by Dylan Hicks
We went without a car for six years. Then, within a month of our arrival in Minneapolis, my mother and I traveled by city bus (on which two unchaperoned boys my age shot me mocking stares) to a large suburban car lot. It was a hot morning in August. We each carried a small plaid suitcase from a set. As we walked through the lot to the showroom, I lagged ten paces or so behind my mother, as if with our matching suitcases I could feign independence. The showroom was vertiginously cooler than it was outside. My mother walked up to the first free salesman she saw and set her suitcase in front of him. He looked down at it. “I’m going to buy a cheap used car from you today,” she said. “Cash on the barrelhead.” The salesman scratched the back of his left knee with his right toe. “Then my son and I are leaving for the Grand Canyon. I want to make it to Kansas City today. If you can sell me a car in a half hour, we’ll be there by dinner.” This salesman was mellow. He didn’t comment on my mother’s speech or ask her to clarify “cheap,” he just motioned for us to follow him, led us to a disregarded part of the lot behind the service garage, and showed us a dented but low-mileage American sedan going for three thousand dollars, painted a caramel not unlike my mother’s hair that season. “The Grand Canyon is an incredible place,” he said. My mother smiled. After that, she generally lost interest in long walks, or maybe her interest had already started to wane during our last year or so in Enswell, I’m not sure.
Anyway, when she got back from her walks, I would ask her how the walk had gone, and she’d say, “It would have to be described in French.” Decades later, I realized that she’d been borrowing one of Malte Laurids Brigge’s lines from Rilke’s novel, which I suspect she first read on Wade’s recommendation, since it was a novel he “loved.” Wade was a lover; he claimed to love people or at least women liberally, but he didn’t apply the word glibly to things. I don’t recall him ever saying, as I do, “I love this song!” or “I love that shirt!” No misunderstanding: I don’t think it’s silly to love a song or a book, and in some cases one might forgivably love a shirt. But for some reason when Wade told me he loved Rilke’s novel, a book then unknown to me along with its author, the words seemed wrong from his mouth, perhaps disappointing. “To be loved means to be consumed in flames,” writes in the novel. “To love is to give light with inexhaustible oil. To be loved is to pass away; to love is to endure.” So by its own terms, it’s selfish to love The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge; it aligns one with the book burners, though a book burned privately and in the right spirit, a spirit in fierce yet pacific opposition to hate and fear, could be a sort of offering, and I can almost imagine how beautiful such a ceremony might be.
For the Roses
WANDA’S SUNDAY NIGHT GIG WAS AT A NEWISH comedy club in the warehouse district called Jest in Time. The club was unexpectedly light, woody, and contented, its small round tables, armless Windsor chairs, and newly refinished floors all softly dyed in close shades of beige or natural. Two of its walls were mirrors, but despite that clue it took me awhile to remember that the space had previously been a dance studio, the Belknap Center for Dance, where a friend of mine’s much older half sister had taught and once in my presence done something unorthodox with a portable barre. Wade and I were happily not talking at a table near the knee-high stage, above whose cream backcloth was a vinyl banner, its squiggly lavender stripe the lesser of the room’s two intrusions of bold color. I scanned the room, counted heads (sixteen nonstaff, some of them presumable members of the headlining improv troupe), and was momentarily tempted to move to one of the white beanbag chairs tossed pixieishly in the club’s northeast corner, shaded by a large plant that I couldn’t identify. A red leather coat—here was the other show of bold color—lay on one of the beanbag chairs. My Coke was Pepsi and came in a heavy tumbler, clinging to which was a cocktail napkin featuring, I saw after the napkin fell on my lap, the club’s mascot, a laughing alarm clock whose pipelike limbs seemed to be dancing to the Dire Straits album playing on the club’s glassy sound system. I stared at the damp napkin, torn around the mascot’s face, and started to feel sad about the club’s impending failure.
