The Metaphysical Ukulele

by Sean Carswell

  Short stories which are alive and well, despite the cynics’ moans.

  The simplicity of pop songs is elusive, though. It uses language in ways Pam may be beyond, or may be too distant to access. Language, for Pam, always fails to mean. The exact opposite is the prerequisite for a pop song. So Pam borrows one. She serenades her hitchhiking ghost with a tender rendition of “Into the Mystic.”

  Faint traces of the song drift up to Vivian and me, who stay warm in the car.

  When Pam climbs back into the Civic, she smiles like a woman who has never seen a bad day in her life.

  The Incognito Players

  There are people we fear, people we dream, people whose exiles we become and never learn it until, sometimes, too late.

  Kristiani had imagined that, upon leaving graduate school, she might somehow abandon her obsessions with the author Thomas Pynchon. She fled the long linoleum halls and elm-strewn sidewalks and cafés with communal copies of Foucault’s books that served more as signifiers of status than reading materials, as props to gaze into both quizzically and knowingly. With it, she’d hoped to also flee the use of Brennschluss in metaphors that, should they actually be overheard by a rocket scientist who knew what Brennschluss was, would cause him to wince and avert his gaze as if he’d stumbled upon a scene of spontaneous incontinence. Never again, Kristiani told herself, would she giggle as a drunken classmate warned all within earshot to “Fickt nicht mit der Raketemensch!”

  It was not until she finally saw the man she believed to be Thomas Pynchon that she understood why it had been necessary to journey here and why, through the process of learning jazz and Dixieland non-standards with obscure seventh notes, her ukulele style had become the atonement for hermeneutic sins.

  Kristiani first suspected the tall, gentle Tom of being Pynchon mid-conversation, or mid-argument, really, during a break between sets. She’d stolen off to the barista to order a hot tea. Tom, waiting in line behind her, asked, “No coffee?”

  “I don’t drink it. I’m more of a tea person.” The words escaped her mouth before she had time to contemplate the possibilities of tea woven into the meshwork of her identity: I’m a tea person. Had such a thought ever occurred to her?

  “It’s not a little disgusting?” Tom asked. “Half-rotted leaves, scalded with boiling water and then left to lie and soak and bloat?”

  Kristiani heard the line as others hear lyrics folded into a conversation. Surely Tom was quoting Mason & Dixon. She hadn’t memorized the next line so much as recognized her cue and sought faithfulness in theme if not exact phrasing. “There’s something too Catholic about coffee,” she said. “Only the first cup out of any pot is good. The rest slowly grows embittered. To drink it is to pay penance for that first sacramental sip.”

  “Too Catholic?” Tom, shaking his head bemused. “And what is that tea good for? Curing hides?”

  For the next three weeks, Kristiani struggled to shake the conversation and its role as, if not indisputable evidence at least an extremely compelling suggestion that Tom was actually the man the world knew as Thomas and more so by his last name. Pynchon, never really a recluse so much as a man who avoided cameras, could very well be among this group of Upper West Siders who joined Kristiani to play jazz and Dixieland non-standards in Café Pick Me Up, an Alphabet City coffeehouse where they were delighted to find warm and caffeinated beverages for sale at less than ten dollars a serving. When Tom, upon learning Kristiani’s last name was do Spirito Santo, gifted her a San Diego Padres cap despite previous conversations that clearly identified her as a Mets fan because, as Tom said, “We need to complete the trinity,” the joke was so forced and corny and obscure that the suggestive became the convincing. The Padres and Kristiani do Spirito Santo. Who else could open a door to a world in which that passes for humor? Who else could catalyze such esoteric paranoia?

  Kristiani embarked on the journey to learn the history behind this mild-mannered Tom who seemed to be so much more than another Upper West Side septuagenarian in her ukulele club. If her throbbing tattoo of a muted horn meant anything, then all signs were pointing to the notion that Tom may very well be the elusive man behind what were, in Kristiani’s estimation, the greatest novels ever written.

