Let's tell the future.

Let's say you're nine years old. You're a tall, shy, skinny, awkward artistic, underconfident girl who's sometimes hassled by other kids for looking like a boy. At home - which can be an inspiration or a battleground: no real haven there - you're the quiet and inroverted one in "a familt of very intense people who talk a lot and argue a lot in a heated atmosphere" rife with '60s politics and passions. Your father is a well-respected writer and teacher who was born in Puerto Rico, and your mother, who works with computer systems, is a half-German, half-Swedish Minnesotan. You think of them as always yelling at each other and fighting. At school on a very mean street in Spanish Harlem, you're really into Puerto Rican pride and learning about your "Hispanic roots." this is the turf on which you're trying to figure out how to be tough enough to defend yourself and your two younger brothers and sister against long odds. Then one day your father tells you he's not your father, that you're not half-Puerto Rican, that your real father is white, is somewhere in California and hasn't even bothered to get in touch with you for seven years. Boom. Let's tell the future.

Suzanne Vega and I are sitting, both nervous as hell but almost concealing it, at a long wooden table - old brown, dark, full of holes - on two of the six iron-and-felt chairs that surround it. On the table are three white candles burned to half-mast and set in three arched black metal holders. Thtough the six front windows, I can see the river in the distance and hear the Manhattan traffic below. This is the front part of Vega's downtown loft, at once artfully comfortable and artlessly casual: "a cool, well-lighted place" as she might say with her hard-won, spontaneous, better-late-than-never schoolgirlish laugh - and there's a poster with Spanish writing in a brown brick wall, a white guitar close by it and a large globe in the corner next to several plants.

Vega, whose work I much admire and who sells a million records in the United States and several million in Europe, is 30, stands five foot six, has short red hair and is wearing a plain white blouse and stylish black slacks. (For the second day's interview, she switches to a white sweater and blue jeans.) There's a lot I'd like to ask this woman about her life, her career, her family and the case of the lost father, a matter that has taken on new and fabuluous dimensions.

We start by talking about the new album, DAYS OF OPEN HAND - I can't help thinking about all those "fist" images in many of Vega's earlier songs - and pretty soon we're at the heart of this or any other matter: A story of fractured families, a biological father, a stepfather, a mother, half-brothers, half-sisters and a damaged young girl, all of them haunted by eerie, early memories that something happened - something perhaps terrible - but they aren't quite sure what.

"I would think that the characters in DAYS OF OPEN HAND are the family I grew up with and not Richard, my biological father whom I recently found," Vega says. "Because the family I grew up with, we're still very, very close, and we're still very emotionally involved as a family. And I wasn't sure what the effect would be when I found Richard. It wasn't like Richard was a substitute for Ed, the father I'd grown up with. It was a completely different thing. Suddenly I saw where I had come from and where I'd gotten some of my temperament and my body from, but the relationship I have with Richard is part of a different configuration. I think of my family as a configuration. We have this effect on each other. We all kind of hold each other in orbit. And Richard is just different. He's over there in California, and we talk, and it's just a different branch of the tree."

When did you decide to look for him and how did you find him?

"Well, it's a weird story," she laughs. "My mother, Patricia, knew that he lived somewhere in California but didn't know where. It was in August of 1987 and I was on tour in California and "Luka" went to number three on the charts, which I never in my life thought would happen. So I hired the detective the week that "Luka" went to number three to find him because I thought, Well, why not just do all of my wildest dreams at the same time? I'd always wondered about him because I'd heard that he played jazz piano and was a nice guy. That's all I knew about him. I had a picture or two. And I just wanted to know: Where is he? What does he look like? What are his feelings? And the detective found him in two weeks.

"I was still on the road - we were making our way back from California - in Salt Lake City when they told me that they'd found him. And at the time I didn't want to deal with it. It was like, Oh, I'm in the middle of this tour. I don't want to call this gut. I don't know him. So I waited until I got home, which was a few months later and I sent him a Christmas card saying, Hi, I'm your daughter. This is my address. If you want to talk to me, you can. If you don't, well, I understand and have a good life or whatever. I tried to keep it as cool and dispassionate as I could because you never know what kind of response you'll get. He called within a week, and we started talking to each other."

