The Illinois summer heat and humidity clamped down over Chicago's West Side like a damp electric blanket. Ozone filled the air with the promise of lightning. Gunmetal clouds brooded, purple with bad intent. Merrimac Street was still. No baseball today. Aunt Rose said it was polio season.

I had already read Neville Shute's On the Beach and Seven Days in May over the summer of 1963 -- or was it '64? My father had finished with them and handed them off to me. "It's time you graduated from the Hardy Boys," he had said. Still, I had packed The Twisted Claw by Franklin W. Dixon with the other books -- only that one hidden in my A2000 pitcher's glove. I had just finished An American Guerilla in the Philippines, and the day's weather conspired to place me even more fully in Manila, 1942 -- my cousin was the American intelligence officer here, my aunt and uncle were Japanese collaborators.

My uncle's police radio crackled with static downstairs and in our attic bedroom. My cousin Jimmy and I listened to the Ventures play "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue." The Ventures twanged the hell out of this one on their Mosrite guitars. Nothing could be cooler than this 45 rpm record, I thought. Last week I found a recording at the library of the Ventures playing live in Japan. It had "Slaughter" on the CD. I listened and found it unlistenable. What was I thinking? I thought the theme to the TV show 77 Sunset Strip was boss too.

After multiple vinyl encores of Nokie Edwards, Mel Taylor, and Don Wilson that August day...and having finished The Twisted Claw...

"Frank found the switch and turned on the lights. The boys looked around...on the far side of the room, armor engraved with the symbol of the twisted claw, stood on a pedestal.

"...Joe suddenly grabbed his brother's arm. 'Hold on!' he whispered. I might be seeing things, but I'm sure that figure on the pedestal moved!'"

...I closed the book, switched the turntable to 33 rpm, put on the soundtrack to Lawrence of Arabia, and picked up a book I had found in a suburban garbage box: The Pass Beyond Kashmir by Berkely Mather. The difference in the writing was like a physical blow. I seem to remember a thunderclap overhead as I read:

"...The sun was dipping down behind the high ground towards Malabar Hill, but it hadn't taken the heat with it. You could almost see the heat. It seeped out of the streaked, yellow-washed walls of the bazaar and it made objects in the middle distance dance and shimmer. It was helped by the smoke of the little fires from the alleys that ran down toward the Crawford Market where the women were cooking the evening meal of curry and dahl and the street traders were waking from the long siesta...scratching, hawking and spitting. Ten thousand of them doing it in concert...can drown all other sounds in the two waking hours of dawn and sunset in Bombay."

The music Maurice Jarre scored for David Lean and Peter O'Toole's Lawrence fit the characters Smedley, Rees, and Polson and their deadly rendezvous in the Himalayas to perfection. I made it so in the geography of my 12-year-old mind. India, the Arabian Desert -- what difference? I wondered what curry and dahl tasted like. I wanted to see Arabs and camels spit, hordes of Thugees and Sepoys at the Afghan frontier, scimitars and lances winking in fierce sunlight.

Somewhere around that time I had read The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence. I remember enjoying it, but I could not have understood it. I couldn't make it through Lew Wallace's Ben-Hur, but I sat through Charleton Heston's portrayal several times. Listening to Miklos Rozsas's score while reading Harold Lamb's Ghengis Khan and Hannibal worked well. About that time, the Beatles were on transistors and hi-fis everywhere you went. I read Catcher in the Rye four times that year and I Was a Teenaged Drug Addict (author forgotten) and Junkie by William Burroughs -- all to early Beatles singles and Dave Brubeck's "Take Five" or "Blue Rondo à la Turk."

When I think of H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines, I think of early Animals records and, for some reason, Billy Joe Royal's cornball lament "Down in the Boondocks." I heard that one and the Byrds' "Mr. Tambourine Man" wafting across the still surface of Round Lake in northern Illinois in whatever summer that was. The Beatles' Revolver was in there somewhere too, and I read King of the Khyber Rifles, Sartre's Nausea (to the tune of "Is That All There Is?" -- I could swear -- coming from my mother's bedroom as she lay in bed all of June and July of 1966). Then there was The Iliad and The Odyssey (for school, but I loved them) as well as a copy of Terry Southern's Candy I had hidden under my mattress. This latter novel went well with beef jerky and early Rolling Stones.

