If Rock and Roll Were a Machine

by Terry Davis

  Bert lay in the dark on his grandmother’s sofa and considered his grandfather’s absence from the world. Gramp hadn’t been Gramp for a long time. But now he was nothing. He wasn’t in the world anymore. Maybe he was somewhere. He was in Bert’s memory for sure and forever. But he was not in the world. It didn’t make Bert sad exactly. It was more amazing than sad. Bert had loved this man. Bert had kissed him on the lips, received his whisker burns, they had smoked his pipe together. How could he disappear from the world? And yet he had.

  Bert stayed with Gram the next day. He asked if he could rearrange Gramp’s workshop a little, and she said okay. The first thing he did was to make a fire in the stove, then bring out her old coffeepot, make some coffee, and keep his cup—a ceramic cup—warm on the stovetop. He moved boards and tools into the garage. He vacuumed and then he washed the floor and walls with hot, soapy water. From the rafters of the garage he brought down Gramp’s old army-surplus cot and set it up in one corner. He slept on it that night. The next day he went home at lunch and packed the stuff he needed from his room. He slept warmer that night under his comforter.

  The following day, after Gramp’s funeral, Bert asked his mom if she minded him staying at Gram’s for a while. She said Gram didn’t have room, and Bert replied that he’d fixed up the workshop a little.

  Jean Bowden looked at her son as though he were someone she’d known a long time ago, someone for whom she’d had great affection but could no longer quite recognize. “Of course you can, Bert,” she said. “Of course you can stay with your grandmother.”

  Chapter 20

  Not a Harley Guy

  If it hadn’t been such a beautiful morning, Bert might not have parted with the Sportster. It had been cold and clear and still, an appropriate setting in which to part from delusion. Bert had known for a long time he wasn’t a Harley guy. He wished he were the kind of guy who fit on such a machine—a guy like Camille Shepard—but he wasn’t and he never would be. Bert didn’t believe he was nothing, as his father thought. He wasn’t much, but he wasn’t nothing. He was honest. He knew what he was, and he was honest enough not to lie to himself about it.

  But maybe it hadn’t been the beauty of the morning that made him do it. Maybe it had been the night before when Camille caught eleven passes and scored three TDs to lead Thompson’s 27–26 thumping of Gonzaga Prep, undefeated and ranked first in the state until this final game of the season. Maybe Bert just couldn’t stand that he wasn’t a guy like Camille Shepard and so he couldn’t stand owning and riding around on a machine that showed the world so conspicuously he wished he were. Camille had had Coach Heslin cut off his ponytail with a pair of tape scissors in the second quarter because he couldn’t get the refs to keep number 22 on the defense from pulling it. Bert’s imagination could not compete with such real-world studliness.

  “You don’t have to be tough to be a Harley guy, Bert,” Scotty said after work. “You don’t have to pretend to be tough. You just have to like riding a Harley.

  “Maybe you’re a Triumph guy,” he said. “Or a BSA guy. I wouldn’t be surprised if you turned out to be a Norton guy. We’ll get as many dollars as we can out of the Sportster, then we’ll keep our eyes peeled for a new ride for you.”

  Bert brought sweats with him so he could run home, and he was bundled up good when he walked out of the bathroom to where Scotty and Dave were sitting by the stove. Rita had arrived while Bert was dressing. Scotty’s workout bag sat by his chair. The racquetball gloves fastened around the straps always made Bert think of the pelts of little animals. Scotty and Rita were headed for a workout.

  Scotty had been after Bert to try playing racquetball. He said it was a great sport for gimpy old farts like him and solitary guys like Bert. Rita directed the aerobics program at the club where Scotty played. She said Bert would like it there. Bert told them he was thinking about it. And he was.

  His sweats were soaked by the time he chugged through Gram’s gate. He ate in the wet clothes, then walked out to his room, popped in a tape, built a fire, and sat down at the keyboard to cut the Camille Shepard profile. Through his headset Bert listened to his standard inspirational tunes by Bob Seger, Bruce Springsteen, Eric Clapton, George Thorogood, ZZ Top, The Fabulous Thunderbirds, and the Jeff Healey Band, along with tunes by Bob Dylan and Bonnie Raitt whose music Scotty had introduced him to. Listening to rock and roll was like riding a motorcycle. It vibrated through you that same way, and it shut out the world—all the parts of the world you didn’t want to let in.