I don't imagine that you had any memory of him at all, since he left when you were two.

"No. In fact, when they told me that I had another father, I was really confused because I had this really strong identity as a half-Puerto Rican girl. I had been to Puerto Rico and everything. Of all the kids [brothers Matthew and Timothy, sister Alyson], I had - and probably still have - the most Puerto Rican identity. And it turns out I'm the one who really isn't Puerto Rican. I had all these really weird ideas about white people. [laughs] So to realize that I was in fact white was obviously a big shock."

How did you find out about Richard?

"Oh, Ed just decided one day that it would be a good idea if I knew. He was always trying to sit us down and have us tell him what we were feeling. I never really thought much aboiut how I felt. It's such a weird thing for a kid to sit down and think about how she feels. But as a family, we were always having these formal discussions, and during one of these, Ed mentioned this to me. And I thought it was a joke, a strange child-psycholgy test or something." She laughs. "Tell her she ahs a white father in California. See what she does. And I went, Are you kidding? That's not possible. Are there any other surprises like this? Because my name was different and everything. On my birth certificate, I have a completely different name."

What is it?

"I would really rather not say.

"But this was eerie. My mind turned it over for days afterward. I have another name. I have another father. My father is white and he lives in California. I thought about it all the time. I never talked about it much, but I wanted to know what the situation was, partly because there were things I didn't understand about myself. Like, Why don't I get angry more often? I don't know. Why am I so introspective? Beats me. When I met Richard, I found that he isn't really that introspective. He doesn't read a lot. But he's very musical.. His mother had played drums in a band, but he was adopted so he never know his mother. So all these connections were broken, and yet the blood things still spoke up, which I find really remarkable.

"And the fact that Richard's mother had been a professional musician who toured as well; I guess the traveling thing recurs in that branch of the family. There was musical ability on my mother's side as well- she sang and played the guitar- but it didn't seem to be as fervent as on Richard's side. My mother played jazz, and Richard's mother played bebop music. Her name was Helen Grant, and during the '20s and '30s she toured the Midwest with the Merry Makers Ladies Orchestra. You see pictures of her and she's this enormously glamorous woman. She had four children, and she put three of them in an institution and gave my father up for adoption and continued with her music. The father, I guess, had left the family. He was a trumpet player, and he went to the Philippines during the Depression because he couldn't handle having four kids or something. So all down the line there are all these stories of people leaving. And Richard felt that he had done the same thing."

When Richard called you, did he know that you were the Suzane Vega?

"On the phone when he first spoke, he went, There's a singer who has your name." She laughs. "I said, Yes, there is, and that's me. And he went, 'Luka'? That's you? And he was very happy. But what pleased me was that he wasn't impressed by the fact that I was successful and just had a Top 10 recording; that didn't make a dent. He thought that was hunky-dory, but he was happy because I was his daughter who was contacting him. I felt good about that. If he had said, Oh, you're rich and famous, why don't send me some money?" She shakes her head. "Then I would have gond, Well, gee, Dad, I don't know if I want to know you."

Meeting must have been terrifying.

"Yes. But I figured it had been a long time and it was something I wanted to do, so I flew to California. It was really a long six hours, and I flew on the plane by myself because I felt that this was something I should do alone. And when we met at the airport, we wer like...you just look and look as though you can't stop looking because you can't believe it, and you're sort of just matching things.

"In some ways I thought he would look different than he actually did, but there were other things that seemed so familiar about him. At first I thought, Oh, I'm imagining it. There's a way that he looks at people. He puts his head down and kind of has this way of looking at you from underneath his eyebrows. It's extremely direct, and I've seen that same quality in my own pictures.

