Afterwards, a large crowd milled around the auditorium’s outside steps. Some set up a vigil around the back, where an ambulance stood with lights blinking. Most people wore the look of disaster survivors. Some projected the damage estimates. “He’s dead, I’m sure of it,” someone said. “Keith’s gonna be a vegetable, he’ll never walk again.”
…they sat with the flask at the base of a sycamore, passing it between them. After a while, they shuffled back to the car and drove south past Newell Stadium and The Arena Club, then turned right and headed south, parallel to the Western-Pacific tracks heading back to Ram’s house.
Jumbled images of the garage with faces smeared, uttering sounds, Jaime and Stew in a spitting war, chasing each other around Fran’s wrecked Austin-Healey which Ram had driven into a house under construction off Tangerine Avenue. Jaime leaning in after Stew to loogie him when Stew ran into the house, and Jaime accidentally stabbing himself in the shoulder with his open stiletto; then the chase down the hallway into the bathroom and moments later, the crash; Ram and Shaughn coming in to find Jaime and Stew on the floor, surrounded by scraps of porcelain and water jetting onto the floor. Panic and laughter, then more panic… “My mom’s gonna kill me…” I heard myself saying in the 35 years ago that was now again…
Shaughn was still laughing…
“…so you remember it then?”
“Yes, Shaughn, yes, I remember.”
The rest of the call was spent in likewise fashion—Shaughn bringing up stories from the past that I preferred keeping locked away and me admitting that I remembered them… the Owsley purple flat acid on bologna sandwiches washed down with milk; the time in Vancouver with Jonas; Tahoe and Vegas; and all that cocaine. “Do you remember that weekend at my condo in Heavenly when you came up with those Australian girls?”
“Sandy and Christine,” I said.
“And one of them died a week later.”
“Sandy, on Bermuda or Barbados, I forget which.”
“No, it was Jamaica,” Shaughn corrected me, correctly it turned out.
“Yeah, Shaughn, you’re right.”
It went on for a while until I told Shaughn that all of that was the past and that I’d remembered enough. I wanted to know how things were with him right now.
“Same old, same-o, pretty much. I’m not with Lehman anymore. Now, I’m with Kidder-Nobody.”
“Who?”
“Kidder-Nobody,” Shaughn laughed. “Kidder-Peabody, if you want the facts. That’s your business right, Le Doir? The facts?”
“That’s the past now too.”
“I read the stories in all the newspapers. You wanna talk about that?”
“I don’t think so, Shaughn.”
“I understand. That was some heavy shit.”
I let it go without comment, and we talked about sports and music and work, with Shaughn providing most of the dialogue while I interjected a comment or two.
Those moments with the pictures running through the reels lasted a few seconds, before Shaughn blinked me back to the present by saying that Jonas was in town and staying with him and why didn’t I come down to visit them in The City.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m busy here. You know, work and all.”
“Come on, Le Doir, you can find some time for your old friends. Come down this weekend and I’ll cook us dinner, one of my ratatouille extraordinaires. We can hang out and catch up and you can tell us what prison was like and how you killed your wife.”
He was laughing again, that stupid hillbilly laugh. I let enough silence pass to inform Shaughn that I didn’t appreciate the remark. It seemed to turn him back to semi-sobriety and the business at hand.
“So what is it? Can you make it?”
“Let me look at my schedule and figure things out. I’ll call you Wednesday.”
“Sure,” Shaughn said. “I’ll tell Jonas, and we’re looking forward to it,” he said, ignoring my uncertainty, certain that I would come. That was Tim Shaughnessy to a T, whatever Shaughn wanted, he assumed was bound to be, and he’d lobby, weasel, and manipulate shamelessly to bring about whatever that was.
A minute later, I put the phone back in its cradle. The memories of Shaughn and the scenes we’d shared pinged around my brainpan: our youth in Sagrada. The Stones and the exploding toilet, followed by raids on model homes in new subdivisions, trying to steal a replacement commode; then fast-forwarding to Deerville after Shaughn got back from Europe, preceding Canada with Jonas, then Vancouver and that whole scene. I couldn’t find a mechanism to turn off the projector and the spools of tape and the images they contained kept piling up while I sat there on the couch wondering what to do about it. After a while, we said goodbye and I remained there for 15 minutes, staring at the phone, marveling over the fact that such mnemonic power hid within so banal seeming an instrument.