  Bert listened to tunes and cut the article until he had it down to eight pages.

  Darby printed it without changing a word.

  Chapter 21

  The Second Best Thing

  Tanneran has told Bert he can be a writer. Bert wants to be somebody, and writing might be a way to do it. He loves to read, and he likes to write, but he’s never thought about being a writer. The idea of creating for others the pleasure he finds in books is appealing, all right. But it’s also incomprehensible. What does Bert Bowden know that someone else would want to hear? And yet, because a man he trusts says he can do it, and because he so badly wants to do something, Bert entertains the notion.

  Bert’s greatest dream and secret desire is to be an athlete. But Bert is not a stupid guy. The world has shown him that this isn’t going to happen. So what can he do? He can do the second best thing.

  Bert withdraws his last essay from his folder and reads Tanneran’s note for the zillionth time:

  Bert, I was so engaged by “Peckered” that half the songs on my Dylan Slow Train Comin’ tape played through while I was reading and I didn’t hear a word or a note. I love that tape, so your making me deaf to it is high praise.

  You’re a funny guy, Bert. Smart and funny. These qualities come through in your prose. In class, however, you’re one of the living dead, and I want you to come alive.

  You have a style. A developed style is unusual for a sixteen-year-old kid, and this is what I want to talk to you about.

  I think you can be a writer, Bert.

  What do I mean by writer? What I mean is a professional story writer—somebody who sees so deeply and clearly into human life and then writes with such precision, insight, compassion, and imagination about it that the world gives him or her a reward. The reward might not be money; it might be respect. But because there is value, there is also reward.

  I know: You’re thinking that you’re just a kid. True. But consider this: S. E. Hinton wrote The Outsiders when she was sixteen; Françoise Sagan wrote Bonjour Tristesse when she was eighteen, and Stephen King was writing when he was in high school and sold his first stories when he was in college.

  Better yet, consider this: You know kids playing sports at Thompson who in five years, with any luck at all, will be playing professionally. They will be rewarded for doing a thing they love. It’s true that all the writers in the world who make as much as pro athletes could get together in the teachers’ lunchroom and there’d still be chairs left for the entire Thompson band. But money isn’t the point. The point is doing the thing you love to do. And for a writer the point is also having the honor of taking part in a tradition that’s as old as human life on earth. Back when people wore animal hides the tribal storytellers were honored with the place closest to the fire. Now they get the place closest to Oprah Winfrey.

  That’s a joke. It’s after one A.M. You keep me up late, Bert, and you make me forget that Dylan’s on the box. You must be a good writer!

  The reason I bring up the kids with chances to become professional athletes isn’t that they’re models for making lots of dough. It’s because they’re models for starting early to be what they want to be. These kids—and also some actors, musicians, dancers, graphic artists, and auto mechanics—are preparing right now for the thing they want to make happen in five years. They’re starting to make it happen now.

  If you want to be a writer, Bert, you can start now.

  I’m not suggesting you sign a blood
oath in your diary or make a pilgrimage to the Hemingway gun collection down in Ketcham or take up smoking and drinking too much coffee or wearing a cape or any other crazed artsy-fartsy shit.

  Being good at anything is real hard, and if we want to be good at something as complex and comprehensive as writing stories we need to realize it’s going to take a long time, and we’ve got to get in gear.

  You might think you need a “gift” to be a writer, Bert. Well, don’t think so, because it isn’t true. Writing, like most difficult things in life, takes more guts than brains. It takes “desire”—you’ve got to want to do it—and then out of your desire comes “tenacity,” the ability to hold on.

  The greatest gift a person can have is desire, Bert, and I know you have it. If you want to focus your desire on writing, let’s get together and outline a course of action.