"But he's this big, jolly guy; I thought he was going to be thin and pale and melancholy. He's about six foot and 200 pounds. That surprised me. I figured he'd look like James Joyce. And he doesn't care for reading. But he draws. That's what he does in his business. He makes architectural renderings, so he has all this spatial information, a way of seeing the world.

"He's friendly. I think he's the kind of guy who'd be good with animals. He's empathetic and decent. He can say, Oh, you must be feeling this because of that, and usually he's accurate. The two of us were very curious about each other, so we kept looking at each other. It was interesting to see the kind of person he was because I wanted to know who I was descended from. To know what his tendencies were, moralistically as much as anything else. And he seems like a man who's always tried to do the right thing. I appreciate that."

Does he like your songs?

"I think he does. We don't talk a lot about what they mean. Of course, he liked 'Gypsy' because of the chorus ['Oh, hold me like a baby/That will not fall asleep']. I think he felt really moved by that song because he had known me as a baby and hadn't seen me since.

"He told me that when I was born, I was the only person of his flesh and blood that he'd ever seen because he'd been adopted. And I realized, God, he's right. He said he didn't realize until I was gone what had happened. I'd come to New York with Ed and Pat [who both knew Richard in California], and I guess that he hadn't realized what the effect was going to be on his own life.

"But there was still all that time when nothing happened. I get different stories. Richard says one thing about why 25 years went by, my mother says another. I don't know what really happened."

Why did they break up?

"Well, they were really young. they were 18, they knew each other in high school, they were fooling around, and oops, here's a child. It just didn't work out. I don't blame him for that. A man and a woman don't get along with each other and they break up. That's natural. If happens all the time. It is different though when you're blood to the person, and sometimes you're not even aware of what that means until many years later.

"He sent me lots of pictures. I was astonished to see all those pictures of me in circumstances that I knew nothing about. I didn't know I was christened. There's me in my long gown. There's Richard, real skinny, with a pair of sunglasses, looking like James Dean, sort of holding me up there. That almost said more than the stories."

Vega has to leave for a moment and I look around the room. On one wall, there's a photograph of the painter Francis Bacon. A big black book, Egon Schiele by Rudolf Leopold, sits on a table next to a huge black wrench. Sixty-four Crayola crayons. A German gold record for SOLITUDE STANDING, Vega's second album. Another book: First Aid For Quilts. Two green apples in a brown bowl. A plaque that reads: "The Center for the Elimination of Violence in the Family, Inc. expresses appreciation to Suzanne Vega 11/16/88." Green candles by a small mirror. A grandfather clock. It's a wonderful place. When Vega returns, we start again.

After Ed told you abuot Richard, did it stay with you?

"Yeah." She pauses. "It would rear up because I just tried to deny it. I went, 'So who the fuck cares about this guy in California? Just because I'm not really Puerto Rican doesn't mean that I can't try to be Puerto Rican.' One of the first singing jobs I ever had was with the Alliance of Latin Arts in this show called Boriquen Canta! I was the only white girl in the show. I was 15. This was a summer job, and we were city-sponsored. We'd travel in this bus and go sing in the South Bronx and at Lincoln Center. We'd put on an all-Spanish version of The sound of Music at Lincoln Center and I was a nun. But it was hard for me to accept that I had this other thing that seemed to mark me as bing different from my family. I didn't like it, and I wanted to get rid of it. Finally I just started to accept the truth and stopped trying to make believe that it wasn't there.

"In the '60s everybody was being raised to be proud of their ethnic heritage. The schools I went to all emphasized that. And I'd go, Yes, I'm learning about my Puerto Rican self, and we'd get all this literature from the YOung Lords, who had their offices right up the street. So it was not a very cool thing to suddenly be told that you were white. Where am I at? Where are my roots? No one wanted to hear about my white roots. All my friends and the kids in school were half-black or half-this or half-that, and the friends of my parents were all very political and artistic. So it just felt weird to know that I was," she pauses in mock solemnity, "the white girl."

What a great title for a B movie.

