There are a lot of sad moments in Jesus’ Son, but the one I come back to the most often, the one that haunts me, is the death of Jack Hotel. In the story “Out on Bail,” Hotel and the narrator cop together split the bag, then separate. They both OD but the narrator is revived by his friends while Hotel is not revived by his. The story ends with these lines:
“He died. I am still alive.”
This is a book that was taught to me as an undergraduate and as a graduate student, that as a teacher myself now I assign every chance I get. It was on my spring syllabus in Indianapolis, and indeed I had reread and taught it only the week before, on March 16, 2017, to be exact, which it either will or won’t surprise you to learn was the fourth anniversary of Jason Molina’s death. And I could not, of course, know at that time that Denis Johnson himself would be dead of liver cancer by the end of May.
Jesus’ Son has been a part of my life for twenty years and I still find it inexhaustible. Its meanings proliferate and resonate as the years go by. Here’s one more layer of meaning it has for me now. In a dream I am back in my classroom at Pratt, it’s just me and Eli in the room, he’s sitting in one of those awful chair-desks and I’m standing, it’s twilight out the window—magic hour—and I am screaming at him the way my father used to scream at me when something was so important that he was willing to blow a vocal cord to make me hear it: the righteous roar of insatiable impotent rage.
I taught you this book, is what I’m screaming. We talked about it for hours and I made you write a fucking paper on it, then you went and did exactly what it warned you not to do.
* * *
—
Who would Eli have grown up to be if he’d had the chance to finish growing? Would he have defeated his demon, yoked it and put it to work like Denis Johnson did? Or would his story have gone more like Jason Molina’s, who wrote in a song called “Farewell Transmission” these lines that I used to think were metaphorical but which I now understand to be literal:
There ain’t no end to the sands I’ve been trying to cross
Real truth about it is
My kind of life is no better off
If it’s got the map or if it’s lost
I don’t know if those lines are true of Eli. I don’t want to believe that they are, that they ever could have been. But I believe they are true of my father, who, though not an addict of any kind, was far more cognizant than he ever let on about the mental illness from which he suffered, and about the ways that depression and rage deformed his life. Like an addict, he white-knuckled it, and predictably enough it worked except for when it didn’t. (That it worked as often as it did, for as long as it did, is a testament to his discipline, his enviable and terrifying force of will.) When things fell apart, he did his best to put them back together. This, too, worked except for when it didn’t. And then one day it no longer worked at all.
* * *
—
Center Point, Indiana. Off the highway, down the town road, past a church and another church. Long curve around farmland and into the woods. A hilly lane switches from asphalt to gravel, solitary homesteads boasting Trump signs, a swimming hole with a posted notice that says SMILE YOU’RE ON CAMERA and why would it matter to anyone living this far from anywhere whether some kids want to sneak a dip in their mucky pond?
I arrive at the tiger sanctuary just shy of noon. I park in a gravel lot a quarter mile past the main entrance, an employee lot, but a sign says I can also park here. At the far end of the lot, in an industrial garage with its door rolled up, a one-armed employee is using a machete to butcher a cow carcass hanging on a hook.
I walk up the road back the way I drove in, a bucolic quarter mile of two-lane gravel hugged by Indiana woods, to the gate of the sanctuary proper, where my solitude is promptly obliterated by the shouts of a hundred children. This week, I quickly learn, is spring break for some Indiana elementary schools. I pay my $10 admission and get assigned to a tour group. There are about two dozen of us, and I am the only adult other than the tour guide who is not there in his capacity as the guardian of a child.
The tour lasts an hour. Tigers, lions, lynx, and many other big cats; I see them all. The guide tells heartbreaking stories of abuse and rescue. Drug lords and roadside zoos. We watch a feeding (bucket after bucket of chicken quarters) and we hear the lions roar and see the tigers leap from perch to perch in their habitats like the enormous house cats that at this point they basically are. This place does good and difficult and often thankless work. I am glad I gave them my $10, glad I’ve seen it. I do not have a transformative encounter with the very breathing muscle of wild nature. It is not the best $10 I have ever spent.
