by Dylan Hicks
On the drive he told me that his older sister was a decent pianist, that he used to help her push the untunable Salem spinet out from the wall so he could lean against the soundboard and listen to her play show tunes at incongruous tempos: a dirgeful “Surrey with the Fringe on Top,” a sprightly “Ol’ Man River.” He told me about the time he was hit, while jayrunning so as not to arrive even later for a dishwashing shift, by a Dodge Dart “the color of a jaundiced pear,” and how useful it is to know “severe collisional pain.” The restaurant’s manager, who had strange, winged hair like Schopenhauer’s or Bozo’s, Wade said, called the hospital to find out when the accident occurred, then fired Wade for tardiness. He told me about a Grand Forks doctor, a sometime customer, who for a few years offered back-alley vasectomies to the promiscuous and uninsured, either as an act of Malthusian charity or because he was a sadist, Wade wasn’t sure. A Yellow truck passed us going north, and he said he’d often thought about getting a trucker’s license. “Isn’t it disorienting to see these huge orange trucks rolling down the highway with the word yellow painted on them?” he said. “Ceci n’est pas un camion orange.” He told me again about Jaco and the catalpa leaf. Since we were sharing encounters with jazz bassists, I told him my (light-on-action) story about shaking Ron Carter’s hand, and he answered that one of his ex-girlfriends had gotten a splinter from Charlie Mingus’s bass lodged in her ear. Mingus, Wade said, telling his ex-girlfriend’s story, had been plagued at a Chicago nightclub by a pair of incessant chatterers near the stage, loud chatterers and glass-clinkers who wouldn’t shut up even after repeated calls for attentiveness from the bandleader, who finally picked up his double-bass by the neck and brought it down like a hammer on the middle of the chatterers’ table, not more than a ruler’s length from the table occupied by Wade’s girlfriend. “Mingus himself tweezed out the splinter with a pair of dessert chopsticks while Dannie Richmond took a long solo,” Wade said. “Then Mingus brought his totaled bass backstage, grabbed another one—a wasted old thing with just three strings—and finished the gig, playing better than before.”
“Man,” I said.
“Her implication being that something magical happened to the ear as a result of the splinter. But I have my doubts. This gal, she lacked discernment; her ears were too soon made glad.”
“Maybe before the splinter they were—”
“Even sooner gladdened? It’s possible. I don’t even like to think about some of the crap she made us listen to. Mingus and Van Morrison were the only worthwhile musicians she liked, and probably their music sounded especially strange and unprecedented to her ’cause she listened to no other jazz or blues or soul, not even fusion or blues-rock or blue-eyed soul, unless it came on the radio or I put it on at home.”
“You lived together?”
“For a while.”
“What was her name?”
“How’s that?”
“Her name,” I said.
It seemed like he couldn’t remember or was reluctant to report it.
“Rae,” he said after another moment.
“Ray?”
“Rae, R-a-e. Rae Morgenson.”
“My mom was a big Van Morrison fan. Both my moms were.”
“Yeah, well, everyone was,” Wade said.
“Not everyone,” I said.
“I would rather you not question the universality of the white hippie experience.”
I laughed. Then, “Do you consider yourself white?”
“I consider myself blue.”
It was a cool day, but the car’s heater worked surprisingly well (and still does). I shimmied off my L.A. Kings starter jacket. “So what kind of crap did she listen to when she wasn’t listening to Mingus or Van?” I asked.
“I just told you I don’t like to think about that.”
“Yeah, but—”
“I don’t know. Commercial stuff, phony head music: the Other Knee, the Cryan’ Shames, Iron Butterfly, Wind Shadows, Vanilla Fudge, the Eggs of Misconception, the Ghosts of Electricity. A lot of questionable shit. She’d dated the drummer from the Other Knee. Frog, he called himself. I think he was the one who gave her the Mingus album. She liked Mingus’s music purely, you know. She didn’t like it ’cause it was cool or sophisticated, ’cause it might intrigue someone who called on the phone and heard it blasting in the background, she having turned it up before answering. She just liked it.”