It was a Sunday, gardening day, and I spent the rest of the afternoon fussing with the roses and picking at imaginary weeds—anything to keep the memories at bay. But I couldn’t do that. They kept welling up in me and I didn’t know what to do with them. I wanted, in the worst possible way, to be done with all that and put it to rest. I had done the crime, done the time, and was almost done with my parole. But the punishment that I’d received for murder was nothing compared to this. Now I was remembering again, and remembering it was bringing it back to life…
It was so long ago that in my psychologically re-altered state and consequent reconstruction of history, the character that took part in it was, for all intents and purposes, Ram the pupa. There were many morphings that followed that event; many layers of skin grown and shed; many moltings of plumage donned and discarded.
It was more than a hundred and thirty seasons ago, in a town that I was raised in, although that too might also be debated. And though the question seemed harmless enough when Shaughnessy asked it, I found I couldn’t turn off the movie it summoned forth when I hung up and went out to the garden. It continued to race on through the spools and pile up on my memory floor like a twisted river whose origin and terminus were uncertain. Ghosts illuminated for a second or longer, whose existence I had long kept at bay, now began marching through and muttering lines to the camera, their voices insistent, yammering and congealing. And perhaps that is all they are, I thought: ghosts of a film that was largely forgotten but still remembered by the few of us still alive who were there; an afternoon’s cheap entertainment, a farce, sometimes humorous, sometimes melodramatic, sometimes a continuum as tedious as Samuel Beckett at his starkest and most severe. What do you mean, nothing means nothing? No, nothing is a universal truth as real as gravity. Nothing means something.
The toilet caper took place midway through the second reel. And though it was just a vignette, it did at least provide some laughter. The bodies of Jaime and Stew, tangled on the floor, amid the cracked toilet tank and gushing water; the model homes case-out starting the day afterward; the successful liberation of one and the escape out back through the sliding glass door, with Shaughn cradling the tank in his arms and all of us running for Earl’s mom’s Falcon station wagon, while the realtor came in through the front door with a prospective couple; the race back home to reinstall it before my mom got home from her committee trip. It was a pretty little picture, that episode. But that’s all it was, a vignette that signified nothing except in the larger metaphoric sense of what it symbolized.
Shaughnessy loved to tell that story, loved to remind me of it whenever he could and whenever it afforded the most embarrassing opportunity to do so. Like on those Tahoe weekends, with his stockbroker friends and the Aussie girls I brought along. I both hated and loved him for that now as I stood in the garden pruning roses, and it was both for the same reason. Now there was no stopping the memory, only maybe controlling it.
After working my garden for the rest of that day, I called Aragon at home and told him about my conversation with Shaughn and the invitation to come down to The City. He let me tell the whole of it, then asked me how lo
ng it’d been since I’d gotten out. I told him about two years. He said that was time enough; that I had to put my life back into some semblance of order but I’d never move forward until I come to terms with my past and faced it directly. I asked if he was advising me to go down to Shaughn’s, and he said this, “Ram, I can’t advise you to go, and I can’t advise you to not go, that’s a call that only you can make, and it’s entirely your decision, so think about it. But I want you also to think about this: it won’t be the last time that Tim O’Shaughnessy calls you.”
…so here I am driving southbound on Highway One, coming up on Marshall, driving a car that seems to drive itself, heading into the autumn air and the mists of West Marin that lead to God knows where.
I put a cassette into the recorder, and the music began to play, the spooky violin intro, then cellos, violins, and piano, then Richie Furay’s haunting tenor:
’In the hour of not quite rain
When the fog was fingertip high
The ground hung suspended
In a singular sky.’
…
It was dawn, dark and gray. At this time of year, and this far north, all of our days in Vancouver were gradients of gray: dawns were anthracite, midday was smoke, and afternoons the color of tarnished silver.
