by Dylan Hicks
Martha took a pastrami sandwich out of her coat pocket, brushed it off, ripped it in half, cutting the meat with her fingernails, and offered the bigger half to Marleen. The unpainted nails on Martha’s right fingers were long, but her left fingernails were short, because she played the gimbri. They also shared an apple, which picked up linty red spots from a cut on Martha’s lower lip, the spots mirroring the red slubs on Barry’s coat. They talked about poetry and a friend they had in common. Marleen, urged by Martha to speak a bit of French, quoted a few lines of Baudelaire’s L’ideal, impressing Martha. “He’s so repugnant, but I love him,” Martha said, and a moment later, “That’s something I want to do, learn a foreign language.” Barry turned his head partway toward the backseat: “I’ve heard college is a good place for that,” he said. The driver laughed, Martha shrugged. Emboldened, Barry added that it was dumb to define the proletariat on nineteenth-century lines, as if we weren’t living under a vastly transformed capitalism. A very much still possible revolution, he said, would be led mostly by enlightened members of the middle and intellectual classes, and he tossed in a few more points while Martha imitated a puppeteer with her right hand. “Barry’s a perfectly enlightened member of the intellectual class,” Martha stage-whispered when he’d finished, “until it’s time to scrub the brown streaks off the toilet bowl. That seems to be where I come in.”
When they got to the administration building, there were no more signs hanging from the windows and at most twenty students inside. Barry’s friend, a grad student and a member of the New University Conference, was sitting on a slatted wooden bench at the end of a dim hallway, playing an unamplified bass guitar. Barry brought his two bags of groceries to the food station and introduced Marleen, Martha, and the others to the grad student, who, after some small talk and updates, offered to take the group on a partial tour of the campus-abutting Woodlawn neighborhood, some of whose poor, mostly black residents were about to be displaced by a U of C construction project. Momentum never built for this walk. A short while later a new group of students rotated in, and Barry’s friend went home to take a nap.
Martha and Marleen sat against a wall, talking and smoking. It felt good to be away from the others. Martha was originally from Wheeler, North Dakota, she told Marleen, a town of six hundred people where she’d lost her virginity in a giant mound of hard red spring wheat. Later the family moved to Enswell, where Martha had been Enswell High’s third prettiest cheerleader. Martha wasn’t really half Marleen’s size, but it seemed to the bigger party as if two Marthas could squeeze into one hollow Marleen. Soon Barry brought the group back together, suggested they all go out to a pizzeria he knew of and then catch the Sonny Stitt Trio at the Plugged Nickel. Porkpie had already assented this plan. “What kind of music is that?” Martha said.
“Jazz,” Barry said.
Martha snatched the folded newspaper from under Barry’s arm and scanned the concert listings. “Why don’t we see Vanilla Fudge?” she said.
Barry shook his head no.
“I sorta know the drummer in one of the warm-up bands,” Martha said.
“That’s not what we’re doing,” Barry said.
“Don’t be such a snob,” Martha said.
“Taste and snobbism aren’t synonymous,” Barry said.
“We could see Baby Huey,” Martha said.
“Yeah, let’s see Baby Huey,” John said.
“Let’s see Sonny Stitt,” Barry said.
“Baby Huey!”
“Sonny Stitt!”
“I just don’t really feel like jazz,” Martha said.
“I’m treating,” Barry said.
Marleen rubbed Martha’s arm and said, “You sort of feel like jazz.”
At the Plugged Nickel, the four students and one alumnus pushed two tables together, but before long the conversation split up again along gender lines. The club was loud and warm. One of Martha’s boots formed a puddle in which a fringed end of Marleen’s scarf soaked all night. Martha had brown hair and a dimply smile and was wearing a clearly homemade embroidered blouse, one of her earliest attempts—the flowers wilted, one sleeve too tight, the other too loose. To Marleen she seemed a blend of restless confidence and twitchy vulnerability, completely assured and completely uncertain, and somehow these combined energies made Marleen feel at ease in ways she knew with no one else in DeKalb.
Between sets, Barry pulled his chair next to Martha’s and said, “That toilet gibe—if you have a problem—I’m not saying the housework has been equitably divided—but if you have a problem, it’d be better to bring it up at a self-critique session.”
“Why don’t you?” Martha said. “I’m talking to my new friend.”
