Boarded Windows

by Dylan Hicks

  “Some of them I get for free at the store,” I said.

  “Well, you can get matches for free, but that doesn’t mean you should use them to burn your house down.”

  “Kind of an over-the-top analogy,” Wanda said.

  “I used to have a tape of this album,” Wade said. He was cutting the pizza with a pair of scissors. “Listen to that bass.” He hummed along with a few bars, conducting a bit with the scissors—or, not so much conducting as describing a finchlike flight pattern.

  “A genius,” I said.

  “I sold to Jaco one time,” he said.

  “Really?”

  “Just once, down in Atlanta. We walked together for a block or two. The whole time he held a catalpa leaf in front of his face to avoid recognition.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  “That was Jaco,” Wade said. He brought the pizza to the table and sat between Wanda and me with his back to the kitchen. “Yeah, this album sounds exactly like the drive from Enswell to Grand Forks, but not at all like the drive from Grand Forks to Enswell. In fact clashes with the ride home. Dissonant where it doesn’t want to be. I’ve tested this several times. I used to have a Rand McNally extensively marked up with that kind of research.” He looked into Wanda’s eyes. “His mother and I, we listened to a lot of this one, a lot of Joni, the jazz Joni, Jaco Joni, Jarrett, J. J. Johnson, Jimmy Giuffre, Jimmy Webb, Jimmy Reed, Jim Reeves, Johnny.”

  “Which Johnny?” I asked.

  “All of ’em: Hartman, Hodges, Coltrane, Carson, Mathis, especially Mathis. We’d recite Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Bataille. We were D-Luxe Frenchies. Have you met his mother?”

  “No,” Wanda said. “I’ve talked to her on the phone.”

  “Seen any pictures?”

  “Yes,” she said with put-on affection.

  “Lord,” Wade said, now drawing a figure in the air. “Legs like inverted traffic cones. She was a Lachaise sculpture. And a real voluptuary. I trust she still is.”

  “Okay,” I said, trying to move things in another direction.

  “A beautiful woman!” Wade said. “Not pretty at all. I’ve thought about calling her before I leave for Berlin, but … to what end? She probably wouldn’t want to hear from me anyway.” He looked at me.

  “Yeah, I don’t know,” I said. The pizza sauce was oversweet and the cheese kept sliding from its base like a slapstick toupee.

  “The early Joni—not the early Joni, but the second phase, star-made Joni, Ladies of the Canyon through Court and Spark—that period doesn’t work for me as bedroom music. The lyrics are too distracting, like having your lover’s roommate in the corner talking on the phone, about you. That’s a male perspective, I know,” he said, glancing at Wanda, who may have found the glance patronizing, may have found the word lover oily or square, though the more up-to-date substitute words tend to be cute, imprecise, or overslangy.

  “I don’t like vocal music at all during sex,” Wanda said, “unless it’s in a foreign language—”

  “A foreign tongue?” Wade said.

  “Yes, a foreign tongue,” Wanda said. “Or in English but indecipherable. I think I’d like to live where hardly anyone spoke English. People say that’s the best way to learn a foreign language, but I’d want to stay ignorant, maybe choose somewhere with a language I had no interest in learning, with a different alphabet so I couldn’t figure anything out. Maybe then everything would be dreamlike and romantic. You could imagine people were reciting poetry and plotting revolutions when really they were just gossiping or asking for change.”

  “They’d probably ask for change in English, if they were asking you,” I said.

  “Maybe,” Wanda said.

  “But you’re right,” Wade said, “words are complicated in that context, the bedroom context.”

  “I don’t like anything rhythmically straightforward, either,” Wanda said, “in that ‘context.’ I dated a woman for a while who could only fuck to John Philip Sousa.”

  Three sharp laughs shot staccato out of Wade’s wide mouth.

  “Almost all the music we listen to is rhythmically straightforward,” I said. “I mean, not the free jazz or some of the syncopated stuff, but—”

  “Well I’m not speaking in like technical terms,” Wanda said. “I’m just saying I want the music to be more flowing than driving, not because I want the sex to be dainty, I just don’t want anyone to be overly influenced by the beat, you know. That’s happened a few times, where I found myself getting fucked to the beat—one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four …”

  This aroused and accused me, and I considered two things: that with Wade sleeping in the next room, Wanda and I would be deterred from having sex, and that the length of his stay was unsettled.

  “Sousa is strange,” Wade said.