The fire from the Urpp party still burned, the embers glowing cherry red, flames shooting now and again through the long white grain of the oak splits, the shadows ghostlike on the living room wall facing the fireplace, so with the light of the fire and the light of dawn, the atmosphere inside Chateau Urpp was cave-like.
Jonas and Shaughn and Donnie and Ram and three other survivors sat in front of the fireplace, tending the logs and sipping tea, all but spent. A few bodies were scattered about the room, their sleep smell filling the living and dining rooms. The other two hundred guests had gone home during the course of the night.
“We wake Jimmy at eight-thirty.”
“I don’t know, Jonas. He looks finished if you ask me.”
“But did I ask you, Le Doir?”
I shrugged at Jonas and looked to Donnie who rolled his eyes then lit his cigarette with an ember.
Jonas staggered over to the couch, put his tequila sunrise down on the coffee table, and braced himself, leaning over Jimmy Pearl asleep on the couch and asking loudly.
“Are you part of the problem or are you a part of the solution?”
Jimmy blinked, and pushed Jonas aside. He rubbed his eyes, yawned, then spoke, “What, gentleman is the solution, if I presume to ask?”
Jonas smiled crazily; that paralyzed grin that characterized him whenever he had a few too many. He wasn’t expecting a reply from Jimmy; he was just a prop in Jonas’ act at the moment.
When I left Vancouver to go back to California and raise money for the arts center that Shaughn and Jonas and I, during those sleepless nights in Deerville, had planned to start in Vancouver, Jonas had just gotten a job at the Magic Theatre taking tickets. “I’m in the door,” he crowed. “That’s all that matters, wait and see, Le Doir, I’ll be on the boards by the time you get back.”
And he was, playing the juvenile lead in a high camp romp. The art center idea—the multimedia art center, as we called and envisioned it back in Deerville, a sort of expatriate Chautauqua of art and environmental communal activism; in short, the whole hipoisie vision of heaven on earth if you were twenty or so—Jonas had abandoned if not completely forgotten. When Walt Gabriels, another Deerville poet/expatriate who stayed on with Jonas after I left in July, saw the idea dissipating, he began making other plans, staying in Vancouver just long enough to see Jonas get on his feet, then driving north to Juneau, Alaska where he had a sister. Jonas told Walt he’d send him the money he owed him as soon as he had it.
“Gabriels couldn’t handle it,” was what Jonas told Shaughn and I when we came back up to Vancouver, our suitcases packed with drugs for sale, our wallets fat from smuggling. Jonas had his part in the farce, then in its sixth week, he had also been cast as Pan in the Queen E modern dress production of Midsummer Night’s Dream. Jonas rarely said so, but I could feel Jonas’s fear: he was destined for a career that was one juvenile lead after another. Sometimes, when I arrived backstage hours before the performance, I’d find Jonas experimenting with wigs and makeup. Jonas would ask my opinion. I would nod noncommittally.
“It’s this pug nose and the eyes. And that I’m blond. Maybe if I went gray?”
“You can do that with a bottle,” I offered.
“Nah, it’d look phony. Verisimilitude is what I’m after, Le Doir, verisimilitude.”
“What the hell, Jonas? You’re working.”
But Jonas and I both knew this wasn’t enough. Jonas aimed higher. He wanted to be James Dean or Marlon Brando, or, better still, Paul Newman. Unable to be seen as such because he lacked the discipline to achieve it, he did what he felt was the next best thing: he lived it. “Give it time; do the work,” I would counsel him.
But Jonas was impatient for it to happen, and such advice that I offered was often met by a sneer and the reply. “What do you know? What are you doing?”
I could have answered, but it was futile for me to do so, for Jonas, by the mere fact of his working and the fact that I was staying with him now—the direct opposite of how it had been in Deerville—meant that Jonas had the whip hand, and for reasons unknown, felt compelled to use it. “Forget it, Ram. He’s not himself; it’s the play,” Donnie would say after one of Jonas’s verbal assaults. But I felt it was more than the play, it was something within Jonas Allen himself. When others were around, or he and Shaughn were out, Jonas played the charmer, or the fool; then his sarcasm was self-mocking with the exception of a few subtle, yet pointed remarks reserved for those who he knew couldn’t read between his lines.