  Back at the beginning of this episode, sitting on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum with her phone fading into sleep mode and hiding the message that her girlfriend, Bambina Omnipatri, wouldn’t be off work and out to meet her for another half hour, shadows casting the long specter of early evening all the way down to the police SUV parked in front of the hot dog cart on 5th Avenue, the last tired tourists posing for their final photos in front of banners advertising the art of Venice and the Islamic world stretching back into the Middle Ages, Kristiani embarked on an idle engagement with time that began a journey without a step. Her ukulele sat encased at her feet. On this platform where spectacle, commerce, and art drip, splatter, and spray like paint on a Pollack canvas, Kristiani tenderly lifted her uke out of its case and cradled it. One song wouldn’t interrupt the bustle.

  As a warm up, she strummed through a circle of fifths and into a Tin Pan Alley standard. As those in the immediate vicinity seemed more engrossed in their Metropolitan Museum of Art gift shop bags or Lonely Planet guides to affordable Upper East Side eateries or just thumbs grazing over smart phone screens, Kristiani saw no harm in singing when the song came around to it. She closed her eyes to join the song in solitude in this anything-but-solitary place.

  She opened them to find a few dollars in her ukulele case. A crowd had gathered. Kristiani snapped the case shut with an apologetic, “I’m not busking” for the smattering of people staring at her, briefly entertained using the tube of lipstick Bambina had left in her purse to make a sign that expressed that simple point, but ultimately decided against it when she struggled with the spelling of busking in her mind. Somewhere, she was half-convinced, a “q” and a “u” should nestle into the word.

  Midway through her fourth song, a snappy jazz arrangement thick with diminished and seventh chords, a gentleman, out of place in most of the world but comfortably situated in this neighborhood with his tweed blazer, tan vest, and russet slacks pinned between a silk bow-tie and a pair of Italian leather roach killers that suggested his whole ensemble set him back about the cost of a Korean compact car, edged his way to the front with a hundred dollar bill in hand and inquisitive eyes seeking hat or case to drop the money into. Kristiani met his glance and shook her head.

  Later, in a nearby café where patrons snapped at servers who hid their submission in timely quips, among plates full of mac and cheese and spaghetti and meatballs that attempted to carry the adjective “gourmet” without irony, the gentleman introduced himself as Flatfoot Floy, band leader of the Incognito Players, a ukulele group who invaded the Café Pick Me Up in Alphabet City during the hours when Wednesdays drifted into Thursdays and performed only obscure and intricate songs on instruments that were rivaled by kazoos for their absurdity. “We’d like you to audition,” he said.

  Kristiani let her mind drift back to the accumulating texts from Bambina, hoping the endless museum meetings wouldn’t kill her sex drive.

  Before long the café filled with an early dinner crowd. Flatfoot and Kristiani sat among the aftermath of their snacks: congealing, gouda-crusted noodles here, chicken skin wrapped in waffle crumbs there. Flatfoot had assembled a whole gang of septuagenarian ukulelists. Jelly Morgan-Gould, with her sharp German features striking out from the shadows of her cloche, leaned in to cast a Marlene-Deitrich glance. “Of course, you know who we are?” she said, the lilt in her voice so subtle that maybe only half a question mark could hang at the end of the statement.

  Kristiani knew. The Incognito Players were the stuff of legend around the East Village when they invaded Tompkins Square in their hired cars. This was no senior center ukulele group all strumming “My Blue Heaven” in incongruous tempos, no aging-hipster orchestra adapting vacuous pop songs into ironic indie rock arrangements. The In
cognito Players took this shit seriously. Their instruments, hand-crafted from sustainable hardwoods by luthiers who made only a dozen instruments annually for people whose incomes were like yen-to-dollar conversions for the common folk—a hundred twenty-five dollars for them was the equivalent of one for Kristiani. They dropped their five grand on these custom ukuleles with same nonchalance Kristiani used to acquire a forty-dollar pink plastic jobber with a sticker of a hibiscus and fishing line for strings so her niece could learn to play.

  The Incognito Players songs were as meticulous as their instruments. Most chords required four fingers on the left hand to play. Free flowing jazz improvisations came from years of learning where fingers should and could flow freely. No covers. All originals. And no talk of making the quintet a sextet. There were five players. And so, it seemed, there always would be.

  If Kristiani was reading this right, there might be a sixth.

  Praetoria Splorf, daughter of a the famed Broadway chanteuse Pretty Splorf who had ego enough to become the namesake of her progeny but too much ego to share the “Pretty” nickname, dooming young Praeti to a hard “a” in the first syllable, or worse, to a lifetime of abbreviations to Splorf, smiled to soften the barbs of Jelly’s statements. “You’ll do fine kid. Let’s just hear what you got.”