  “Yeah, who was that?” I said.

  “He was an American composer of marches and—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I mean who wanted to fuck to his music?”

  “No one you know,” Wanda said.

  “It sounds kind of made up,” I said.

  “Well, it’s not,” she said. In the dim light, her inexorable acne was significantly obscured and her hair looked blacker than it was, though not as black as Wade’s. Her hair was in fact brown, but brown on the border of black, with a few prominent tufts curled into loose spirals. She was wearing a one-pocket crew-neck T-shirt from a discount-store three-pack, or rather a former crew-neck, since she’d ripped the collar into a jagged scoop neck while we sat next to the coin-operated amusements on the store’s sidewalk. I couldn’t understand the urgency. “Why not wait till we get home?” I said, and I remember the look of mournful surprise on a little girl’s face when Wanda started biting and tearing the three-pack’s top shirt, how ashamed I was when the girl’s possibly poor and affronted mother pulled her daughter away toward the mechanical doors. I liked how those T-shirts came out, though. Once on one of our early dates I blurted, “I’m not looking down your shirt.” “There’s not much to see,” she said, and it’s true that one noticed more clavicle than breast; I even came to eroticize her clavicles, would sometimes lick or nibble them from left to right as if I were eating corn on the cob in summer (when sweat would rest on her clavicle’s upper ridge and I’d relish the salty taste).

  Wade cleared his throat. “In some ways—to get back to what I was saying—in some ways those Joni albums, from a certain masculine perspective, are ideal make-out music, since they’re so resolutely, even if remorsefully, against domesticity.” Neither Wanda nor I took up this thread. After some silence (the CD had ended a few minutes earlier), Wade closed his eyes and in a tarnished baritone began to sing from Mitchell’s “Let the Wind Carry Me,” a great work of art with which I have a deep and increasingly lachrymatory connection: “Sometimes I get that feeling and I want to settle and raise a child up with somebody.” (I love that folksy up.) He stopped, to my relief; he was making me uncomfortable. But he was only counting the beats in his head: “I get that strong longing and I want to settle and raise a child up with somebody.” He had a tender, expressive voice, as fine as ice on eyelashes, and he was really stretching and bluesing some of the notes and phrases, though not the same ones Mitchell stretches on the record. I hadn’t remembered him being much of a singer, but he was outstanding, and there was something superbly unfashionable about the sweet yet burry tone of his voice—singing voices are as much expressions of fashion and history as they are of self, and Wade’s seemed locked in 1974. His singing face was nearly as expressive as his voice, though not in an actorly way, or it was expressive in an actorly way so accomplished that the artifice seemed to slide away. Wanda shifted (lustfully?) in her seat. Few of us are immune to the tall-dark-and-handsome type. Wade, his “Here comes one good-looking Indian!” T-shirt notwithstanding, was a Lebanese American. His grandfather’s first name had been Saleem, self-Anglicized into the surname Salem. Quite a few Syrian-Lebanese people, mostly Maronites, came to North Dakota around the turn of the century,
settling in towns and small cities such as Williston, Rugby, Hunch, Ross, and Goldenrod, where Wade grew up, working at his parents’ grocery store, serving as the Bruins go-to wide receiver from ’64 through ’66, inheriting his grandfather’s Little Blue Book on Schopenhauer, which for a while Wade carried “talismanically,” he told me once, in the crumby pocket of his letter jacket. He went on with the song: “But it passes like the summer, I’m a wild seed again. Let the wind carry me.” He opened his eyes, Wanda complimented his singing, I murmured a second. “Anyway,” Wade said, “it’s not a perspective I’m bound to, a so-called male one, that is, or isn’t. ‘Everyone is the other, and no one is himself.’ I still believe that.”

  “‘I is another,’” Wanda said softly.

  “Exactly,” Wade said. He closed his eyes again but didn’t sing this time. “I have to have music. I have to have music.” He opened his eyes. “I’m not above pulling out midcoitus to flip over the record, and have been criticized for doing so. After I’m settled in Berlin, I’m gonna buy a really good sound system. Everyone knows the Germans are great audiophiles. Phonaesthesia is fantastically common there. Hundreds of car accidents happen each year on account of folks swerving and braking to avoid collisions with music.”

  “How’d you meet up with Jaco?” I asked.