On Monday, Martha moved into Marleen’s dorm room, over the drizzly mumbles of Marleen’s preceding roommate. “Why do you still live in this baby dormitory?” Martha asked Marleen, who shrugged toward inertia. Martha showered in the middle of the night and kept her hallway appearances brief (the floor supervisor never hassled her); she used her yellow Samsonite as a dresser, kept it under the single bed she and Marleen shared. Their relationship was more sororal than sexual, Marleen told me: mostly Martha was a cuddler; she’d nestle her head under Marleen’s chin, and her hair would tickle and irritate Marleen’s face. In the dorm room’s cramped quarters Martha’s charms began to wane. One night Marleen, statuesque and a restless sleeper, unwittingly pushed Martha off the bed, waking everyone up. Martha recovered and was soon chuckling over the accident, trying to steer the chuckling toward a discussion of chance and the unconscious. For about a week, Marleen had been discouraging the pair’s carouselling small-hours conversations, mostly out of pretended courtesy for the now third-wheel roommate, who to all appearances seemed to be a contented eavesdropper. On the night of Martha’s fall from the bed, Marleen let the talking go on for ten minutes or so and then said, “I’m sorry, but I’m really tired. I’ve got this paper to write. I can’t sleep through more classes. Most of this stuff can’t be resolved anyway, even by people who know what they’re talking about.” Martha, though sharp with comebacks, just turned away from Marleen. “I didn’t mean that as a put-down,” Marleen said. “I meant both of us, all of us.” Marleen was sorry but didn’t say so.
Some afternoon about a month after Martha had moved in, the largely forgotten Barry came by to say that Martha’s brother had called the co-op. “Frankly, it sounded mortal,” he told Marleen, and that night Martha learned that her parents had died a full three weeks earlier in a car crash. Marleen held Martha most of the night, stroked her hair, handed her toilet paper since there were no tissues. The other roommate watched them silently and creepily. The next morning Marleen and Martha walked together to the bus station, taking turns carrying the heavy Samsonite, into which Martha had earlier snuck Marleen’s copy of Gérard Zwang’s Le sexe de la femme.
Marleen didn’t hear from Martha for over two years, didn’t expect to hear from her ever again, didn’t, after a while, think of her often. Then one weekend day in July of ’71, Martha put a call in to Richard and Esther Deskin of Palatine, Illinois. Yes, he was Marleen’s dad, Dick told Martha, and in fact she was back home for the time being and was already coming to the phone.
“I’m in bad shape,” Martha said over the phone. “I’m in super fucking bad shape.” She sounded drunk or high, slurry and tearful. She said she’d tried to start a small clothing line but it hadn’t worked, and now she was broke and incredibly sad. She said she had a beautiful, three-month-old boy whose eyes played the music of the spheres, but that she couldn’t take care of him. “I need you to help me, Marleen,” she said. “I know I haven’t kept in touch, but last night it struck me like lightning that you were the one, the one who could help me. It came to me as a voice, a totally external voice, your voice. It didn’t sound like your voice, but it was, it was your voice.” Martha started sobbing, and was still holding the phone sobbing when Marleen arrived two days later at a little rented house in Enswell, North Dakota. This t
ime of course Martha was on the phone with someone else, but it seemed to Marleen as if the drive, which she’d alertly enjoyed, hadn’t happened, as if she’d made it from Palatine to Enswell like a voice through phone wires.
Martha really was in bad shape, foul-smelling, Cubistic, often incomprehensible, constantly smoking PCP-enhanced grass or dropping acid, crying and talking to illusions, lying on the floor, sweating a lot, hearing the wrong things on Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, which she played over and over, often forgetting to place the needle after the skip near the start of the first band. Sometimes Marleen would come into the living room to find Martha lying on the floor listening to Morrison sing, “in the ditch, in the ditch, in the ditch, in the ditch, in the ditch, in the ditch,” until Marleen, holding the baby like a football, walked over, turned down the volume, and with her left hand advanced the needle slightly, even though she was sick of the album and didn’t think it was helping. Only recently did I realize that Morrison in truth sings “and the ditch.”