"Yes." She laughs. "I felt it internally, but I don't think that Ed and Pat had any knowledge I was feeling this way because I never talked about it. I kept myself to myself. I had my own ideas about the world and spent a lot of time by myself, writing in my notebooks. I was a pretty withdrawn kid. I had a lot of stuff to deal with."

Richard is English-Scottish-Irish?

"Yeah. And most people don't think of my brothers and sister as being half-Puerto Rican. Most people think they're white, I guess, just because Ed and Pat were really very strict about how we spoke. If we came home going, 'Dis ain't no fun' or whatever stuff we'd picked up in school, they'd say, 'What kind of language are you speaking? They'd both been to college and were well-educated and they hammered into us that we had to be articulate. So we all speak very well and we've all gone to good schools, and most people think, What's the big deal? You're about as white as anybody else. So what? But when you're growing up, all of that has a huge feel to it."

What streets did you live on?

"Five years on East 109th Street between Lenox and First, then 12 or 13 years on 102nf and Broadway, which is really mixed. A block to your left there's the beautiful West End mansions. A block to your right there's the projects. And you don't go through the projects because people will throw things out the window at you. So it was very carefully mapped out where you could walkto school so that you wouldn't get hit on by a gang of girls or somebody who wanted to take your money."

Ed is a novelist, short-story writer, essayist, teacher?

"All of those things. He writes in English, and some of his writing has an almost hallucinogenic quality to it. Not realistic. More dreamliks. He recently won a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He's a member of PEN."

He must be one of the big reasons you wanted to write.

"Well, yeah, because of his life-style. Both of my parents thought that being an artist was the only reasonable thing in this society that a person could do. Or at least Ed thought that. My mother worried that we weren't going to make enough money to support ourselves, so she was always trying to drill it into us that we had to get skills. Ed was always going, You must not give in and conform to what 98 percent of the people expect of you. You must challenge your dreams."

An exciteing, turbulent household.

"I can't say it was restful. You had to be on your toes. In some ways it was great because it really prepared me for going out into the world. But at the same time, if you wanted security and not stress, forget it. There was this constant feeling of... battling. Somebody battling somebody else. My parents would argue, which they're famous for. They've been together for almost 30 years, and it's just what they do: They argue. But they're still together, so I don't know. No one can explain what happens.

"Ed was always trying to get us all to learn something about life, and sometimes it seemed that we had learned it and other times it seemed that we had not. And I'm still trying to put my finger on what it was that he was trying to teach us. It had something to do with risks and being honest and having courage, but that's not good enough. That hardly begins to touch on why the house was in such an uproar all the time.

"He had an idea - he stillhas this idea - and he wanted to talk about it. He wants you to get in there and grapple. It doesn't matter that you're six years old and don't know what the hell anybody's talking about. You have to take your stand. If you want to come home and feel like it's your little haven, it's just not going to happen."

Did you have your own room?

"Sometimes. And sometimes I had a room with my sister.[laughs] Very early on, when the kids would have bad dreams, they'd come into my bed. So I'd wake up and the four of us would be sprawled out over my bed. And if my parents were arguing or whatever, I would entertain the kids, amuse them, make puppet shows or drag them off somewhere. I felt very protective of my siblings. I still feel like I'm the big sister looking after them, fretting over them."

I guess you were held up as a good example to them.

"Yeah, although that kind of shifted. There were times when Suzie had to set a good example, but there were other times when it was like I just wasn't participating. I wasn't wild enough. I wasn't like... for example, this is something that happened when I was younger. My parents had a wild party one night and decided to take out the watercolors and draw on the walls. So they filled up the halls with these murals and sayings and pictures and cartoons. And I woke up the next morning wondering, 'What happened here?' Because Timothy, my younger brother, would also draw on the walls with his crayons, and he got yelled at for doing that. Suddenly my parents were doing the same thing, and I was in this weird in-between state, old enough to know better and not old enough to do what I wanted. This was a constant feeling I had."