The emcee introduced Wanda as Shucks Mueller instead of Miller and ignored Wade’s shouted correction. Wanda had tucked most of her hair into a frayed straw boater and was wearing her light-green houndstooth sports coat, a wide-lapelled size forty-six that held her trunk like a hot-dog bun round a pencil. Her floral kipper tie was of the same vintage (early seventies) and taste (bad) as the coat, but her trousers—cream flannels once worn by her remarkably thin Rockefeller Republican grandfather—were elegant, although short, even in this satirical context, complicating the rest of the costume’s easy-target vulgarity. Her set was a slightly modified version of one I’d seen a few times before, made up mostly of domestic jokes about shrewish, foolish, or whorish wives. At the start of the performance, she or Shucks was uxorious, slouchy, beleaguered; by the end s/he was bumptious, enervated, abusive. At one point, the dildo strapped to her (let’s stick with feminine pronouns) waist must have slipped through the slit in her (my) boxers, and she pitched the proverbial tent in her grandfather’s flannels, which were stained at the crotch with my semen, and which, along with Wanda’s white Corfam loafers and her pale skin, blent into the backcloth so that she sometimes looked like the floating torso of a minor-market weatherman.
Only the most perceptive audience members would have noticed that stain, but it was the kind of detail Wanda cared about. One night several months earlier, I’d come home from work to find the flannels laid out on the living-room floor and Wanda reading in her underwear on the couch. As a greeting she asked me to unzip my pants and hover over her grandfather’s. She pointed to a piece of red sweater lint to the right of the zipper, my target. At first the idea seemed disrespectful to her sweet, still-living grandfather. “These are really nice pants,” I said, kneeling to palm the soft fabric, reaching inside to finger the silk lining. But then Wanda got on her knees and elbows (her knees near the one-and-a-half-inch cuffs, her elbows on the thighs), unzipped me, and started sucking deeper and rougher than normal, which encouraged me to grab her hair and carry on with an aggressiveness that later engendered some guilt along with decades of masturbatory support. Eventually she pushed my thighs to slow me down, and with my cock still partly in her mouth said, “Tell me well in advance of when you’re going to come.” “It’s gonna be hard for me to hit that exact spot,” I said. She stopped sucking and said, “If you miss, we can try again later.” That promise and her breath on my penis acorn elicited a drop of pre-come, and she slowly pumped my cock over the target (my knees hurt on the hardwood floor) till I came quite precisely where she wanted me to, shooting just one errant, briefly shaking glob on the floor, which she scooped up with a grapefruit spoon and rubbed into the trousers. The stain hardened to a faint caramel similar to the paint on my mother’s old sedan.
Wade laughed heartily throughout Wanda’s set, not at every joke but at quite a few, and sometimes punctuated his laughter with a startling clap. In imitation, and because of the weed (the smiling box officer had sniffed conspiratorially at the smell floating off our hair and skin), I laughed a lot too, more than I usually did at Wanda’s act. Wanda’s steadiness as a performer was nearly professional, but our laughter seemed to distract her. “Maybe we should cheese it,” I whispered to Wade. He looked at me quizzically and continued as Wanda’s volunteer claqueur, and I, against my will and without reinforcement from the rest of the crowd, continued to find his laughter infectious.
After the set, Wanda, carrying two rum and Pepsis and now in jeans and one of her hot-rodded T-shirts, joined us at the table. She graciously if coolly accepted Wade’s compliments and my less effusive ones. The crowd had doubled by the time the improv troupe, Without a Paddle, went on. Their set was boring, inane, beneath satire. Here and there Wanda and I exchanged groaning glances, while Wade’s head kept bobbing in and out of a churchy doze. My interest endured mostly by dint of the five-person troupe’s one female me
mber, a short, wide-hipped woman, about my age, whom I’d noticed jittering around the club before the show. Onstage, the Without a Paddle players sometimes wore wigs, lab coats, or grass skirts, but mostly they wore their own clothes—drab, state-university clothes except in the case of their token woman, who came out in the more bohemian outfit I’d seen her in earlier: white jeans; Doc Martins; and a mannish V-neck sweater, now topped with an unbuttoned red leather jacket, the one seen earlier on the white beanbag chair. One of the arrowhead ends of the jacket’s belt was now tucked into a slanted pocket, but the other end dangled toward the floor. The jacket was just slightly darker than the red-red of stop signs and fire trucks, and accorded perfectly with the woman’s sangria lipstick and short, almost en brosse dyed-black hair. In my memory, I suppose this jacket has become the “rose to match my red ideal,” to traduce a line from a Baudelaire poem notably interpolated and given a honky-tonk mise en scène by Bolling Greene.