  Tanneran

  Tanneran was right—Bert knew it. He had desire. That was something Lawler hadn’t taken from him. Bert also knew, however, that so far in his life his desire hadn’t brought about any achievement.

  Tanneran’s advice was that Bert spend his time and energy learning about writing so that when a story called to him from his life and when he was sure he wanted to answer it and sit down for all those hours, he’d have the skills to write it. You develop those skills, Tanneran said, from line-by-line reading of the best writing you can find, then trying to write your own stories like the masters.

  Tanneran told Bert to be thankful for the pain in his life, not resentful, because out of that pain would come knowledge. He told Bert that most important of all was to be patient, because it would be a long haul.

  He gave Bert a list of books: Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich, The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, A Childhood: The Biography of a Place by Harry Crews, and The World According to Garp by John Irving. The only one Bert had heard of was Garp because he’d seen the movie. Tanneran said to read through them once for the story, then to study them.

  Bert is beginning the study phase tonight. He’s starting with Love Medicine. It was the first one he read, but some of the stuff in it stayed with him even while he was reading the others, which were also great. His goal is to discover how Erdrich captured him away from the real world and brought him into her imagined one.

  Bert’s favorite characters are Lipsha Morrisey and Howard Kashpaw, who is also called King Junior. Lipsha is sort of lost until he discovers who his father is. He and his dad only get to spend a little time together, but they like each other, and Bert could tell that’s what turns Lipsha around.

  Howard Kashpaw is a younger kid whose dad, King, is a massive asshole. Howard has always thought of himself as King Junior until one day at school his teacher is calling roll and she reads off his whole name, King Howard Kashpaw Junior, and asks which of these names he’d like to be called. He never realized he had a choice. He chooses Howard. Then another day the class is cutting out paper hearts for Valentine’s Day. They write their names in the heart with black Magic Marker. When Howard sees his heart up on the board with his name on it he has a kind of spiritual experience. Bert wrote the word “epiphany” in the margin. He learned it in Tanneran’s class. It means a sudden manifestation of the essence or meaning of something. What is manifest to Howard is the knowledge that he’s himself and not his dad. And this knowledge sets him free to be himself.

  Bert wishes Louise Erdrich would write another book about Howard so he could find out if he maintains that independence as he gets older. Even if your dad’s an asshole, it’s awful tough to keep from wanting him to like you.

  Chapter 22

  Bert Joins the Club

  Bert pedals hard on the stationary bike. The music blasting up from the aerobics room vibrates through the walls, the floor, the bike, the air, and into Bert. The sensation is like riding a motorcycle. The beat of the music pulses like pistons, and the sexual effluvium emanates from the aerobicizing bodies like oil burning on a hot engine. An erotic quality fills the air and clings like a preorgasmic secretion.

  Bert has tried aerobics. He has been down on the floor among those bodies. But he can’t endure it. Neither can he turn away completely. So he rides the stationary bike at the railing above the aerobics room, loses himself in music and fantasy, and pretends not to look down.

  Some of the women wear tight black sports bras and nothing else over their knee-length shorts. Even harder to endure than the black bras over naked belly buttons, though, is another kind of leotard some of them wear. These cover more of their upper bodies, but they taper down to a tiny string of fabric that runs between the women’s legs and bisects their butts into pairs of hard, sweet, dancing, neon ham-buns.

  It’s those tiny strings that did Bert in. They focused his attention, then they wrapped around it and squeezed. And he could not endure the beauty and the sensuality. Bert wanted to be one of those strings of fabric rubbed to a musky tatter in that dark swamp of swirling stars.

  Bert’s enthusiasm for the club is running out at the same pace as the two-week membership Scotty and Rita gave him for Christmas. His stomach is sore from the abdominal machine, his thighs and butt are sore from the StairMaster, his powers of fantasy are travel-weary from so many trips to Bowdenland with various of the aerobics women and all of the aerobics girls. And the thin ego he brought to the club has been pounded flat as the red lines on the racquetball courts by everyone he played with.

  Bert has been demolished by a woman his mother’s age, a man older than his grandmother who is right-handed but played lefty, a fat college girl, and a junior-high boy.

