Boarded Windows

by Dylan Hicks

  Probably I couldn’t have stopped Gustafson anyway. He didn’t really need my permission; he was just being courteous, and his show, Medea Culpa, was surely beyond its beginning stages (it opened less than two months later). In Gustafson’s treatment, as I came to understand it from secondhand reports, my story included a comic yet contemplative picaresque section and concluded with a dramatic (“wrenching,” said one of the dailies) reunion between my unnamed surrogate and Martha Dickson, rechristened Lacy Rugh and then living in Moon Township, Pennsylvania, where she worked as a brand manager for a pharmaceutical company and was still happily married to “Mike,” “name” retained and flourishing at Prudential. The show got strong reviews, made a few of the local reviewers’ Top Ten lists that December, and enjoyed three revivals. Wanda, by then on the theater beat for the Twin Cities’ LGBT glossy, as has been noted in less detail, was the only critic not taken with the play, which I never saw despite Gustafson’s kind invitations.

  When Gustafson called about using my story, he asked me if I had ever tried to find my mother. “I’m not the questing type,” I told him. In truth, I’m not wholly unquesting. I’ve discovered, for instance, that Martha isn’t listed in any of the online phone directories, and that the leading search engines turn up no other leads. Probably she took “Mike”’s name. Keeping one’s name was still leading edge in the early seventies, and my sense is that Martha’s time on or near that edge was short. Wade, we know, was unsure even of “Mike”’s first name, and said nothing of his last, though I guess it wouldn’t require much sleuthing on my part to find it out. I’ve considered taking more forceful measures to find Martha, just as I’ve considered paying a surprise visit to Wade, but such reunions, I’m sure, would only bring pain. It was easier when I could sympathize with Martha, when I saw her not as some flighty, selfish black marketeer but as a wasted, desperate young woman who gave me away out of love. I’ve often resented Wade for upending Marleen’s well-meaning lies, and yet for a long time I couldn’t help but think that he had some beautiful design in mind, that he was trying in his way to do right by me.

  A few summers ago, I did at least take a road trip back to Enswell, where Martha’s reportedly obese older brother still lives. I thought about calling him, but didn’t, nor did I look up any of my grade-school playpals, a few of whom may have passed me on the street or in the mall. The paradox about my loneliness is that while I do feel the weight of the word’s meaning—I do feel painfully alone—the pull to actually be with other people grows easier and easier to ignore. At the library I found Enswell High’s 1967 and ’68 yearbooks. In both, Martha was listed under “Students Not Pictured.” She wasn’t on the cheerleading squad after all, apparently, nor was she listed in any of the Enswell phone books I looked through. I did find her parents in the ’67 book: “Dickson William B & Mildred D pipefitter Great Northern Railway …” I stopped for a few minutes in front of what was once their modest home. Also on the trip I had my cowboy boots resoled at the saddle shop on Enswell’s beleaguered Main Street, where Motown and other R&B oldies piped lonesomely and I suppose incongruously from municipal loudspeakers. In Ruyak Park, the sounds of playing children sometimes drowned out by impudent exhaust tones and desperate hemispherical combustion chambers filled me with intensely sad nostalgia. There were muscle cars everywhere. At a traffic light later that same night, I pulled up behind one, an early nineties Pontiac. “If you’re gonna ride my ass, at least pull my hair,” read its bumper sticker, bespeaking, I thought, Enswell’s enduring strain of petulance and impurity. I followed the car for a few miles, failing to get a look at the driver’s face, though I felt I could make it out later that night when I masturbated twice into one of the motel’s balding lemon hand towels.

  The Basement (1)

  A FEW DAYS AFTER I GOT BACK FROM CHICAGOLAND in the fall of ’98—Maggie Tollefsrud’s van returned not noticeably the worse for wear, a cover of clutter on my pink-and-blue easy chair—I got an email from Maryanne. The body of the text: “It was great to see you.” Economical to a fault, as well as redundant, those being her parting words to me at the curtain of her freight elevator. Then the playful postscript: “Do you come to Chicago often?” My sincere and quietly witty response went unanswered. My emails are often failures: too formal or too self-consciously chatty, too aloof, too earnest, too grave, too jokey, too self-assured, too pathetic, too open to misreadings, too closed to nuance. Or there’s nothing wrong with the tone of my emails. Perhaps they’re so frequently unanswered for other reasons. I’ve often loitered in my “sent” box, rereading a dangling email three or four times, and consistently I spot nothing repellent in its neutral, sometimes modestly clever subject lines, nothing estranging in the notes themselves. I’ve forwarded some of these to other friends, few of whom have contradicted my sense that little if anything in the forwarded email would offend or for other reasons silence a normal recipient, one friend at least finally agreeing that a laconic yet soothing response would have taken the recipient less than a minute to compose, making busyness no real excuse.