The beautiful woman in the red leather jacket wasn’t an especially gifted improvisational actor, but she was better than her colleagues. (Irrespective of her superiority, I was more embarrassed for her than for the others.) One of the sketches was set at a driving range—I lightly slapped Wanda’s arm—until the woman came onstage as an NBC producer and the scene became an audition for Johnny Carson’s replacement. In another sketch, her character unsheathed a ridiculous, piercing laugh, a true cackle, that itself drew the biggest laugh of the night.
“Well, I didn’t mind the ass on the gal,” Wade said when the set ended. He wasn’t shy about making lecherous remarks around Wanda, who I think endorsed his boycott of false gentility. “I’d like to be around her with a paddle,” he added. “Is that a big thing for you, paddles?” Wanda said. They discussed that further while I played with my napkin. We would have left, but the club’s manager was stalling to pay Wanda her twenty-five bucks. She was about to ask again when the woman from Without a Paddle approached our table. “Shucks?” she said, and started praising Wanda’s set, first generically, then in more detail, repeating a few punch lines and making a flattering reference to a reasonably well-known performance artist. She’d grabbed a seat from another table while delivering this long compliment. There were two tomato seeds stuck to the left sleeve of her sweater, one seed stuck to each side of the elbow like fish eyes. Her name was Marianne. She’d seen Wanda perform before, had recommended her for the opening slot.
“When I first saw Marianne Faithfull’s name, I thought it was pronounced like marine,” I said. “Isn’t that dumb?”
“My name’s spelled with a y,” Maryanne said.
“Oh,” I said.
“But not like the Gilligan’s Island chick; it’s one word like Marianne Faithfull’s, but with a y.”
“Wanda and I are big Marianne Faithfull fans,” I said. “We listen to Broken English all the time.”
“Well, we’ve listened to it a couple times,” Wanda said.
“But we both like it,” I said. “We each have a copy.”
“They’ll probably never make love to either copy,” Wade said, “on account of it being for the most part rhythmically straightforward.”
“To be honest, I’ve never heard Marianne Faithfull,” Maryanne said. “She’s just a name to me.”
“Like Pete?” I said.
“Yeah, or Larry,” Maryanne said. “I know she used to go with Mick Jagger.” Go with Mick Jagger, I liked that. She was taking big sips of her clear cocktail, probably a gin and tonic. We all talked about Marianne Faithfull, and then our Maryanne, waving toward the stage, said, “I don’t think I’ll work with these guys anymore. It’s”—she shook her head searching for a word—“asinine.” It didn’t seem like the word she wanted. “Every time we finish,” she said, “I feel my dignity get carried off on a stretcher.” I was about to contradict her. “Improv is tough,” Wanda said, and she and Wanda talked about the form and its difficulties, Wade and I chiming in about jazz and bluegrass. “Yeah, that was my last Without a Paddle show,” Maryanne said.
“Probably you could do better,” Wanda said.
“Well, I thought you guys were pretty good,” I said.
Maryanne shrugged and, mostly to Wanda, said, “I just wanted you to know that I know how stupid the stuff was tonight. These guys, their first ideas are always, I don’t know …”
“Hard even to summon the energy for further critique,” Wade said in too harsh a tone. At the ebb of his high, Wade got irritable. Wanda gave him a chastening look, then to Maryanne said, “But you were good, you almost saved them.”
“That Carson bit was spot-on,” I said.
“Thanks.”
“Have you heard the Beach Boys song about Johnny Carson?” I said.
“No.”
The waitress came around for an early last call, and I learned that Maryanne drank vodka tonics, not gin ands. She was an overnight baker, she told us, or had been at least; a few weeks earlier she’d been fired (coolly, and by telephone, she said), and was now living off her dwindling overdraft account. Soon she’d have to sell her motorcycle. She was taking one class, on the history of erotic art (among Wade’s areas of expertise, he slickly conveyed), but her plans to enter a film program in St. Paul were on hold, and from there the three of us raced through our favorite movies, most of them unknown to Wade, a few of Maryanne’s unknown to me. The waitress returned with the drinks and Maryanne nearly chugged the vodka tonic and got up to squeeze in an order for one more. Her voice got louder and stagier. She started talking about an idea she had for a movie, and about a large sculpture she was going to make out of cough drops. I began to think that too much of the group’s conversation was being devoted to Maryanne’s future achievements. After Wanda collected her money, Maryanne suggested we all go to a late-night family restaurant not far from our apartment, but Wade said he needed to turn in for the night and I followed his lead. As we were all standing outside the club, Maryanne wondered aloud if a family restaurant that stayed open so late had been misclassified, or if it stopped being a family restaurant at a certain hour, such as nine p.m. As she pursued this fruitless riff, once cracking herself up (the jarring laugh that so charmed Without a Paddle’s audience was closely patterned on Maryanne’s normal laugh), I applauded myself for declining to join her and Wanda. Moments later, however, when they drove off on Maryanne’s Japanese motorcycle, I regretted my decision, and felt guilty about my private dismissal of Maryanne’s harmless joking and unselfconscious, one might say defiant, laugh.
