When Venus Fell Read Online Free PDF

already become a house that the postman passed by. Pop channeled all the household mail through the club. And we had an unlisted phone number. It was the beginning of his secrecies, when his anger at the world began to growaround us like thorny vines. Sentimental ideas, Pop finally explained, had no place in a disciplined person’s life.
    “We have to take care of ourselves. Every day has only a precious amount of time, not something to waste on people we barely know,” Pop told me. “Gib and his family aren’t like us. They don’t understand what we’re all about. You don’t want Gib to grow up expecting you to be a type of person that you’re not. You’re going to be a very special and important person. You don’t ever want to be helpless, do you? Being too friendly with other people makes you dependent, and then people take advantage of you.”
    “I don’t want to be helpless, Pop,” I recited fervently. But I was heartbroken and bewildered. Pop had turned me into a silent soldier in his one-man war on ideological crimes committed against our family.
    My duty—as Pop directed me—was to perform brilliantly on concert stages. In that arena I’d rise to a rank so high that no one in the world would dare harm me or anyone else Pop loved.
    I missed Gib for years.

Three
    I was nineteen years old when Pop’s bitter choices caught up with him. I thought he had cloistered us from a world that lurked outside our door with the threat of eternal evil, but that year, 1988, our protected lives began to unravel.
    Federal court judge Lytel Billings, his wife, and their three teenage sons burned to death in an arson fire at their upstate New York house. The story was plastered all over TV and the newspapers for weeks. Billings had been on the Reagan administration’s shortlist of Supreme Court candidates. His fans loved his merciless, hard-line record on immigration law. I knew all about Judge Billings because Pop hated his guts.
    “If Billings had his way my daughters would be labeled as second-generation Jap-Wop on every document from their birth certificates to their driver’s licenses,” I’d heard Pop say more than once. “Hell, he’d probably have ethnic code numbers tattooed on their arms like the goddamned Nazis.”
    But then Pop despised a lot of prominent judges and politicians; our house had always been littered with left-wing newsletters and magazines that stopped just short of calling for all-out anarchy.
    Pop taught us to distrust and scrutinize all governmentprograms and authority—I could sniff out a potential conspiracy or official corruption, real or imagined, a mile away. But that had all been a game to me, growing up in a safe, tree-lined, moss-draped, expensive New Orleans neighborhood where the local police officers knew Ella and me by name.
    The Louisiana state attorney general, for God’s sake, was a regular visitor to Pop’s nightclub. The
governor
had once sat in on drums with a clarinet man named Blues Joe, and Pop let me play keyboard with them. The government was made up of friendly, familiar faces, and We the People included Venus and Ella Arinelli.
    I had never taken Pop’s rants seriously. Ella and I had been weaned on his extravagant rhetoric—the political meetings he attended, the passionate activists’ groups he hosted, and the frequent dinners at our house where the guests were old-style radicals from the music world. They scared Ella, who refused to listen, but I hid at the top of the stairs, grinning as aging musicians shouted opinions at Pop and each other before adjourning to the music room to hold ad-lib jazz sessions. When I thought about Pop’s leftist politics I imagined them underscored by jazz rifts and scented with the mellow, sweet-musky smell of marijuana. They seemed quaint.
    So even though the murders of Judge Billings and his family meant more in our household than to most Americans, it was only because we were already familiar with a whole gallery full