“What did Ellington say? ‘If it sounds good, it is good.’”
“But I couldn’t figure out why Mingus sounded good to her, because as I say most of what she liked was garbage. I tried to listen to her music with new ears, you know, thinking maybe she was hearing things I couldn’t hear, me being too much the yeasayer of prevailing critical opinion. Didn’t work, though. I’ve always been mystified by people like that, the sporadically, randomly tasteful. My problem isn’t indiscrimination, it’s that I have such a painful sense of where my discrimination gives out. Hank Adams said he knew his inferiority in taste just like he would’ve known it in smell, had he been hard of smelling.”
I grunted.
“A lot of times I’ve felt too smart for my life, but too dumb for another one. You’ll probably find that too.”
I didn’t like the sound of that, and we drove without talking for a few minutes. Then he told me about some of his other girlfriends. He said he’d had a “soap-bubble affair” with Mollie Katzen, the beautiful author of The Moosewood Cookbook and The Enchanted Broccoli Forest, and that he’d spent one night with Bolling Greene’s ex-wife, the singer and one-hit-wonder Penny Sakes (’77’s For Heaven’s … holds up pretty well). Also he’d loved a woman whose great-great-grandmother may have been the model for Courbet’s The Origin of the World. “I’m a bit of a starfucker,” he said. He’d also gone out with an artist who believed in “booksong,” the idea that one could develop a “mystic’s ear” for which book to read next. He’d dated a court reporter who was into bondage and discipline and some sadomasochism, he said, and from her he’d picked up a mild taste for that sort of thing. He’d grown equally comfortable as top or bottom. One of his favorite things was to be punched in the eye while coming, he said, but the court reporter didn’t always get the timing right—apt, he said, since she was also a not fully competent percussionist in a folk-rock band. Desire, Wade told me, wants nothing more than to destroy itself, as the Trammps had more or less maintained. He said he’d had a lot of girlfriends and had loved them all, but none as much as my mother. “She was a real connoisseur of coffee on book leaf,” he said, as if that were her defining trait. “Probably still is. She loved to stare at the stains and wonder over the words they’d landed on. She was deliberately careless with her cup. Your mother appreciates things, you know: blackbirds on white skies, raindrops on sidewalk gingko leaves. She would never explicitly point those things out, but … she’d draw your attention.”
“I don’t remember any gingko trees in Enswell.”
“But I saw some raindrops like that the other day and thought of her. So this is it,” he said, parking. I leaned against the car while he studied the bank for two or three minutes. “Can you grab me the SX-70?” he said.
“What?”
“The SX-70, please.”
“What?”
“The Polaroid in the glove box.”
He took a photo of the bank, and did a few dozen squat-thrusts. “Okay, let’s split,” he said.
“You don’t want to go inside?”
“Not really.”
“You want to stop for lunch at all?” I said.
“Let’s just grab sandwiches at a gas station.”
“A lot of those sandwiches are slimy.”
“This place isn’t happenin’ for me right now, okay?”
About twenty miles out of town, we stopped at a gas station where I bought sandwiches in triangular containers while Wade altered his Polaroid photo with the rusty fork I’d seen in the glove compartment. The sandwiches were slimy. The rest of the way home w
e took turns naming professional or notable collegiate football players. To make the game more challenging, we had to circle through the alphabet, forward and backwards, him saying “Grady Alderman,” me saying “Fred Biletnikoff,” him saying “Jimmy Conzelman,” me saying “Tony Dorsett,” him saying “Bill Earley,” and so on. We were allowed to skip X. The first person (me) who couldn’t come up with a name lost. I challenged some of Wade’s names—a few seemed patently fictional—but each time he unhesitatingly offered corroboration: always a position and a team, often a jersey number or a metaphorical description of the player’s style and form, maybe a bit of human-interest trivia, the marital history of some ancient Canton Bulldog or Rock Island Independent, the stray border collie that really taught him how to run. I held a few of the suspect names in mind, and, sure enough, they turned up in a football encyclopedia. It was hard to know when Wade was telling the truth, and I think one of his tricks was to make some truths sound like lies, so that if you discovered enough of his seeming lies to be after all true, you might start to think that everything he said was true.