On their way to the restaurant, Wanda and Maryanne hit a patch of gravel and dumped the motorcycle. No one was hurt beyond some skin abrasions, but the bike came out badly positioned for sale. My drive home with Wade was less eventful, mostly silent. “You think we should meet them after all?” I said as we were approaching home. “No, they want to be alone,” he said. “That’s why I said I was tired.”
“Seemed like you really were tired.”
“I am tired,” he said. Then after a pause, “Wanda was good tonight. She’s the real thing. The stuff she’s doing now, it’s not quite there, but she’s on to something, just you wait.” I took his words seriously, and several times during those last months of ’91, even as I felt Wanda and I breaking up, I imagined myself as her lifelong aide-de-camp, doing mundane things for her that would make her art possible, leading the ovation when she merited one, leading it more commandingly when she didn’t, getting teary when her name was called at some local awards ceremony. Though in truth I’m a tagalong not a votary, and I doubt I could ever play such a role, even for someone more talented than Wanda.
From Now on, the Poetry Is in the Streets
ON HALLOWEEN AFTERNOON IT STARTED TO SNOW heavily and continued through the night. I had to work the next morning, a Friday. Wade didn’t stir on the sofa as I ate my cereal in the kitchen, or when I put on my rustly parka and pulled on my galoshes with some grunting difficulty. When I stepped outside, there were, as I recall, eighteen and a half inches of snow on t
he ground. All over the city, stems from the larger pumpkins barely emerged from the snow like snorkels round a touristy reef (I did a bit of traveling during my two-year affair [mid-’01–late-’03] with an ad-agency noncreative), but most of the pumpkins were submerged altogether, along with ashcans, oilcans, leaf piles, Tonka trucks, and some of the smaller grills and Coleman stoves.
Considering the size and prematurity of the storm, I was surprised when my bus arrived more or less on time, though after a while I realized that it wasn’t my bus at all, but a much-delayed earlier bus, explaining why many of the passengers looked unfamiliar and more professional than those of us who didn’t need to make it downtown till just past nine. The bus got stuck near Franklin Avenue, and about a dozen of its more spirited and sacrificing riders got out to push—against Metropolitan Transit Commission regs, repeated the gregarious driver. We managed to loose the wheels (one of them spewed grime on my pants), and I high-fived the thin glove of a fellow pusher wearing a stiff glen-plaid suit under his promotional letter jacket, the suit’s wide trousers only grazing his pinchy wingtips. My ankle-boot galoshes weren’t built for the task either, especially since the left galosh had a nickel-sized hole on its heel.
Timid or lazy stay-at-homes had given downtown a cheery holiday sparseness, and after I got off the bus I lingered awhile in the snow-global scene in front of the record store, even though my arrival at the store was recorded by two machines and I was often scolded for tardiness. Sometimes the wind would blow a cluster of flakes into curved feathers. When, a bit later, I got back from the bank in time to open the store, I was met by a somewhat mentally handicapped woman who came in every few weeks to ask after the same discontinued Bolling Greene cassette, Hosses, which had helped her through a hard time, she’d once explained. I unlocked the doors and she followed me into the store, stamping her boots on the welcome mat. “It’s snow joke,” she said, and we had our recurrent conversation about Bolling and the fickleness of the record industry, the decline of the cassette. After she left, no customers came in for several hours. I took a seat on the ledge of the store’s plate-glass windows and watched the snow fall, listening to a Kentucky Headhunters tape at a higher volume than was usual for the store, until their music started to seem properly genial but improperly prosaic for the occasion, and I put on Joni Mitchell’s latest, which I later brought home for Wade, not much taken with it. None of my coworkers made it in. I understood why Wade sought out nearly solitary straight jobs—filling up vending machines, watching over parking lots. At about four o’clock the district manager called to say that all the stores in his ambit were closing for the rest of the day.