  “Shouldn’t I wait for the other two players?” Kristiani asked.

  “Tom’s holed up tonight,” Flatfoot explained.

  “He’s always a little hesitant to meet new people,” Praeti added.

  As for the other player, the Spaniard Remedios de las Cosas Pequeñas, whom Tom always called Dios though the others stuck with Remmy, he shuffled into the café aflutter under a fedora at that exact moment. And Kristiani, never shy about uking in public, sought to fill the din of the evening diners with a love song bastardized from the Romantic Ballads Fake Book by Hardt and Negri. Starting with a diminished chord to bring the unexpected and seguing to major chords played down the neck, Kristiani sang:

  I’m just a kook with uke

  Just a girl with a toy

  It’s too round to be phallic

  Too tiny for a boy

  Oh what is it about

  That little Madeiran machete

  That makes my knees so wobbly

  And the pads of my fingers sweat?

  So Mister keep your gui-tar

  Sister keep your violin

  I’m playing my oo koo lay lay

  Like a vibratin’ carnal sin

  There’s no blues in my Jacuzzi

  It’s rock’n’roll in the shower head

  For a kook with yook

  A lay lay

  For a girl straight out of bed.

  Flatfoot erupted into applause, screaming, “One more time! Now everybody!” Jelly lifted her cloche and wiped the soft beads of sweat assembled on her brow. Remmy set a napkin on his lap, more like pitching camp than preparing for a meal. Praeti stated the obvious. “My, how clitoral.” Fanning herself with a take-out menu to underscore the point.

  Kristiani was in.

  She caressed her ukulele along the curve adjacent to the sound hole. Idly, she toyed with the notion of another song in this crowded diner, but a real entertainer knows when to take a bow and step off the stage. She tucked in her little instrument and noticed, glowing in her purse next to the ukulele case, a text from Bambina. It read, “Im stuck here. don’t wait up. norwegian expressionism makes me want to scream.” Kristiani had time to linger with the Players. They ordered a round of beer or wine, accompanied by the old familiar arguments of grape versus grain, and a bowl of pistachios to work as mediator when no cheese or bread could accompany all the tastes. Kristiani asked, “How did you all meet?”

  Furtive glances ricocheted under the canopy of Flatfoot’s exhausted “Aauuhhgghh!”

  Canada, 1968. Just before dawn. Fog rolled in from Burrard Inlet like a gray amniotic fluid to cradle a small city in the last hours of slumber. There were Tom and the apprentice witch Jelly nestled around a newspaper fire in a hibachi on Jelly’s Vancouver front porch. She was wrapped up in a robe so thick and fluffy that it could be mistaken by casual eyes for a fur coat. The matching toque made her look more like a Depression-era movie starlet than an aspiring witch. Tom wondered where his images of witches came from to begin with and cursed himself for letting illustrations in Grimm’s fairy tales censored for upper crust Long Island boys and Disney movie posters craft his sense of a witch. A long forgotten direct male descendent of Tom’s had been a member of the church during the whole Salem hullaballoo. Legend had it that Tom’s greatn-grandfather William had busted witches and doled out death sentences. A little digging into the issue found just the opposite. William was no follower of Cotton Mather. In fact, in his own unpopular tract, William had called shenanigans on the whole witch affair, but cool reason combined with middling wordsmithing has never been much of a match for fear, hysteria, and a little gratuitous groping of adolescent Puritan breasts, so so many Goody Weatheralls were put down and history, if it remembered William at all, forgot to mention which side he was on. So much for those old WASP legacies.

  Anyway, this particular witch had weed. Jelly lit a joint from the flame of her newspaper fire and, after taking a turn, passed it Tom’s way. The smoke of the inhale dissipated in Tom’s lungs and blood just as the smoke from his exhale became part of the Vancouver fog. Before all thoughts scrambled, Tom mentioned, “This is great stuff. I could sell pounds of it to my co-workers at Boeing.”