The Origin of the World (1)
I MENTIONED ABOVE THAT THE WOMAN I’VE BEEN calling my mother, Marleen Deskin, wasn’t my biological mother. This fact was never kept from me. Martha Dickson was my biological mother. Between my mothers’ names there’s obviously much similarity—alliteration, assonance, consonance, and so on—and perhaps this similarity (unfortunate in the present context, and I apologize) readied or at least encouraged my mothers’ short but important friendship, since all sorts of superficial similarities can at least briefly make a friendship seem inevitable.
At some point in my antememorial days my mother Marleen must have sat me down for a bowdlerized version of the following story, beginning, it may have been, with a tenderizing plate of runner-up brand cream-sandwich cookies and a gentle yet distinctly portentous prelude. I don’t remember these cookies or this prelude, but neither do I remember a time when I didn’t know something of my spectral biological mother. I do remember two times on which she, Marleen, told a more or less complete version of the story: (1) on a road trip to the Grand Canyon during my twelfth summer, and (2) in the kitchen while she made a taco salad during my sixteenth spring. Fragmental-anecdotal parts of the story came or were drawn out on several other occasions. Certain fragments came out with relative frequency, such as the part about Martha’s homemade embroidered blouses, how ineptly they were sewn, or the part about her copy of Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, how and where it skipped. (No doubt Marleen repeatedly recalled this skip as a reflective joke, and would be pleased to know I finally got it.) As I grew up, the story and its fragments got darker, more specific, less euphemistic, and maybe Marleen altered, added, or subtracted some of the particulars along the way, just as I’ve done with the benefit of scattered research.
Marleen Deskin first met Martha Dickson on February 7, 1969, when they, along with two other Northern Illinois University students and one alumnus, got in a beaten brown Buick and drove from an imperfectly cooperative five-bedroom Victorian in DeKalb to a sit-in at the University of Chicago’s administration building. The sit-in had started after the University announced it wouldn’t rehire Marlene Dixon (again, I apologize for the similarity of all these names), a young, fairly popular assistant sociology professor and Marxist-feminist-activist whose three-year appointment would end the coming September. Dixon’s work, argued the sociology department’s tenured faculty, failed to meet the intellectual standards required for reappointment. The demonstrators attributed the dismissal to sexism and revanchism, said the administration overvalued research and publication, undervalued teaching; they demanded an equal student voice in the hiring and firing of professors. In the first days of the sit-in, about four hundred students occupied the administration building, whose everyday occupants were temporarily relocated. As the sit-in went on, student leadership changed and more demands were added, many of them unrelated to issues of hiring and firing or to Dixon, who visited her supporters a few times but generally kept out of the way. The administration’s response was hard and cool: they didn’t meet with the rebels, they didn’t call the police; they handed out suspensions, they waited for spirits to sink.
Since mid-January of that year (so for about three weeks), Marleen had been dating an NIU graduate named Barry Morton, a former SDS member and a friend of one of the U of C sit-in’s organizers. Barry was a Marxian, self-described, though others (at least one other) described him as a moneyed liberal who’d learned to use New Left rhetoric with moderate facility but incomplete conviction. Barry wasn’t all talk, though, and in fact he preferred spear-carrying to, say, speaking at demos, writing for underground newspapers, or drawing attention by other means. (Barry and I are now friends on Facebook.) He had delivered sandwiches and some other provisions to the sit-in on its third day, when the administration building was still bustling, triumphant kids talking all night, laughing, swaying, poster-making. “Welcome to the Winter Palace,” read one of the posters, and Barry was among those outside cheering when it was first unfurled, descending like a tingle down a spine, from a second-story window. He’d only planned to stay for a short while, but the mood was so exhilarating, he hung around for ten hours, had to call Marleen to postpone an informal date. Each day, however, the numbers dwindled and spirits indeed sank, so Barry recruited Marleen, Martha, and the two others to offer further support to the flagging protest. Marleen, who would graduate that spring, only had an early morning French class on Fridays and didn’t have to miss any school to make the trip. Martha, an unserious junior, played hooky.
