I sometimes think of my brain as if it were the hold of a storm-tossed ship with all sorts of  unlocked trunks spilling, unhinged containers cracking open, their myriad contents tossed about, bobbing in the bilgewater. Images float up, long ago people or places, voices, shards of laughter, scraps of poetry, random songs that will sometimes stick around for weeks on endless, maddening repetition. But now and then these bits and pieces come together in an unlikely alignment of life and work, the present and the past.

My earliest notes for the book that became Undesirable, describe it thus: “This fucking project for which I have no name.” But even before that, I needed a title. Without a title, there can be no Information Retrieval, a necessary term which takes no note of the Muse, or the glory or the gorys, the gnashing, thrashing, the highs and lows of actual writing.

Having a title was never a problem in all the years that I wrote on a typewriter. The pages accumulated beside the typewriter.  As the pages turned into chapters, they got folders named Chapter 1, Chapter 2.  The title didn’t matter until it mattered to the writer. I mean, you could call  your project whatever you wanted, or no title at all. But the computer is not that forgiving. From the very moment the writer sets out to create (even if the idea is and remains utterly fetal) you must have a title.

Once these documents, up from the basement, were spread across the dining room table, and I randomly read, a song began to float up through the bilgewater in my brain, a few notes, wispy lyrics, the plaintive title refrain, “Can’t Find My Way Home”  I typed “Can’t Find My Way Home.” into Apple Music. Ah yes, from eponymously named  album, Blind Faith, released in July 1969. The song was instantly familiar, never mind the five decades since I  had sat around in grungy grad student digs, candle shadows dancing on the ceiling, passing a joint among friends, and grooving to this album. Can’t Find My Way Home became—and remains—the name of my computer file for this book. It ended up with 186 folders and nearly 2000 files, a labyrinth, a warren I learned to navigate.

Blind Faith was a tremendous Super Group, top British musicians culled from other legendary  bands: Eric Clapton, and Ginger Baker from Cream, the fabulously successful band that broke up in 1968,  Stevie Winwood, from Traffic, Ric Grech from the lesser-known Family. The Blind Faith origin story goes something like this: after coming off the highs (and no doubt contentious lows) of Cream and Traffic, Eric and Steve are jamming in Eric’s basement and digging the new music and probably smoking a lot of weed. They are joined later on drums by Ginger Baker, all of them feeling elated, and thinking: Hell yes! Why not? Let’s make a new band! However, they had all (and each) signed a lot of contracts with men in Suits, agreements that would need to be honored or broken or somehow settled in ink. In early 1969, the lawyers and managers and corporate types were doing just that while the boys in the band wrote, jammed and got high on their own music and other substances.

In early 1969 the musicians in Blind Faith embarked upon a period of what can only be called fierce, even incredible, possibly unparalleled  productivity. They wrote, recorded, produced and released this album in a matter of months. In June they gave a free concert in Hyde Park where 100,000 people showed up. “Blind Faith” the album appeared in July,1969. (Very weird cover art on the British edition had to be scrapped for the American release which featured a boring photo on a vaguely mustard-colored background.) In 1969 Blind Faith did one album, one tour. By 1970 they were finished.

There are only six songs on the album. Was this because already, mere months into this new venture, the fissures were widening? Differences of opinion among the musicians on where to put their combined creative time and strengths? Did they realize that if they didn’t produce this album, release it, and go on tour in 1969, then their whole coalition would collapse and nothing would come of their musical union. And just think of all those Suits to whom they were obliged, men needing their percentages, their fees. . .

The album consists of “Well All Right,” “Had to Cry Today,”  “Can’t Find My Way Home,”  “Presence of the Lord,” “Sea of Joy,” “Do What You Like.” Listen in 2026 and you can still hear the shining intensity and virtuosity. (You can also understand why the mind-bending experience of listening to this album was so much enhanced by weed.) You can detect the struggles that must have swirled among these musicians. The songs cross spectrums of musical possibility. Apple Music classifies the album and the band as psychedelic blues which seems like an impossible combination until you listen. Some tracks echo with the sad grit, the heavy roll reminiscent of The Band in this same era. Some crackle with energy. In the fifteen and a half minutes of “Do What You Like,” Ginger Baker on drums battles the universe head-on and the universe is losing. Though much shorter and far simpler than the other tracks. “Can’t Find My Way Home” is the standout. With its wistful wailing, its cry from some unimaginable abyss, its weird symbolism and intrinsic, aching loneliness, it is to me far more poignant now than it was in 1969 which is why, no doubt, it came to me, unbidden, allied to my brother’s experience.

Doug Johnson went to Vietnam in June 1969, and by July 1969 he had already racked up arrests for going AWOL for which he would face a court-martial. In the book. I wrote, “Sometimes when I look back over Doug’s life, I wonder if he ever did come down from being high, or find his way back, not simply to his unit, but to his essential humanity. Every time I hear the 1969 Blind Faith song, “Can’t Find My Way Home”—from the moment I first put the phonograph needle, hissing on the original album, and now, a half century later—at the sound of those wailing lyrics, I think of my brother, wasted, lost, wandering, seeking some ephemeral path home and then the song ends, and when the music stops, the jungle closes over my brother and he vanishes.”

However poignant and apt the song, it could not serve as a title for the book. The metaphorical connections  to my brother’s Vietnam experience were useless if the reader didn’t know the fifty year old song. Even if I could afford the fees to print the lyrics—without the music, lacking that wail—well, they were just words. They would never mean to the reader what they meant to me. Still, the file name allowed me Information Retrieval. I could go on working.

And then, perhaps three or four months into the writing of the book, one afternoon a friend came over and saw the sea of paper on the dining room table. I showed her  the folder marked “ORIG,”  that is, Doug’s original discharge. She took the page out of the folder, and looked up at me, her expression rippling with shock, horror—and pity. And I knew, instantly, the title had been there all along.

UNDESIRABLE

This document declares before all the world that at age twenty, you are and forever will be undesirable. You stinking loser. No one wants you. No one will ever want you. The Army sure as hell doesn’t want you, and they don’t give a flying fuck that you spent fourteen months in-country, never knowing if you might die before sundown. The Army doesn’t give one shiny shit that you were shooting up cocktails of heroin and speed and chasing it with little candy-colored tabs of LSD before you tightened your helmet, grabbed your weapon and went out into the jungle on point, not knowing where the Cong might be lurking, where, or into which tunnels they might hide, or where they had laced the landmines, or set up those little booby-trapped bits of bamboo, punji sticks, calculated to cripple. So fucking what if you served jail time for that first court-martial. You went AWOL again and again and there’s another court-martial coming up, dipshit, another assured vacation in Long Binh jail joined by the rats. You wanna avoid that?  Then shut up and sign here, you  undesirable asshole.

And so, Doug signed.

My father always knew what was truly at stake for Doug. Not simply the Army’s estimation of his undesirable past, but his future: my dad was determined to scrub Undesirable from his son’s psyche, that he should at last find his way home.