You once said that something happened to you when you were 12 and that you "got hard." And that as a child, you sometimes felt you were a "bad person." Why? Because you were introspective? Because you felt that you weren't living up to your parents' expectations?

"Yeah." Vega speaks quietly and matter-of-factly. "You pretty much hit it. I did feel that my parents were looking for something that I wasn't providing. Ed was always pushing me and trying to make me reach my limits. He wanted a reaction. And any reaction was better than nothing. And it just felt wrong to my nature to do that. So I constantly had the feeling that he thought, Oh she's just too quiet. She's just too orderly. She's just too good. Why is she doing her homework, for Christ's sake? Why isn't she more rebellious? He had this longing for rebellious children, and he could have handled that. Instead, he had me. I was trying to figure out what he was talking about or what was expected of me, and that seemed to bother him - that I was trying to understand what was expected of me. So there were ways in which I grew up that were very beneficial, but there were other ways in which it was very difficult and not at all what you would think of a childhood as being like.

"It always seemed that I would brood over things and mull them over and drag them into a room and think about them for two years. Even when I was seven years old, I would say, I'm going to think about this for a while and I'm notgoing to tell anyone about it until two years have gone by. And I would think about it the whole two years. Then I would tell somebody what I'd been thinking about, and they'd go, What are you talking about? Why did you wait two years to say this?" She laughs. "Because I thought that it was a safe period of time. I had a plan and I stuck to it. It's just a different way of being.

"And some of these questions I've been thinking about since I was seven years old. So, yes, there was a sense of having failed or disappointed them. And, without getting specific, they had their own problems that they were going through. I really believe the emotional truth is more important than the specifics, although I'm sure the specifics would make it easier for people to understand what I'm talking about. I am being abstract, but there are some parts of my life that I keep to myself.

"Anyone who's had experiences like I had growing up knows whether or not I hit it on the money. And feeling like I'd become hard when I was 12 is a very accurate description. I made a conscious decision to stop expecting certain things, to just say, 'One day I will be grown up and I will earn my own living and have my own place. I know this because I am planning this. And I am going to carry this plan out. I'm going to do what I have to do so that I can come out the other side and be independent.'

"The problem with an attitude like that is, when you get it that young, you can't get out of it sometimes. I stlil feel that way sometimes - that I'm removed. In stressful situations - if I'm on tour or tired or sick - it's like the shell comes down, the uniform goes on, and I'm not a person, not a human being. It's like, I'm doing my job, I'm doing my duty. And I don't like that about myself."

The uniform?

"I think that's what the soldier imagery in some of my songs has to do with. It came from a military jacket I had. Because of all of the political involvement, we were always going to rallies. At one of them, they had a pig's head on a stick. I just remember the violent image of the pig's head and the slab of bacon on the pig's neck.

"When I was about 12, I saw this green military shirt at a rally. You could pick out a silkscreen to go on the back of it, and I picked one of a Vietnamese woman with a baby in in one arm and a gun in the other. And this was my emblem. I'd get up in the morning and I'd put on my jacket and I'd be dressed for the day. This was my thing. It covered me from my neck down to my knees, and I felt like the coolest person in the world when I had my jacket on.

"And to me, it was also like, that's what you have to do: You put on your uniform and you get through the day. I felt like a soldier in my own life. I woke up in the mornings ready to fight, ready to do my duty. It had nothing to do with how I felt, really. Nothing. You know, I might have liked not to have had to fight. I might just like to go take a nap. But I can't do that, so I will do ehat I must. I will do what has to be done to keep the family together and moving forward, and I will try to keep my own private dream alive of being a performer. I trained myself to do what I had to do to survive and be independent. And it was good training.

"But now that I don't have to get up every morning and do my duty, the hard part is learning how to relax. Suddenly, I go, Well, what should I so? I mean, what is there to do? Sometimes when you take off the uniform, it's still with you."

End of Part 1 - Continue with Part 2

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Submitted by Eric Szczerbinski

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