One afternoon Marleen and the baby came home from Piggly Wiggly, and Martha, who hadn’t left the house since Marleen’s arrival two weeks earlier, was gone. She’d left most of her things, but Marleen knew she wouldn’t be back. “I was sad for Martha,” my mother told me, “but I was happy for me, because I really, really wanted to keep you.” A year or so after Martha left, Marleen legally adopted me, and a few years after that Martha died of an accidental overdose somewhere in California.
Astral Nights
ON THE EIGHTEENTH OF OCTOBER 1991, I WAITED with expanding hunger and impatience for Wade and Wanda to pick me up from work. From there we were going to the Great Perusal, a St. Paul bookstore where an obscure poet named D. Michael Tauber was reading. I’m sure of the above date because this morning I found a calendar listing for Tauber’s reading in the archive room of the Twin Cities’ surviving alt-weekly. Wade’s forty-fourth birthday, then, would have been the previous day; I’d given him a Nicholson Baker book that he received with some skepticism, in turn received with some defensiveness, though I hadn’t read the book yet either. Anyway, I waited forty-five minutes or thereabouts for Wade and Wanda to pick me up, pacing on the sidewalk while my coworkers occcasionally looked on in entertained sympathy. This lateness doomed our plan to go out for dinner before the reading. When Wade’s car finally approached, I had a few seconds to watch them through the windows before they stopped at the curb. He was talking enthusiastically, slapping the steering wheel for emphasis; Wanda was laughing, one of her clownishly large-soled shoes tapping the dashboard in time, I think, with her laughter. When I got in the backseat I almost sat on a rusty car jack, and they apologized without remorse for their tardiness and explained the flat they’d caught on Lyndale and Franklin. There was a short but possibly telling pause when I asked which tire had deflated, and then Wanda handed me a somewhat mollifying bag of barbecue ribs. Bolling Greene’s underappreciated Greenehouse was playing on the tape deck.
While I ate, Wade and Wanda returned to the conversation I’d glimpsed through the windows, about the democratization of connoisseurship or the pornography of yoga, biological determinism or the extent of Browning’s influence on Joyce, animal liberation or whether Heidegger, writing on Van Gogh’s peasant shoes, had described something profound and far-reaching about art’s power to unconceal truth (Wade’s view, as I’ve reconstructed and distilled it), or whether the exhausting Nazi had misread the shoes and used his misreading to reframe a silly agrarian romanticism that undercut his larger and rather commonsensical point (Wanda’s view). These at least were things they talked about during Wade’s time as our lodger (Wade always dominating the discussions), though to be honest I don’t recall what they talked about in the car that evening, only that I felt a bit childlike and superfluous in the backseat.
In front of the bookstore, Wade, in one easygoing attempt, parallel parked into a space that would have deterred some motorcyclists. A passerby applauded; the passerby, I gathered, was crazy, but the applause wasn’t. Wade was so facile that night, so at one with everything; he was a raindrop on a sidewalk gingko leaf. I couldn’t sort out my admiration from my envy from my jealousy. Wanda went inside the bookstore to get seats (“which I’m sure are in high demand,” Wade said sarcastically, though it was his idea to come to the reading), but I stayed outside for a few minutes with Wade, who was doing squat-thrusts on the sidewalk while studying the store’s window display. He was wearing close-fitting, boot-cut Erizeins, faded to stratus-cloud white-gray. There were a few stores with selective inventories of used jeans near our apartment. I watched him for a few seconds, then turned to look at his hatchback. “Your spare is the size of a regular tire, huh?” I said.
“That’s right,” he said.
“I thought the Leveret came with a doughnut.” An affinity for the doughnut wheel might have led me to some expertise on its history, but I was bluffing, trying ineptly to catch Wade in some lie.
“Nope.”
I turned again to face his back. “Are those jeans new?”
“Do they look new?” he said, turning around while still in a squat. The jeans were particularly bleached at a quarter-sized spot to the right of the zipper’s end point, I noticed.
“I just haven’t seen them before,” I said.
“These are my reserves. You like them?”
“Yeah,” I said. “But the other night you said you only had the clothes off your back and all that.”
“And a few other items, such as those in my pillowcase, where I’ve been holding these jeans. I never said the clothes off my back et cetera made up the whole of my wardrobe, just that they were notable among my monkishly few possessions. Sixty-two,” he said, finishing his exercises.
