I marched against the wars he fought in back when he was still too young to fight in them. We had tried to stop them before they started but the wars came anyway and they never ended so he came of age and went to fight, and they were still being fought without him now as he sat in a windowless classroom tucked between the storefront and the firing range, teaching an erstwhile Jew from Miami the right way to hold and load a Sig Sauer P226, the standard-issue infantry sidearm, same as he had carried in the desert.
It wasn’t a real Sig Sauer I was holding. Not yet. This was a dummy gun. He was teaching me how to load a clip and work the safety, the correct overlay of fingers in the two-handed grip. He taught me a breathing exercise that I recognized from yoga. I did not tell him this.
When he deemed me ready for the real gun, we went out to the range. He had warned me about the kickback on the Sig, which is an automatic pistol, but I didn’t understand what he was saying until I squeezed off the first round. The gun bucked like a mule and I found myself pointing its lightly smoking barrel at the ceiling, the spent shell having spit itself back at me, bounced off my glasses, and fallen into the collar of my shirt. My teacher took all this in stride.
Slowly I got steadier, less skittish. I put some holes in the orange silhouette on the target.
I asked if I could switch to another gun. He said the AR-15 was a lot of fun but I didn’t want to spend that much money on bullets, so I asked for a .357 magnum (the only other gun I knew the name of), which was heavier than the Sig, but for that reason easier to hold steady. Without the automatic’s fierce recoil to reckon with I did a better job of maintaining my aim. A half dozen holes appeared in the target. And sure they were low and to the right, hardly kill shots, but there they were within a couple of inches of each other, clustered like a constellation in the belly of the silhouette.
The whole experience lasted two hours and cost me a hundred bucks. I remember I thought that I should tip him but I’m not sure if I did, or if I did whether he accepted. I knew that I would not be returning to this place. My purpose in coming here had been to attach experience, something known and felt, to the otherwise largely abstract concept of “a gun.” (Abstract to me, I mean.) Now I knew something specific and untranslatable: the weight and heat of metal; the river of silence that ran between the click of the magnum’s hammer pulling back and the thunder of its falling forward.
As he rang me up at the front register, my teacher suggested I consider getting a range membership. I told him I was in town for work (I couldn’t bring myself to say the word “semester,” much less “writer-in-residence”) and that I only had a month to go before I left. “Well, heck,” he said, “if you’re only here a little bit, one thing you’ve got to do is see the tiger sanctuary.”
“The tiger sanctuary?” I said.
“The tiger sanctuary,” he said. “Out in Center Point.”
An old man, a grizzled type, the kind of guy with whom I had expected to spend a morning such as this one, emerged from the back room of the shop. “Y’all talking about the tiger sanctuary?” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “You been out there too?”
“Best ten dollars you will spend in this life,” he said. “And it’s not just tigers neither.”
* * *
—
The tiger sanctuary is an hour and twenty minutes due west of Indianapolis. I drove out on Wednesday the twenty-ninth of March, late enough in the morning to miss rush-hour traffic but not so late that I’d have to hurry to make it back for my evening class. I was in the mood to drive and play loud music and be alone with my thoughts. One week—to the day and almost to the hour—since my visit to the shooting range. I had already begun to polish and revise the scene at the cash register with the two men—that is, the scene you just read—though at this point I had no notion of you who are reading this, or indeed of this book you are reading: I was “writing” it as a story that I’d tell Dad. We’d last talked a week and a half earlier, so we were due for another call.
The guys at the gun shop had described the sanctuary as a place of profundity and desolation. (They didn’t actually say those things, but I got the sense that that was what they meant.) On the day they’d visited they’d been the only people out there and so had enjoyed a tour no less intimate than the private shooting lesson I’d lucked into. Their guide had even let them touch the flank of one of the tigers, and it was on account of this transformative encounter with the very breathing muscle of wild nature that the old man had deemed the admission fee to be the ten best-spent dollars of his life.
I cued up Songs: Ohia’s album The Magnolia Electric Co. and hit the highway. Magnolia is a strange and beautiful album, an all-time favorite. Jason Molina, the songwriter and bandleader, had a style at once forlorn and anthemic. His work is haunted and haunting. He was from that part of the country where the South and the Midwest mingle like brackish water—Ohio, West Virginia—where Chicago is the city people dream of, not New York. The record label that broke him big (as big as he got) is based in Bloomington, Indiana. It felt special to listen to this music, that spirit and that voice, in the region where much of it had been written and performed, and with which it was always concerned.
* * *
—
Jason Molina was an alcoholic. This was not widely known until after he died, in March 2013, succumbing to complications from an illness instigated by his disease. He was thirty-nine years old. I had interviewed him once, in 2010. A fan, I’d emailed him out of the blue and asked for a phone call, which he generously gave to me. Josephine, which would prove to be Molina’s last LP, had come out about a year before. The band was on hiatus and he was living in England, where he’d moved for his wife’s job. He alluded a few times in our talk to health issues, a chronic illness, but did not specify what it was. At one point I asked him outright and he said he didn’t want to say. I thought maybe he’d had cancer. I realize now that he meant addiction, and almost certainly depression too. There are references to illness, to the degradation and soul damage that come with permanent sickness, threaded all throughout his vast body of work. Molina made the most he could of a suffering that ultimately proved beyond endurance. He packed a whole life’s work into the too-short time he had.