  Which set Jelly rolling, making calls, arranging rendezvous, or, since it was more than one, perhaps rendezvi, even getting her friend Praeti’s balloon into the mix. The Mounties had been on Jelly’s ass ever since so many acres of cannabis plants were discovered in an apple orchard tied to one of her parents investment interests, an orchard in which Jelly had been seen practicing and promulgating her almost preternaturally green thumb. Since the pot’s disappearance, Jelly had been seeing red coats and flat-brimmed Stetsons like acid trails in her periphery. Now that she felt she could unload a tidy share of it just a hop and a skip across the old Puget Sound to the offices of Seattle engineers whose dedication to fostering advanced warfare made them beyond reproach, it was time for her to shake Marvy’s Mounties off her ass.

  Tom and Jelly met Praeti on the farthest reaches of the Capilano Country Club, just beyond the intersection of Southboro and Kenwood, the only place flat and, thanks to recent downpours flooding the course, empty enough to get a balloon weighted with four hippies and their weight-equivalent in sticky buds airborne. Praeti arranged her luggage into piles of ballast bags filled with sand and ready to be jettisoned during flight and empty tote bags—long since fashionable—to be filled with bushels of marijuana once the mysterious Spanish runner dropped the weed off. The waterlogged golf course with all its new and spontaneous water traps provided a moment’s safety. The three makeshift drug runners could feel the moment passing. Nothing was safe with Marvy’s Mounties nashing about downtown, tormenting every creature looking to get high, not just hippies connected with Jelly but seabirds and hang gliders flocked away from them. Even the sky train looked for places to become a subway. The morning fog presaged doom.

  A young boy on a red Schwinn three speed no doubt delivered to him through the last available airborne methods, mail coming from a Sears catalog, with a front wicker basket large enough to smuggle a St. Bernard rang his bell to call attention to Praeti, Jelly, and Tom. Though he could have mumbled the words and still hooked these three stoned counterculture refugees, he sang to them, “Pies for sale. Custard pies for sale.”

  Praeti and Jelly dug through purses and bought pies despite Tom’s warnings that custard pies carry their own weight. “They’re like Chekhov’s gun,” Tom said. “Once a custard pie is introduced into a story, someone’s going to get it to the face.”

  This may have been too hasty of a warning. Praeti and Jelly were already digging out handfuls of pie and licking fingers clean. Tom, who wanted a great story perhaps more
than pie, asked the kid if he had three more. The kid opened the basket to reveal a space inside exponentially larger than the space outside. Tom remembered the Spanish drug runner and bought a fourth. As if this fourth pie were a spell unleashing havoc, the Spanish drug runner, none other than the aforementioned Remedios de las Cosas Pequeñas came charging up Southborough Drive on a unicycle. He had a Santa-Claus sized sack slung over his shoulder and a kazoo in his mouth. He blew out a warning like a foghorn. Praeti stashed her pie and readied the empty tote bags. As soon as Remmy arrived, they stashed the weed, already bound in neatly wrapped pounds, into the bags. The labor went more quickly when they noticed a fifth refugee, stranger to them all but soon enough known as Flatfoot Floy, had long since joined in, filling bags and passing them to Tom, who stacked tidy bundles in the balloon’s gondola.

  Once the ballasts were filled and even the unicycle and custard pies were neatly stashed, Praeti, Jelly, Remmy, and Tom hopped in the gondola. Tom gave Praeti a light from his Zippo to get the burner going just as a gang of Mounties emerged from the green of the 13th hole. All shadows were being thrown downhill from the morning sun. Wind blew from the north, a bit of serendipity. Praeti turned up the flame until it shot sideways and, with a steady roar, opened the silk bag. Mounties grew larger in their approach. Tom watched them through the wiggly heat waves. Flatfoot earned his nickname by staying rooted to the rough of the 14th hole. His fear of jail wrestled and lost with his fear of heights, so he rejected all offers for the getaway hot air balloon in favor of the slim hopes that he could bounce off a bystander alibi. Slowly, the balloon began to expand. “Remember me,” Flatfoot called above the rumbling burner. The balloon rose a little off the ground and caught the wind the way ancient Hawaiians once caught the shore break at Waikiki. The Mounties zeroed in on the balloon, grabbing hold of the gondola all around its gunwales. The bag wasn’t all the way up, but they did gather speed, dragging Mounties as fast as their feet could move all the way across the first water hazard, where they stumbled and sloshed and piled upon each other with little option left beyond arresting Flatfoot as a consolation.