  So Maryanne didn’t reply to my reply to her overshort email. For a week or more I checked not infrequently for her response. (Now, though I have little reason to expect an email more uplifting than a badly punctuated concert invitation from some stranger I’m friends with on Facebook, I will generally check my email thirty times a day.) Then in April ’99 I got a call from Maryanne. She’d moved back to Minneapolis, she told me, or rather to one of its southern suburbs, and was working at a RadioShack. “The district manager says I’m RadioShack’s first female employee.”

  “What? That can’t be,” I said.

  “There’s some women at corporate, but I’m the first to work in the field.”

  “I still don’t think that’s accurate.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “I responded to your email but you never responded to me,” I said.

  “I never got a response. I thought you blew me off.”

  “I responded. I probably still have my response in my sent folder. I could send it again.”

  “It might’ve gotten mixed up with my spam.”

  After letting a few skeptical seconds pass, I asked after Rowan.

  “He’s good. He got a new bike. So listen, I’m living with Wanda now. The house we’re living in is her place; I’m helping her pay the mortgage. The main reason I’m calling, besides just to say hi, is that there’s a basement apartment here, a pretty nice one, and the guy who’s been living down there gave his notice. So I told Wanda I’d make a few calls, see if anyone’s looking for a place.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’d be cool to get someone in there we know.”

  “Well, I’ve already got an apartment, and, I don’t know, I like being in the city.”

  “It’s really close to the border, and the rent’s cheap.” She told me the figure, and it was cheap, less than I’d ever paid, except when I’d split fifty-fifty or in some other way divided household expenses with roommates. At the time I was renting a Victorian attic from a couple of gentrifiers who weren’t as smart as they looked. The rent wasn’t exorbitant, but it was higher than my income or the bat-ridden attic justified. (I was making small, irregular money as a musician, but mainly earned my keep as part of a street team of guerilla marketers.) The attic’s temperature was always uncomfortable by ten degrees in one direction or the other, and its small windows seemed to have some cheer-filtering effect on the view. “Are you thinking about it?” Maryanne said on the phone.

  I was, and was the next day thinking about the GI Bill, and an unprecedented demand for single-family homes, and—the reader, I’m guessing, roughly understands what prodded American postwar domestic architecture toward homogeneity, and won’t be surprised that Wanda’s taupe, postwar two-bedroom was similar in many respects to the gray, postwar two-bedroom I lived in as a kid in Enswell. It was strange, however, to see that Wanda’s house, like my mother Marleen’s place on Queal, was next
to a church, more precisely next to its parking lot. The church next to Wanda’s place was UCC rather than Lutheran, the building of yellow rather than chestnut brick, modernist, I suppose, rather than Romanesque Revival. Nevertheless. I sat in the Leveret looking at the house and then the church, the parking lot and then the house, the church, the house, the lot, the lot still more, the church again, the lot, the house.

  As I approached Wanda’s door, I realized I was a block south of her house, at 2304 instead of 2404.

  At the correct house (slate and also very similar to Marleen’s onetime two-bedroom), Wanda opened the door before I rang the bell. In the living room, Maryanne and Rowan were watching The Andy Griffith Show. Maryanne laughed at one of Floyd’s lines, and Rowan followed suit, overdoing it. The adults talked small awhile, then Wanda took me down to the basement.

  After the newish washer and drier, the second thing I noticed was Maryanne’s huge, still-headless sculpture, now sleeping like Ozymandias on the basement’s crumbly concrete floor. The apartment itself was not unlike Wade’s old place, but as with the churches there were dozens of differences: for instance in this unit there was a silver strip separating the kitchen’s white linoleum from the main room’s coffee-stained baby-blue cut pile, whereas in Wade’s unit a gold strip had separated beige linoleum from crimson shag. “Is that oak wainscoting?” I said, about the cheap paneling. “Rosewood,” Wanda said. It felt good to easily fall back into joking. “Well,” Wanda said, “it’s a basement apartment, so there’s the risk of depression. But it’s cheap, cool in the summer. Laundry’s free. Folding’s extra.”

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “Just kidding—like we were gonna fold your clothes.”

  “Oh, folding,” I said. “I just didn’t hear you.”

  “Do you think your hearing’s suffered from playing music?”

  “Come again?”

  “Has your hearing—”

  “Gotcha. No, I think my hearing’s okay.” Pause. “I like your theater criticism.”

  “It’s reviewing more than criticism,” she said. “And previewing, even worse.”

  “Seems like a good gig.”

  “I kind of stumbled into it. I have to do temp work too.”

  “Oh. At first I drove up to the wrong house, a block down. I thought you lived next to that church.”

  “Nope, we live right here.”

  “That would have felt especially odd, since Wade lived in a basement place kind of like this when I was a kid, and there was a church on the corner next to that place too.”

  “Well, you can’t really put a big church in the middle of a block,” she said.

  “Even without the church, it might feel repetitious to live here.”

  “We won’t be living together, we’ll just be living in the same house. You’d have your own mailbox.”

  “I don’t mean repeating our thing.” I began to stammer a further explanation but stopped before saying anything coherent.

  “What if I knocked twenty-five bucks off the rent?” she said.

  “Like to compensate for whatever weirdness I might feel?” I said.