We talked for hours. I asked him dense, writerly questions about his lyrics, and he gamely answered all of them. I think he was surprised and pleased to learn that there was someone out there reading his stuff closely, as though it were poetry. I wanted to know about the way he composed, why he came back to certain images or ideas over and over again, and what it all meant to him.
“I think of a song as something you build,” he told me.
It’s not something that you do, it’s not something that comes out of your gut. It’s like you have bricks, you have mortar, you have a trowel—You don’t have a building plan yet, you just have all the raw materials and you just start building it and you hope to god you get something good. But as far as the imagery goes, I’ve always treated it as a rebus. These images all fit into a storyline that is completely open to the interpretation of anybody who listens to it. If you sit down and look at all the lyrics to all the songs, you’ll see that there is a theme, but it’s not running in a straight line. It’s like the dawn coming on, or dusk. It’s always in that purple-grey area. But when I say a mule, I really mean a mule, and when I say the horizon I really mean the horizon.
Later in the conversation I asked him about ghosts. “Ghost” is a crucial word for Molina. It may be his most consistent recurring image. For that reason, among others, I wanted to know whether the ghost was as real to him as the horizon and the mule. He said yes without hesitation.
Seven years after that conversation, Molina was dead and I was living in the part of the country that had made and shaped him, driving a road (I-70 West) that he had surely known well. Moreover, I knew some things about loneliness, about illne
ss and dislocation, that I had not known in 2010. And I had far more yet to learn about all of these, but for the time being I knew enough to sense the scope and depth of what Molina had meant when he wrote a song whose first line was its name and the line was “I’ve been riding with the ghost.” He was the ghost I rode with that day, but he wasn’t the only one.
* * *
—
As I drove west on I-70 with Magnolia Electric Co. blasting, my thoughts drifted from Jason Molina, from Indiana, and back toward New York, where, a few months earlier, my friend and former student Eli Todd had overdosed on heroin and died. He was twenty-three years old. Eli had been my student at the Pratt Institute. I’d begun teaching there in 2011, the same year he’d started as a freshman, and I became close not just with him but with several students in that year’s cohort. They were a great bunch of kids: smart, excitable, unruly, up for any academic or creative challenge I threw their way. As things turned out, my four years as a teacher at Pratt coincided exactly with theirs as students. I kept in touch with a number of them after we went our separate ways. Eli and I traded jokes on Twitter; we emailed about music. I asked to see his work sometimes, and we met up when I visited New York. He was among the most promising young writers I’ve ever worked with, and though still very much finding his voice, had at twenty-one and twenty-two years old already produced a few stories that I thought worthy of publication.
I took one for a small DIY arts journal that I ran with a friend of mine. I took another for The Literary Review, where I was the fiction editor. TLR hosted an issue-release party at a bookstore in Brooklyn in May 2016. I came back to the city for it and Eli was one of the readers. I took him and another old student, Gabe, to the after-party.
At some point in the night, both of us deep in our cups, Eli told me a garbled story about having gone through a period where he was messing around with pills. Opiates, specifically. He kept the details vague. The only thing he told me clearly, and emphatically, was that it was all in the past. There were no lingering issues and he wasn’t an addict. It was just this weird thing he’d struggled with but had gotten over, nothing to worry about, he didn’t even know why he was telling me.
Of course, I did worry. It was alarming to hear these things, and the fact that he had confessed them non sequitur suggested that the issue wasn’t as firmly settled as he thought it was, or rather, as he wanted me to think that it was. Or he knew that it wasn’t and that was why he’d broached the subject. He didn’t say anything about heroin, which would have immediately changed the whole tenor of the conversation, which he would have been aware of, which I assume is why he didn’t say it. He wasn’t a junkie, but he had a junkie’s instinct for knowing how to play his audience, how to turn even a tell-all confession into a sort of performance. Perversely yet unsurprisingly, this natural affinity for narrative was what made him such a talented fiction writer.
I will never know if there was something else I could have done or said in that moment that might have changed things for him; I’d like to believe there wasn’t, but I also know better than to trust such a self-exculpatory thought. For what it’s worth, I gave him a lecture. I told him I was sorry to treat him like a student again, but that since he’d brought it up he should know just how stupid a thing he’d done, that it wasn’t worth the risk. I said all the things that you’re supposed to say, though I honestly wasn’t thinking in terms of mortal danger so much as the drag of rehab, the rounds of kicking and relapse, the needless delay on the road to the real life it seemed so obvious that he had waiting for him. I told him to call me if he ever felt like he was falling off the wagon. He told me again that it was all in the past, and not to sweat it; I told him to just remember what I’d said. He promised that he would. And then, because there was nothing else to be said, we changed the subject. We left the party soon afterward, said good night. I hugged him, hugged Gabe. It was the last time I saw Eli alive.