The car was huge and cold. The men sat in front, Barry in the middle. The driver, whose name my mother had long forgotten by the time she told me the story, wore an unseasonable porkpie hat and smelled in some inexplicably bad way like pancakes. The other young man, his name also forgotten (Barry remembers: John), was possibly hoping to usurp Barry as the co-op’s de facto leader. He was the one who’d accused Barry of being only rhetorically radical. He rarely challenged Barry directly, however, even when given semiformal opportunities. A few miles from the house, Barry, turning around to look at the women, said, “If any reporters try to talk to you, don’t give them your name.”
“What about a fake name?” Martha said from the back.
“A fake name’s okay, but nothing clever, no anagrams,” Barry said.
“So not too fakey?” Martha said with what my mother Marleen called her “Saharan sarcasm.”
“Probably there won’t be any reporters left,” Barry said. He was wearing a Donegal tweed overcoat, its frayed collar partly covered by the hooklike ends of his blond hair. He had agreed to pay a disproportionate share of the co-op’s expenses for seven more months; then new arrangements would have to be made. He had a straight job as a copywriter and rumored inherited wealth, including some obviously hypocritical investments.
“We’re not going to give them our names,” Marleen said.
“Sociology’s a rinky-dink field, anyway,” the driver said.
“This isn’t just about Dixon,” Barry said.
“I just don’t think it’s a serious field,” the driver said.
“Well, you’re the expert,” Marleen said, and Martha stanched a laugh.
“Regardless,” Barry said, “it’s in our interest to have anti-Establishment thinkers in sociology departments, if only to act as foils to those who dreamed up Muzak.”
The co-op housed six to eight people, depending on whom you asked, and was supposed to and sometimes did run on Marxist principles, to which its residents, in the normal way of things, were divergently committed. Martha was an ideological jumble, here radical, there conservative. Her short residency at the co-op might be called situational communism (not situationist, though there was some of that too, probably coincidental). Marleen had already been invited to join the co-op, but, somewhat cautious by nature, chose to stay in her dormitory. She too had a temporizing interest in Marxism, though she didn
’t pretend to more than a passing familiarity with its texts. Two women lived in the co-op, or so Marleen had heard from Barry, but before the drive to Chicago, she’d met neither one. The other woman, Martha explained to Marleen in the backseat, had moved out a few months earlier. “She’s coming back,” Barry said. “She’s just taking care of some family shit.” Martha turned to Marleen and shook her head with ironic affirmation. John snored, the driver turned on the radio.
For all I know the tension between Barry and Martha was romantic in origin, but if so, Marleen never learned about these origins, and it’s just as possible that they simply disliked each other, or liked goading each other. “Unlike certain people in this bucket,” Martha slipped in when she and Marleen’s conversation returned to politics, “I actually come from the prolefuckingtariat.” Profane tmesis, Marleen led me to believe, was one of Martha’s trendy tics: fanfuckingtastic, bullfuckingshit, on and on like that. Barry moved his long legs from one apparently uncomfortable position to another. Martha’s grandfather, his granddaughter added, joined the Socialist Party during its North Dakota heyday in the teens and never lost faith. “So all this stuff is old hat for me,” she said, tapping the driver’s porkpie. “What kind of work did your grandfather do?” Barry asked. “He was just a poor farmer,” Martha said, “trying to set up farmer-owned grain elevators and whatnot.” “Then he was a peasant, not a proletarian,” Barry said. Martha held her middle finger behind Barry’s head for several seconds. As she saw it, she said after collecting herself to some degree, there was no real revolutionary potential in the U.S., not for the foreseeable future, not in the way Marx imagined it, and certainly not from the proletariat. But widespread, ever-growing spiritual-erotic hunger, hunger for the stuff American capitalism trivialized, coarsened, and suppressed, that kind of hunger could lead to a bigger cultural transformation than anyone had imagined. She was showing off with her speech, but also her voice was shaking. The future’s great works of art, she said, wouldn’t look like art at all, would be mistaken for noneveryday life.