  “Oh, that’s kind of a sad story.” He turned back to Wanda: “The music has to be perfect; the wrong music destroys. I can’t perform with rivals on the stereo, either: Marvin Gaye, Robert Plant, Larry Wood, Barry White, Teddy Pendergrass, the later Rod Stewart, any of those Casanovas and Lotharios. The real outsized ladies’ men of mood music are destroyers, absolute destroyers. I’ve gathered some empirical evidence as to their pernicious influence on potency. My needle rusts, to quote a line, paraphrastically, from ‘Phonograph Blues.’ That’s one of the reasons I like Mathis. Open Fire/Two Guitars. You know that one?” He looked at me.

  I didn’t.

  “Another instance of beautiful-not-pretty. What he does to those notes—all the bending and massaging, the holding, the vibrating, the dilating—every phrase a gloss on the terrible pleasure of longing. Maybe during side one you recite a couple of Dickinson poems or a bit of Kierkegaard on Regine.” He hooked a few strands of hair out of his mouth with one of his Lisztian fingers. “A story about Open Fire: One night I’m at Oran’s. This was the bar I haunted in Enswell.” (The exposition was for Wanda; I remembered Oran’s.) “A buddy of mine owned the bar—he’d inherited it from Oran himself—and another buddy, Karl Tobreste, played drums there on weekends: on Fridays with me and a couple other guys in the Seed Sacks; on Saturdays in Hailstorm. And then later on Karl and I were the rhythm section in Bolling Greene’s little touring band.” Wanda nodded. “So one night I’m at Oran’s, sitting in my regular corner booth in the band room, and I look up from my book just as this beyond-belief fox is bending over to pick up a match-book or something. Long blond hair, tight jeans, the kind of ass that begs to be spanked hard with a paddle. Oran’s had a Ping-Pong table in the basement. Well, she turned around and it was like something out of Ovid, Tiresias and the snakes or what have you, ’cause she instantly turned into Gary Rush, this stereo salesman I knew.”

  We all laughed. “That’s also like this one Benny Hill sketch,” I said.

  “Gary Rush,” Wade said, shaking his head, this gesture perhaps actorly. “I’d bought an expensive pair of headphones from him one time, studio quality, with an amazing bass half-loudness point and a ten-foot cord. I could cover a good chunk of my apartment with no tugging or unplugging. I miss those headphones.” He shook his head. “Stolen.” He looked at me. “Did you take them?”

  “What?” I said.

  “Did you take my studio-quality headphones?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you took that sawbuck from your register today, and my headphones went missing during the time you had access to my apartment.”

  “I didn’t take your headphones or the ten bucks,” I said.

  Pause.

  “Okay,” Wade said. “It’s just: they were outstanding headphones. The stereo separation, it seemed really extreme, and the stuff in the center of the mix did strange things, seemed to come out of my eye sockets.” He brought his hands to his face and danced his fingers like crepitating fireworks away from his eyes.

  I asked if Wade planned to eat the crusts he’d arranged in a campfire-like mound on the side of his plate. The customary tentative negotiations over the last pieces had been skipped; Wade ate like a child, sloppily and with no sense of equity. It was okay for me to eat the crusts, he motioned, and continued his story: “So every once in a while I sold Gary Rush grass. He looked like Gregg Allman, but much shorter. Karl used to call him the Midget Rider. After ‘Midnight Rider.’”

  “Right,” I said.

  “So I called Gary over to my booth, and we talked for a while, went out to my car to smoke a couple joints. The grass wasn’t as potent back then, you know, so smoking a joint by yourself was roughly equivalent to the three of us sharing this one now. Anyway, we eventually wound up at my apartment.”

  “This is the apartment below ours?” I said.

  “Yeah, but your mom and I weren’t together yet.”

  “Oh.”

  “Things started to move down a pretty obvious road, and I put on Open Fire/Two Guitars.”

  “Is that like ‘open fire’ with a gun?” Wanda said.

  “What? Oh, yeah, I never thought of that. So a few songs in—we’re shedding some layers at this point—and he gestures to the stereo and says”—Wade switched to a low, burned-out voice—“‘Look brother, can we nix this faggot shit?’” We all laughed again.

  “He’s dead now, Gary is,” Wade said. “Been a long time gone.”

  Wanda and I tried to respond with a shift toward sobriety.

  “Nothing to do with me,” he said.

