into the hallway.

Some crying and screaming followed, but the next thing I remember clearly is that Mother and I ended up standing on the front walk while she struggled to hold four grocery sacks full of clothes.

I was bawling. When I could, I sobbed, "Grandmother doesn't mean it, does she?"

"No, she doesn't," Mother said. Her voice sounded firmer than I had ever heard it before. "She thinks she'll let us stand out here for a few hours or maybe overnight, where the neighbors will see us. She thinks I've never been properly repentant, so she wants us to feel humiliated and learn our lesson. Then she'll let us back in and expect us to be grateful and humble."

Mother paused. I looked up and saw her glaring at Grandmother's house. Her eyes flashed with wet heat.

"Well,f.u.c.k that," she said.

She strode off down the sidewalk, and I toddled along with her, wondering what she had meant. She dropped one of the grocery sacks, so I picked it up and carried it with both arms, hugging it as if it were a stuffed animal.

We took a city bus, and the driver and pa.s.sengers stared at us. Mother stared back, and they stopped.

We went to the radio station, a small brick building north of the Kaw River. By the time we arrived, only three people were still there. The two-to-six disc jockey was just coming off the air, and the six-to-ten man was just going on. The engineer was dozing in the control room, letting the deejays fend for themselves.

The two-to-six man was a skinny, stooped guy with pale skin. His name, Mother told me, was Jeff. We met him as he came out of the booth.

"Hey, that front door's supposed to be locked after five," Jeff said.

"It wasn't," Mother replied. "I'm the new secretary. I start tomorrow. This is my son Oliver."

Jeff looked at us. "So you're bringing in sacks of clothes?"

"We need a place to stay," Mother said.

"Well, you sure can't stay here," Jeff said. "Better call in some favors from friends." "I've been too busy raising my son to make friends," Mother said.

"That's me!" I said brightly. I had surmised that this occasion called for cuteness.

"Isn't he something?" Mother asked, tousling my hair. She dropped one of her sacks in midtousle, and it spilled onto the floor. It was her underwear.

We spent the next sixteen nights on the couch in Jeff's apartment. He even saw to it that I made it to my last day of kindergarten (which I could have done without) and took me to the radio station that afternoon, where I spent four boring hours in a corner of the lobby.

Beginning the next Monday, Mother went to work every morning at eight, and Jeff stayed with me until ten. Then he went to work too, and his sister, whose name I've forgotten, came in and baby-sat until Mother returned at about five-thirty. Jeff's sister was a high-school junior on summer break, and she charged fifty cents an hour to watch soap operas on her brother's black-and-white Motorola.

That Motorola changed my life.

My grandparents had never owned a television, so the s.p.a.ce program had never been more than words to me. But on Thursday, June 3, 1965, I saw Gemini 4 lift off amid black-and-white smoke and flame.

Then, a few days later, I saw Edward White floating above the Earth, holding his propulsion unit before him like a crucifix against the void.

Okay. At age five and a half I couldn't have come up with anything as pompous and meaningless as "a crucifix against the void." What I did come up with, though, was the feeling that I would give anything to trade places with Edward White, to float in nothingness far from Topeka, Kansas. Far from anything.

If anything besides rock 'n' roll could confer immortality, leaving the Earth would be it.

Meanwhile, according to Volume II, Grandmother was calling Mother at KKAP twice a day and asking her to come back home. Mother refused.

Mother found an apartment for us through a friend of a friend of the KKAP station manager, and we moved out of Jeff's place as soon as she received her first two-week paycheck. Rent, food, a used TV set, and a down payment on the money we owed Jeff and his sister, and that was it until the next check.

Jeff's sister agreed to continue baby-sitting on an I.O.U. basis-for longer hours now that Jeff wasn't with me mornings-provided that she got a raise to sixty-five cents an hour. Mother, having no choice, agreed.

During this period, Mother underwent something of a spiritual revival as a result of her job. Her obsession with Buddy Holly had flagged due to her depression at the death of Sam Cooke and her subsequent recovery as she discovered the Beatles, but one day while she was cataloging tapes, she came across an interview with Buddy Holly and the Crickets that had been recorded during a multiband tour stop in Topeka in 1957. A copy of that tape, dubbed onto a ca.s.sette, is now part of my collection.