  In spite of not being good at the game, however, Bert gets a feeling of satisfaction out of hitting that little blue ball. He just wishes he could hit the goddamned thing where he wants to.

  Bert’s dad will give him a membership to the club if he wants one. What Berts wants is to fit in at the club. But membership doesn’t assure that. Nothing assures that. Bert knows that fitting in takes time, particularly in a setting where physical beauty, power, and skill are the dues for true membership. He knows he doesn’t have what it takes to pay in that currency. And he knows that neither his father nor anyone else can give it to him.

  Bert’s mom has offered to buy him some workout clothes, but he’s asked her to wait till he decides if he’s going to join. The truth is that Bert would love some new clothes for the club, but he’d be embarrassed to wear them. What he would love even more, however—and what neither his mother nor anyone else can give him—is the body to wear that stuff. He likes the bright colors, particularly in the tank tops. But if a guy’s going to expose that much flesh, it should be toned flesh, and Bert’s flesh is not toned. Bert’s flesh makes him think of pasta. He’s a five-foot-nine-inch chunk of Bertolini cooked too long.

  Bert’s legs are okay. He might be able to get by in a pair of the skintight, knee-length shorts that both guys and girls wear. But he really can’t see himself styled out like that. The image just won’t form itself in his head.

  The bike beeps to signal Bert that his twenty minutes are up. He keeps his eyes closed as he climbs off, and he doesn’t open them until he has turned and can no longer see through the railing down into the aerobics room. He looks down into the racquetball courts and sees they’re all filled. He won’t be practicing racquetball this evening.

  After Bert showers he stops at the desk to drop his towel in the bag and pick up his keys. On the counter he sees that the sign-up sheets for winter racquetball leagues are out. They can’t have been out long because there’s only one name. Bert bends to the B sheet.

  For a second the sound is turned off in Bert’s head. There is only the pulsing clarity of this name printed in blue ink: GARY LAWLER.

  Bert walks back through the glass doors into the workout area and the sound comes on in his head again. There are many sounds here: the thin swoosh of the stationary bike pedals, the clank of the plates in the weight machines, the whir of the chains that drive the StairMasters, the aluminum whisper of the seat
s sliding back and forth on the rowing machines, the music rising up from the aerobics classes.

  But Bert doesn’t hear these sounds. What Bert hears are the sounds created when racquets make contact with racquet balls, and then the subsequent sounds of those little blue balls contacting walls. He walks along the rail looking down into each court. And then he sees a short, dark guy hitting by himself. That’s him, all right. Gary Lawler, Bert’s old teacher. He hasn’t changed. He looks in great shape. The asshole sonofabitch.

  Chapter 23

  Bert Bashes His Head

  Scotty returned from the classic bike show in Phoenix just in time to scratch Bert’s name off the B league list and write him in on C. This saved Bert the embarrassment of playing men and women against whom he might not have scored a single point, and it saved those B players the wasted time of playing someone who wasn’t experienced enough to give them a game.

  Scotty’s first thought had been to put Bert in with the novices where he belonged. But he figured the kid would ask for help and that he’d have him playing good C racquetball after a couple sessions on the court, so C is where he put him. He told Bert what he’d done the next evening in the locker room when he saw him ripping the clear plastic off the handle of a two-hundred-dollar racquet.

  Bert looked up, and for the first time Scotty saw in his face the boy Donald Bowden might have been referring to when he said a kid like Bert. “I knew you wouldn’t have any fun in B,” Scotty said.

  “Thanks,” Bert replied. “I guess I got carried away.”

  “I think C’ll be plenty of challenge for you,” Scotty said.

  Bert handed Scotty the racquet he’d borrowed. “Thanks very much for lending me this,” he said.

  * * *

  League racquetball started the first week in January, and it didn’t take many matches for Bert to realize Scotty had been right. Bert wouldn’t have had any fun in B. He wasn’t having any fun in C. He would have to score no points at all to get beat worse than he was getting beat by the C players. It was humiliating.