  For argument’s sake, I much later looked into the cause (heart disease) of Gary Rush’s death. Wade I think was an essentially moral man—by no stretch heedless of right and wrong, at least, if not always upright and trustworthy—but there was a slight sinisterity to him that made it momentarily conceivable that he had killed Gary Rush, and for no good reason. (For snoring, say.) Although I’m hard put to evince this sinisterity; the illustration I recur to is more subjective than I’d like: It was about two in the morning after our little pizza party. Underfed at dinner, I got up for a snack and saw Wade silhouetted in front of my stereo. He didn’t notice me, didn’t or pretended not to notice the refrigerator light. He was wearing headphones and a long scarf (Wanda’s—I didn’t like the idea of him getting used to her scent), his spidery right leg propped on one of my particle-board record shelves in the subjugating way guitarists sometimes prop their legs on stage monitors, and in my memory he looks fantastically rubbery and seriocomic, like one of Kafka’s drawings, or even vaguely and more to the point like the shadowy, sticklike figure in Félicien Rops’s Satan Sowing Seeds. Wade wasn’t satanic, I should stress, but his just-mentioned air of sinisterity, though slight, was thick enough to emit bursts of Mephistophelean elegance and allure.

  He wasn’t a violent man, though, or no more than most. The next morning, he and I had breakfast of a kind at the convenience store where he would spend many of his Minneapolis mornings—drinking coffee, eating doughnuts, and playing chess with down-and-outers at the store’s one table, a high round table granted two uncomfortable stools—and it was there that I heard what I took to be his only partly facetious claim to ab ovo pacifism. He was born, he told me, at 11:59 p.m. on October 17, 1947. That birthday, for men born between ’44 and ’50, was drawn 228th in the December ’69 draft lottery; October 18 was drawn fifth. By the time of that first lottery, Wade, earlier awarded a student deferment, had dropped out of college, so had he been born just a minute later, or had the nurse for whatever reason recorded his birth-time as midnight instead of 11:59, Wade almost certainly would have been drafted and might have served. “So you see �
�” he concluded. He’d fired a gun only once, he also told me, while pheasant hunting one cold fall morning with his dyspeptic father, and hadn’t hit anyone with his fists since the third grade. He couldn’t remember what the fight was over, but clearly remembered its last few minutes, how straddling and punching the boy repeatedly in the chest was one of the times in which pleasure and sadness were as hard to distinguish as minnows in a large school. Some of Wade’s sexual proclivities involved violence as well, I came to learn. So when I say he wasn’t a violent man, I mean that he wasn’t routinely, menacingly violent, not prone to freakish, unprovoked, or disproportionate acts of violence of the type one might expect from a criminal.

  He’d spent some of the midseventies in Grand Forks, where he first added cocaine to his inventory of marijuana, psychedelics, and pills. Grand Forks, he said, was North Dakota’s “top toot town.” He left that city because he missed Enswell, he said, but also because a pair of rival dealers may have been threatening him. He’d gotten an unpostmarked manila envelope containing a pamphlet called Home Remidees [sic] for Gunshot Wounds. He left three days later, though for several years he carried on a modest grass trade in Grand Forks. He kept the pamphlet, he said, and eventually gave it to my mother, who he thought would enjoy diagramming some of its barbarous sentences. The pamphlet, I suspected, was Wade’s invention. Only reluctantly would he talk about drugs or dealing—“it’s not interesting”—and when he did it was often tongue-in-cheek, though I think he was sincere when he said it wasn’t interesting.

  At some point when Wade was more or less living with my mother and me, she told me he sometimes sold marijuana to friends, in the way, she said, that one might sell an extra concert ticket to a friend. I’m not sure why she offered this misleading explanation and its even more disingenuous analogy, since I’d suspected nothing and didn’t quite understand what marijuana was. Perhaps she was preparing me for rumors. She smoked a fair amount of pot herself, and though she didn’t proselytize on its behalf, she was never furtive or apologetic about it. (She did sometimes complain of grogginess in an explanatory way related to apology.) After Wade left us to go on the road with Bolling, first as a batman or Doctor Robert, then as a bassist, I learned from my mother that he’d in fact been dealing more coke than pot, and that the short trips he took, putatively to visit family or play an out-of-town gig, were really visits to his supplier in Los Angeles. To throw off the authorities, my mother said, he’d fly to Los Angeles out of a different city’s airport each time—Bismarck, then Sioux Falls, then Duluth. The more she revealed, the more glamorous Wade became and the more I distrusted my mother.