The interviewer's questions are pedestrian, so Holly's answers reveal little about himself or his band...

but his voice itself is another matter. He makes no effort to hide his West Texas drawl. Nor does he tryto hide the fact that he is less comfortable talking than he is singing. While his singing is sure and brash, his speaking voice is uncertain and even shy. Here is the final exchange: ANNOUNCER: "That's all the time we have for this interview with the Crickets, and we want to thank them for taking time out of tonight's busy schedule for talking with us for just a few moments."

BUDDY: "Well, uh, we'd like to thank everyone that, uh, listens and, uh, everyone that, that requests and likes our records, and, uh, we'd like to thank you boys for playin' 'em."

No genius is evident. For Mother, that was the beauty: He sounds like a scared kid,she wrote.He sounds like I feel. But then there are his songs, and just like C. said, they sound like I feel too even though they're so different. So despite that difference, they aren't hard to connect to the Buddy in that interview. Unlike other singers, other stars, he is one of us, and he is grateful that we like his music and that we like him. He is neither above us nor below us, but on a level with us-listen to how he thanks "you boys for playin' 'em."

And now he is gone, and the records that everyone requests have been cut by a band from across the sea, a million miles from Lubbock or Topeka. Yet look at their name: "The Beatles." Not so far from "The Crickets." And listen to their songs: Is "I Saw Her Standing There" a million miles away from "I'm Looking for Someone to Love"?

If I could hear the Beatles speak the way I have just heard Buddy speak, I know I would hear their Liverpool accents just as I have heard Buddy's Lubbock drawl. They have not taken his place; they have not usurped his kingdom. They have inherited it. They are his disciples.

And listen, listen, listen to this new record that just came to the station this week! A new band, also from England, calling themselves The Rolling Stones. And what song are they singing? "Not Fade Away"! It is both a tribute and a transformation.

It is almost a resurrection.

Thus, consciously or unconsciously, Mother gave me religion. In the pantheon of her beliefs, Buddy Holly was G.o.d, Chuck Berry was the Holy Spirit, John Lennon was the new Pope (replacing the martyred Pope Sam), and Paul, George, and Ringo were cardinals. Otis Redding, Bob Dylan, and the up-and-coming Stones were priests with terrific parishes. (In 1965, Mother may have been the only white person in the entire state of Kansas who knew who Otis Redding was. She was also one of the few people anywhere who openly predicted that Dylan was about to go electric.) The Messiah-Buddy reborn in flesh-was still to come.

The tiny walk-up apartment in central Topeka, the first home that Mother and I called our own, was where we worshiped for the next six years. I grew up in the Church, and I learned its liturgy: Oh yeah, baby, baby, oh yeah. Can'tget no satisfaction. Amen,unh.

Christians, Jews, or Muslims might conclude that this Religion of Rock and Roll is either facetious or deliberately offensive. It is neither.

Mother and I relied upon our Church and our G.o.d just as any other religionists rely upon their Churches and their G.o.ds. Of course, everyone believes in the superior power of his or her own particular G.o.d...but for those who doubt that the G.o.d whom Mother and I worshiped had any power at all, I offer my memory of Wednesday, June 8, 1966: I was six and a half years old. The U.S. manned s.p.a.ce program had been proceeding rapidly and magnificently (except for a minor malfunction that had cut short the mission of Gemini 8), leading me to the conclusion that human beings were in control of Nature, that the Universe was under our dominion and command. All we had to do was go out there and take it.

On that Wednesday evening, the sky darkened early. A few minutes after 7:00 P.M., the temperature dropped sharply. Civil defense sirens went off. Mother turned on the TV, and an announcer told us that a tornado was heading for the city.

We had no bas.e.m.e.nt. Mother put me into the bathtub, then brought the mattress from my bed and covered me with it.

"Stay there," she said. "Don't move for anything."

She started to leave, and I poked my head out from under the mattress, asking her where she was going.

She stopped in the bathroom doorway. "It's stupid," she said. "It's awfully stupid. But I have to go to the roof."

She left, and I waited. The wind picked up and the lights went out. I yelled for Mother, but she didn't come, so I got out of the tub, stumbled through the weird green light, and clambered onto the fire escape through the living-room window. The walnut tree beside the fire escape was trembling.

I climbed up to the flat tar-and-gravel roof, and there stood Mother, her hair blown back, her dress snapping behind her knees. She was facing southwest.