  “Interpret it how you will.” A minute later she trotted upstairs to get the lease. I didn’t know whether to wait downstairs or follow her, so I waited. After a while she called down for me to come up, and I was even invited to stay for taco night. The invitation seemed reluctant but I accepted it.

  The Basement (2)

  “I STARTED TO THINK OF WHAT JOHN LENNON SAID about the chair. The blues is a chair, he said. It’s not a chair for admiring. You sit on it, he said. A music critic wrote about this chair in a big red book your Phoenician father was lugging though Vagabondia.”

  “Wade’s probably not my—”

  Bolling went on: “The book was falling apart; pages would float around the van when we opened the windows. One time … What was the name of that building where they wrote songs?”

  Upstairs the sound of bottles being dumped on bottles.

  “In New York City,” he said. In May of ’99, shortly after the release of his quiet comeback effort, & Goliath, Bolling played one of Minneapolis’s smaller stages. This was after the show.

  “Brill?” I said.

  “That’s it. One time most of the Brill chapter from Wade’s book flew right out the window. Wade wondered if parts of the Beatles section would get erased as a result. I liked Wade. You ever hear my Beatles record?”

  “I’ve heard about it,” I said. A copy of Bolling’s rare Beatles album, Wade said, wept gently in one of the boxes that once cornered my apartment, but I looked through those boxes with some thoroughness and never came across it.

  “It’s hard to find. Folks treated that record like a joke, but I wanted to sing those songs. I’d been singing a few of them in Austin, and one night these two dudes came up to me after the show, a young, squirrely one and an older fat one. The fat one wore a knit necktie that didn’t even come close to his belly button. You think I’m fat?”

  “You’re kind of fat.”

  “Not compared to this dude. The squirrely one bought me a drink and said, ‘We want you to make a record of Beatle songs.’ He and his partner had a little record company. The next morning I had it all mapped out, side A to side B, who’d take the solos, everything. So they rented me a studio in Nashville for a weekend. My opinion was that we should just do it local, but they said, ‘Naw, we’re doing this for real.’ I hadn’t planned on doing it for pretend.” Bolling smiled. His eyes were small for his big potato face and their whites, to borrow a line from a Porter Wagoner tune, looked like a road map of Georgia. “They wouldn’t let me bring my own guys. The squirrely one said, ‘Don’t take this wrong, hoss, but your guys can’t play their instruments.’ Then the fat one jumps in: ‘If they could play their instruments, they’d be welcome to play on the record.’ They were a couple of a-holes, these dudes. My guys were by no stretch incapable. The drummer couldn’t exactly keep time, but he lost it in one direction, by which I mean he sped up. And people like that.”

  “It’s an accelerating culture, they say.”

  Bolling pointed at me: “There you go. Most of the guys they hired for the session weren’t first-string guys, but they were good. Good and in one case great, since they brought in the Goat, may he rest in peace, and he could make anything sound better. You know the Goat?”

  “Sure.”

  “No one played the steel guitar better than the Goat. Except Ralph Mooney and Speedy West. Once in the studio—this was years later—the Goat played me a solo that I’ll never remember.” He paused. “This solo was beyond memory, is what I’m saying.”

  “Like the unconscious?” I said.

  “I don’t know. Isn’t that beneath memory? This was beyond memory. That’s how incredible it was. It was only sixteen bars long, but every note was perfect, every space too. Lester Young would have loved that solo. That’s how I grew up, breathing Lester Young out of my mouth, Jimmie Rodgers out of my nose. You ever hear Lester’s speaking voice?”

  “No.”

  “It had that lilt, just like you’d expect. Fine and mellow, right? If Lester’d heard the Goat’s solo, he would’ve said, ‘Yeah, y’know, that’s about it.’ The Goat played that solo, and for good measure we did a couple few more takes, and then the Goat went home to his pot roast or what all. And that night the producer insisted on using one of the other takes. I said, ‘Ain’t you listening to that solo?’ He said, ‘It’s a good solo on a bad take.’ I thought we were turning our backs on humanity.”

  Bolling emptied his glass, reached into the neck of his armadillo T-shirt to rub his liver-spotted shoulders. We were in what the Dog’s Bite Boozery called its green room. It was just a corner of the basement, but it had a loveseat, a chair, a low coffee table, a few ashtrays, an out-of-place copy of Details. Also in the vicinity were boxes of booze, boxes of toilet paper, bowling trophies, curling trophies, trophies that curled. I was stoned.

  “You were talking a
bout the chair,” I said.

  “I’m leading up to that.” He paused again, this time for quite a while. “They made me put on overalls and stand on a pile of manure with a shovel, so they could call my Beatles record Dung Beatle. They brought me out to this farm, these record-company dudes did, along with a photographer, who looked to be the fat one’s cousin. They handed me a red jacket with epaulets and some cheap brassy stuff, made me wear that over the overalls. So I guess they weren’t even overalls!” We both laughed. He waited for the laughter to die and said, “If you look at my face on that record, you can tell I’m hurting. Have you ever seen a girl in a dirty magazine where you can tell she’s hurting?”