Jonas took the Buffalo Springfield album off and cranked up the stereo for one brief MC5 screech. “I give you a testimonial. I want you to testify… Jimmy Pearl!” He whirled away to strut his Jimmy strut across the living room, picked up another oak split and tossed it crashing into the fireplace, sending sparks and bringing moans from the sleeping revelers. He turned back on Jimmy, shaking his index finger, while his other hand, fingers outspread, palm pumping like a preacher calling for calm. “I can’t… Help myself!… Praise God!”
Jimmy pushed himself upright. He pulled a hand across his leonine face.
“No, Jonas, my legs are all the testimony I need. I’m in pain. Too much dancing for this old nigger. Ram baby, is you still alive?”
“Yeah, Jimmy. Still here.”
“What you got for pain?”
“Just what we had already.”
“No, no more acid for this nigger.”
“Why not?” Jonas asked.
Shaughn thought this was hilarious and repeated the question again and again as though it were a prayer, laughing his hillbilly hyeh-hyeh-hyeh.
“Shoot. You all dropped again, am I right?”
Jonas nodded solemnly, “Yes, my son. We are reborn! We are… ReLysurgeisized!”
“You white boys are crazy. Where’s a cigarette? Somebody, give me a smoke.”
Jimmy got up to search, almost tripping over one of the sleepers near the couch. “Looks like a war happen in here. Who are all these people? Him, he’s cute… Fucking crazy white boys, acid all night long and acid in the morning. Ram baby, gimme a cigarette.”
I tossed Jimmy a Players, picked my way through the bodies and cushions to the stereo, and put on Rod Stewart—“North winds have made my face a little older, and my back is bent through trying too hard,” groaned Rod. I opened up the shades looking down at the ice mist covering the inlet and inner city. Water dripping from the hemlock trees played on the patio… Bing, ting, bing… ta ding ding, ba bing…
It’ll be gray all day, I thought, gray and wet and bone-cold, and slick and slippery on the road when I go out for smokes and a pizza. The cats won’t even come out in this. There’ll be no sound except the hish of tires in the rain and the pin
g of the water on the concrete. I wished at that moment that I hadn’t taken the acid, wished that everybody would leave, and leave me to sit by the picture window watching the cityscape run through its spectrums of gray, reflecting on the silence till afternoon, when fatigue would overtake me and I’d fall asleep in the chair. I had two days left in Vancouver before I went to the border to be heard by immigration and I needed quiet.
…I felt the acceleration in the pit of my stomach when the gears shifted. The whine would build to the breaking point and just before it snapped, Shaughn would shift upward, the power surge throwing me back against the seat. When he downshifted at the hairpins, the deceleration abrupt and the tires chattering, the snowy hillside of firs and hemlocks whirled around the car. It was as though we were in the core of a vortex whose poles were ever-shifting.
It was still too early in the season for skiers, and at 8:30, ours was the only car on the Mount Seymour highway. I first declined to make the trip, but Shaughn and Jonas prevailed upon me and I felt that since I’d soon be leaving, hopefully for only two weeks to spend Christmas holidays in California, perhaps it might provide an opportunity to work things out between us.
Up at the summit, I walked across the parking lot, icy from last night’s snow, wrapped my coat and a blanket around me and sat on the stone bench at the overlook. Burrard Inlet was still invisible. But the spires of the Lions Gate Bridge pierced through it, and under the fog blanket, one ship’s horn signaled to another. On this side of Stanley Park, the gray columns of the highrises were outlined against the winter sky, and you could hear, or at least feel, the ambient buzz from the morning traffic in downtown Vancouver five miles away.
“Ah, Le Doir. Lost in a dream?” asked Jonas.
“Something like that. I’m just fixing this place in my mind.”
“Are you all right?”
Windwhistle Bone Page 54