* * *
—
We were in touch throughout the summer and fall. The last time we spoke was October 18, 2016, on Twitter. He tweeted “well the time has come and im getting rly into the dead again guys.” By this he meant the Grateful Dead, a sort of open-secret guilty pleasure of his, and one of the things we shared. Gabe, who after graduation had gone home to New Mexico, replied to Eli with a link to a Phish show and the comment “i don’t know if you’ve ever heard of this band but i think you’d like them.” I was sitting in my home office in Portland when I saw this, and I laughed out loud.
To understand why this is funny, you’d have to know that Deadheads tend to think of ourselves as categorically separate from fans of jam bands in general. In fact, Eli had a longstanding conviction that the Dead “weren’t really a jam band” at all, because their radical approach was without precedent at the time that they took it; that is, the Dead worked without the model of the Dead, which all subsequent jam bands have had to draw on. This is ridiculous, of course—I mean, it’s utterly absurd—and yet I find that I agree with it completely. If anything, I’m jealous that I never thought to make this argument myself.
I sent Eli a YouTube link to the Dead show that had been preoccupying me of late: July 8, 1978, the second night of a two-night stand at Red Rocks, Colorado. It’s a solid set list, and the band sounds fantastic. You can tell they’re all getting along, neither Jerry nor Keith is strung out, and they keep their energy levels high for three gorgeous hours of music: two sets and a meaty encore that includes both their prog-rock-inflected fantasy epic “Terrapin Station” and a cover of Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London.”
I don’t know whether Eli ever listened to the show. Maybe he was saving it for later or maybe he had other things on his mind. That was three in the afternoon, Pacific Time, so six o’clock where he was. He probably left his apartment shortly after our conversation; maybe was already out the door by the time I sent the link and didn’t want to play a three-hour YouTube video on his phone. It’s hard to think of anything that matters less than what I’m wondering about right now, but sometimes I do wonder about it, still.
Here’s what I know: Eli was out with friends when he got a text from S, whom he knew through a DIY music venue in Bushwick where they both played shows. S was also the person who had introduced Eli to shooting heroin with a needle, as opposed to taking pills. That night S couldn’t find his regular dealer and he wanted Eli—who had a car—to pick him up so they could go see some other dealer he knew. After they scored, Eli dropped off S and then drove back to Red Hook alone, where he shot up in the bathroom of the apartment he shared with three other guys. One of the roommates came home around 2 A.M. and noticed light coming from under the closed door of the bathroom before heading to bed. Eli had overdosed by this point, but was probably still alive. Neither of the other two roommates spent that night at home—one was with his girlfriend; the other, I don’t know. When the roommate who was home got up around 4 A.M., presumably to use the bathroom, he found the door still closed and the light still on. When he opened the door he found Eli, but by then it was too late.
* * *
—
The next afternoon I missed a phone call. I was at home in Portland and the phone was sitting beside my laptop on my desk. Everything was exactly as it had been the day before; in fact, it was around the same time of day that I had been tweeting with Eli and Gabe. My phone began to ring and the caller was unknown but the number was a 305 area code. That’s Miami, so I reached over to pick it up, half expecting the call to be from a hospital (is Dad okay? is Grandma?), but there was some kind of malfunction: The phone froze and would not let me answer. I tried to call back but the phone wouldn’t let me do that either. Then I saw I had a voicemail. I pulled it up. It was another former Pratt student, Anika, and she was crying. Adding to the confusion was the fact that the phone’s most recent iOS update had incorporated automatic voice-to-text transcription, but I hadn’t gotten a voicemail since ins
talling said update, so I didn’t know that I had that feature now. Because it was hard to understand what Anika was saying, I pulled the phone away from my ear to put it on speaker, hoping that this would make it easier to hear. When the screen turned on, it filled with this:
TRANSCRIPTION BETA
“Hey Justin this is Monica um I’m just calling because I didn’t want you to find out about the on the Internet um you are I am a little tired I figured I don’t know ___ I didn’t want you to see it online anyway um I don’t how much the fax it I think I left anyway sorry daddy calling with if you feel that are all care…”
Was this transcription useful or not useful?
* * *
—
I listened to the message again from the beginning and this time was able to understand.
* * *
—
Like Jason Molina’s music, Denis Johnson’s story collection, Jesus’ Son, is a work of art that I had long treasured but felt I was coming to understand in new ways while living in the Midwest, since so much of it takes place in Iowa and Chicago. It’s a book about addiction, about just how much despair a life can hold. How arduous and slow, but also how swift and overmastering, the work of grace can be. It’s a book about heroin and an easy one to misunderstand as glamorizing the experience, though for whatever it’s worth I don’t think that Eli did. I would like to believe that the book gave him a language for articulating to himself those things that he was already struggling with, that it gave him a glimpse of what the path back out might look like, even though it was a path he didn’t have the chance to walk.
Riding with the Ghost Page 10