My father and the films Captain Blood and The Sea Hawk led me to the books of Rafael Sabatini. The unforgettable opening line from Scaramouche, "He was born with the gift of laughter and the sense that the world was mad," is carved not only in memory but, I later discovered, over an entrance to the campus of Yale University. The novel itself is far superior to the movie with Stewart Granger (so wrong) and should be enjoyed with Royal Crown cola, the Beau Brummels' "Laugh, Laugh," and the Lovin' Spoonful's "Summer in the City" and "Do You Believe in Magic?" If you have the opportunity in this life, read The Sea Hawk and/or Captain Blood while listening to Erich Wolfgang Korngold's score to Errol Flynn's depiction of Peter Blood and Geoffrey Thorpe.

Another Sabatini, The Black Swan, concerning the lusty adventures of Captain Tom Leach and the heroic Charles de Bernis, was read, at least in part, while my mother played for my brother and me a recording of The 1812 Overture. Tempestuous crescendos and cannon fire were superb accompaniment to swashbuckling scenes:

"...Again the blades sang together. He thrust high. De Bernis parried lightly, using the forte of the blade with great effect, and countered promptly. Leach beat the blade set aside in the same manner.... It plowed a furrow in his right cheek."

Anything that includes either sword fights or gunfire and read while listening to early Fleetwood Mac's "Oh Well" will almost draw actual blood.

I should include the soundtrack to West Side Story. This was played constantly by my prescription barbiturate- and

then-over-the-counter amphetamine-addled mother until multiple copies of the LPs were scratched beyond listening. I tacitly approved the knife-fight background music as long as I didn't have to sit through the visual: choreographed, flaming pirouettes and flailing wrists as the Jets apparently danced the Sharks to death.

I recall a Harry Belafonte calypso record (yes, the one with the banana song) of Mom's, which was on quite a bit, and I associate it with the failed attempt to read Atlas Shrugged (Mom's book). Ayn Rand's concerns were far from my own.

About that time I read Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein, The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski, a few H.P. Lovecraft stories, and later, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as it appeared in Rolling Stone. The Yardbirds, especially performing their version of Muddy Waters's "I'm a Man," seemed to complement Thompson's gonzo prose. Pink Floyd's first album, Piper at the Gates of Dawn, with its wonky organ and surreal imagery, suited Lovecraft, Heinlein, and almost any and all science fiction and fantasy. In the late '60s and early '70s this genre was enjoying a kind of Golden Age (the New Wave), often featuring dark, even mainstream characterization and wild punctuation.

Chicago blues rode my cheap, portable turntable while I read Dreiser's American Tragedy and Thomas Hardy's Mayor of Casterbridge for school. Buddy Guy and Junior Wells, Albert King and Ray Charles provided backup for Nathanael West. Somewhere between Miss Lonelyhearts and The Dream Life of Balso Snell, I discovered John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins, and Cannonball Adderley. Jazz proved to be great reading music, and not just for its lack of distracting lyrics -- I played Nina Simone Sings the Blues all through U.S.A. by John Dos Passos. I was also smoking marijuana and so remember little of the Dos Passos.

Carlos Castaneda's books coincided with Procol Harum and Robin Trower, having nothing to do with each other atmospherically, but chronologically on the same page of some confabulated photo album. The Dwarf by Par Lagerkvist was accompanied by King Crimson. Charles Lloyd and Keith Jarrett played to the sound of turning pages: Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo, Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett, and The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler. A relatively late-in-life reading of Moby Dick I associate with the Kinks and the Who and their rock operas. I don't necessarily recommend the combo, but that's how it went for me.

At some point in my 20s, somewhere around Springsteen and Little Feat, Michael Herr's Dispatches, The Hack by Wilfrid Sheed, Graham Greene's Quiet American, and Anthony Burgess's Enderby, I opted to read and to write with as much silence in the background as I could manage. To this day, while writing or with an open book in front of me, if music is coming from anywhere I will opt to listen to the music. Music trumps language on a visceral level, though both are pleasures -- when they're not instruments of torture. Rap and hip-hop, "the New R&B," martial or German beer-garden music, and Broadway show tunes are torment, just as awful prose is tantamount to chewing on aluminum foil. Anyway, today I will read or I will listen, but not simultaneously.

My own memoirs, when and if they are written, will best be read while listening to a recording of the highest quality and played at maximum volume -- it is a composition by John Cage, usually performed live and always listed first in the program. I must find the title; I believe the word "ambient" occurs in it. For some two minutes or so, I believe, Cage sits at the piano and refrains from playing anything. Eventually the audience stops shifting, clearing their throats, and rustling programs. After the first minute these sounds give way to something as near silence as men and women are capable of this side of the grave. A silence that is attentive, expectant, possibly embarrassed, self-conscious, and pregnant. More rewarding than any memoir.