I tried to shout to her, but either I made no sound or it was lost in the growing rumble. The wind rammed down my throat; the noise of a ba.s.s drum the size of a mountain shook me; and I saw what was coming.

Tornadoes occur in any number of sizes and in a surprising variety of shapes. There are funnel tornadoes and diffuse tornadoes, needle-shaped tornadoes and waterspouts. Most people who have never seen one a.s.sume that they all look like the one inThe Wizard of Oz. Long and snaky-a twisting, dancing devil.

The tornado inThe Wizard of Oz is a mewling infant.

What I saw coming toward us that evening was the king of kings, Odin, Yahweh, Allah, and Shiva; it was the rage of every madman of every race of all history, compressed and raised to the billionth power; it was a churning ma.s.s that laughed at the puniness of volcanoes and earthquakes. It was an impossibly immense, unswerving cone of utter black insanity that covered a third of the southern sky.

The cruelty of the universe had come down to Earth again. Seven years before, it had killed Buddy Holly. Now it would kill Mother and me. It wouldn't even notice.

Mother raised her right middle finger to it.

I ran to her, pulled her arm down, grasped that finger, and strained to drag her toward the fire escape.

Instead, she picked me up and carried me, and then we were in the bathtub, the mattress heavy andsmelling of my nighttime accidents. The tornado's rumble lived in the porcelain that pressed cold against my cheek.

Mother began singing "Love Me Do."

I joined in, my voice a panicked squeak. I knew all of the words.

By the time we finished the song, the building was shaking.

Mother began singing "Everyday," yelling so that I could hear her over the rumble that had become a dragon's roar.

"A-hey, a-hey, hey!" we shouted in unison.

We alternated between Buddy Holly and the Beatles, taking turns singing at the top of our lungs into each other's ears, yelling the choruses into the mattress. We stayed there and sang for a long, long time, until a distant siren sounded an all-clear, and it was over.

When we came out from under the mattress, both of us so hoa.r.s.e that every breath hurt, we saw that the window over the tub had exploded. Neither of us had heard it happen. Nor had we heard the mirrored door of the medicine cabinet fly open and shatter. Shards of slivered gla.s.s were stuck in the top of the mattress.

Every window in our building had broken, and the walnut tree outside our living room was stripped of its leaves and most of its bark. The buildings on either side of ours, and across the street, were gone. Dead birds and splintered boards lay all over the street. Four people on our block had been killed.

The tornado had not left us untouched, however. Mother wrote,It is an omen. Nothing that enormous and malevolent can be meaningless, and it came right for me. It is only because of my son and the songs that I still live. But because the thing could not have me this time, it will try again, perhaps by trying to take something I love.

I will not let it take Oliver.

Mother's belief that the tornado was an omen of more bad things to come was soon to be strengthened.

For one thing, Bob Dylan suffered a motorcycle accident in August that was to silence his increasingly vital voice for more than a year. And then, soon after Christmas, we learned that Uncle Mike was being drafted. By the time Mother could arrange for time off work to visit him in Des Moines, he had already been shipped to boot camp.

But on June 8, I knew neither that Mother saw the tornado as an omen nor that her brother was destined to be sent to Vietnam. All I knew was that on that day, I had been saved by the power of prayer.

So you pray your prayers to G.o.d, and I'll pray my prayers to mine. May the best chorus win.

The cop car from El Dorado stayed on my tail for so many miles that I almost stopped to give myself up.

Raising a finger to Authority is all well and good, but you can't hold it up there forever. But Peggy Sue slowly began to gain a little ground, and then a little more. Finally, when it had been several curves and hills since I'd last seen the red and blue lights in the mirrors, I pulled off onto a dirt sidetrack and scooted Peggy Sue under a railroad trestle, where I turned off her lights and waited.

I waited a long time, but the cop car never came past me, although a few other cars did. As I had hoped, the El Dorado Authorities must have stopped soon after the bike and I left their official jurisdiction. I turned on Peggy Sue's lights and pulled back onto the paved road. I knew that we still weren't safe, though, because the El Dorado boys had probably alerted the Authorities of whatever jurisdiction we did happen to be in.

Less than two miles later, I pa.s.sed a black Jaguar that was parked on the shoulder of the road with its lights off. I recognized it as one of the cars that had pa.s.sed while I'd been hiding under the trestle.

Probably just a couple of rich kids making out, I told myself.