The reading had already started when Wade and I joined Wanda in the back row of folding chairs, two or three empty rows between us and the next clot of attendees. When we sat down, Tauber paused briefly to acknowledge us with an appreciative smile. He had Redford-like hair and a trim, cheek-proud beard. He couldn’t have been much more than forty, though according to Wade he’d been publishing since the late sixties. His reading tone: self-satisfied; my attention: sporadic. After the reading, the three of us browsed separately for half an hour. In the music section I found a used copy of 1979’s The Rolling Stone Record Guide, and with a Greenehouse melody circling my mind turned to Frank Thiesan’s summary of Bolling’s work up to that point:
BOLLING GREENE
Days of Dayton, Nights of Columbus / Beachwood 45789
Hosses / Epic KE-35287
Greenehouse / Epic KE-34738
The Infractor / Epic KE-34039
The Old Chisholm Trail Revisited, or Come-a Tie-Dye Hippie / Two Deuces 2014
Hippie cowpoke quasi-intellectual without Kris Kristofferson’s academic credentials but with a better singing voice (faint praise, that). The deleted Fab Four homage Dung Beatle has amusing cover art and a clever take on “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” that might justify picking up a used copy, if priced to move. After that slender triumph, Greene found himself still much smaller than Jesus and quit Austin for Nashville, where he had some success as a songwriter, penning “Boarded Windows” for Porter Wagoner and “Helen of Troy, Alabama” for Freddy Weller. Greene’s versions of those and other wry, often plaintive country-rock gems can be found on Chisholm Trail, recorded back home in Austin with a sympathetic five-piece, including Michael Murphy on second guitar and high, throaty harmonies, a nice complement to Greene’s black-coffee baritone. That album’s gorgeous “West Texas Winds” finds Greene singing with the sort of unpretending emotion all too scarce on his later outings.
With The Infractor, Greene was positioned as an original scofflaw, a role that seems to suit the portly singer about as well as the snug leather vest and bandolier he models on the cover. “Sorrow Has a Basement” is a drowsy blues with a few twists, and the title track tempers the macho posturing with melancholy, but Greene mostly sleepwalks through the ramblin’ gamblin’ pace
s. Austin pal Hubie Cutler lends some guitar and background vocals to Greenehouse, featuring the spirited “Renegade Ticker” and the dusty-road ballad “Penny of My Thoughts,” a paean to Greene’s then wife, singer Penny Sakes (the marriage barely outlasted the song’s huffing climb up the lower reaches of the country chart). The slapdash, guest-star-larded follow-up, Hosses, was a product of collective unconscionableness. Greene switched labels for Days of Dayton, Nights of Columbus, an imperfect union of unfunny novelties and laughable epics that seems to point the way back to obscurity. —F. T.
I closed the book with miffed force, then roamed without purpose till I came across Wade standing shut-eyed and motionless in one of the store’s back corners. I watched him from two bookcases away for a long five or six minutes, during which I caught not one faint motion from him, though he seemed ever on the brink of movement, on the particular brink of raising his arms slowly in a spiritual gesture, perhaps Buddhistic, perhaps evangelical. His arms stayed at his sides, though. The unbroken calmness on his face was intense, if that’s not too cheaply paradoxical, and his smooth facial skin looked even more vitreous than usual. I saw that another customer, a young woman probably from the neighborhood’s tony private college, was watching Wade too. She gave me a collusive smirk. I made a subtly discouraging face and returned my full attention to Wade, who wasn’t, I decided, on the brink of movement after all, that on the contrary he’d hold his living-sculpture pose till Wanda, I, or one of the bookstore’s staffers spurred him. As if to refute this new prediction on cue, he opened his eyes like a magician’s curtain, alerted the rest of his face, and without transition walked briskly and purposively to the fictional L’s (I followed him unnoticed from several steps back), where he picked out a paperback (Antony Lamont’s Fretwork, it turned out) in the easy way one retrieves one’s bright plaid coat from a sparse rack. Next he talked the cashier into letting him exchange Baker’s book for the Lamont, though I’d bought Baker’s book elsewhere and hadn’t altogether peeled off the foreign sticker. He also bought Asymptote by D. Michael Tauber, who was browsing not far from the counter and soon in conversation with Wade. A few moments later I was spotted, called over, and introduced. “I was just telling D.,” Wade said, “—is that right? D.?” For some reason Wade was messing with the poet.