The main thing I’ve gotten out of the visit, I think to myself as I walk back to the car, is the slapstick of my baffled expectation. This will be a lot of fun to tell Dad about. It is just his kind of humor. I almost call him on the ride home—but again I don’t. I want to listen to more music, keep thinking things through. Molina and Eli, chance and grace, loss and fate. I want to move through the static and distance, as Molina sings near the end of “Farewell Transmission.” I want to ride with the ghost again, recover that solitude I forfeited to the sugar-addled elementary school students of Central Indiana. That solitude was what brought me out here, and I need it to carry me back home and so I let it. And that’s why I do not call my father, who wouldn’t answer the phone if I did call, because he has been dead for a week already, but I won’t find that out until tomorrow.
PART II
Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
The death certificate says March 30. This is not true.
* * *
—
My father died in the kitchen of his apartment in Sunrise Lakes. He probably died of a heart attack, possibly from a stroke, probably on March 24, 2017, though possibly the night before. I know from his phone records that he answered a call from his pharmacy on the afternoon of the twenty-third. He had a new prescription ready and he picked it up. It was Levodopa, the same medication he had been taking for years, but in a new dosage. I do not know whether he tried the new prescription or was waiting for the next day. If he did try it, it is possible—though unlikely—that his death was the result of an adverse reaction to the dosage. The police, having determined that his death was not the result of a crime or intentional self-harm, did not request an autopsy. We were offered the option of having one performed at our own expense. We did not take it.
* * *
—
My last conversation with my father was Sunday, March 19. What did we talk about? The usual stuff: everything and nothing. An upcoming neurologist appointment, my latest failed attempt at admission into the august pages of The Paris Review. He probably asked if I’d talked to my sister lately; I probably asked if he’d heard from either of his. I can picture the room I was standing in when I hung up the phone. I guess a part of me is still standing in that room. The sunroom, it was called. The Butler writing program’s building is a converted house across the street from the campus proper. I lived as well as taught there. Nights and weekends I had the run of the whole place, and treated it as a kind of extended living room, filling it with music and walking around in my socks. The sunroom is on the ground floor, all wood, big windows on the exterior walls, and the interior wall has built-in bookshelves stocked with the work of faculty and alums and visiting writers and Indiana luminaries: Kurt Vonnegut, Michael Martone, and Booth Tarkington, for whom both my fellowship and the program’s literary journal were named. Booth magazine. The Booth Tarkington Writer-in-Residence. I am standing in the sunroom forever, phone still warm in my hand; forever the low moan of the heating system and an SUV brazenly blowing past the Stop sign in front of the campus police station; forever the dryer-lint light of lingering winter and a looming afternoon storm.
* * *
—
And then it’s eleven days l
ater and the same phone’s ringing and it’s Mom. She’s crying. She wants to know if I’m alone.
* * *
—
On March 24 or 25, a neighbor with whom Dad was friendly noticed that she hadn’t seen him around. I don’t know whether she tried knocking on his door, though I assume she must have. If she had done this, and if the blinds on the kitchen window had been open when she did, she would have seen his body on the floor. I know she didn’t see that because she let another few days go by. By March 30 she was concerned enough to call the police, who broke the lock on the door and found him. They were not sure whom to call. Eventually, they found phone numbers for my aunt Ronni and for Mom.
* * *
—
Dad’s body was taken by the city, sent to the medical examiner, held in a city morgue. My aunts replaced the broken lock on his door. The apartment, site of a death and some decay, would require professional decontamination before anyone could go inside.
While my mother called my sister, I called my wife. My clearest memory of the night—maybe the only clear one—is her short, high scream when I broke the news. I hear it in my ear as I write this. (Amanda says she does not remember screaming. She says, “I remember saying, ‘Oh God’ and then sitting in the chair and apologizing to him out loud for failing him.” It may be that she said these things after we got off the phone, or that I heard them and simply do not remember. There are good reasons to trust her account over my own. Nevertheless, the only thing I remember about the phone call is the sound that I believe I heard.)
We were all in different places. Amanda was in Portland. Melanie was at home in New York. I was in my campus apartment in Indianapolis. Mom was home in Nashville with her partner, Mark. Dad was in Fort Lauderdale, wherever they had taken him. It was eight or nine o’clock at night, a Thursday. I booked the earliest flight I could get out of Indianapolis the next morning. I told everyone else to stay put. There were more phone calls, made and received.
Baruch dayan ehmet, my friend Joshua said.
Blessed is the true judge.
(Bad Jew that I am, I had to google what it meant.)
I drank whiskey while I packed. This was a shitty tribute to a man who I never once saw take a drink of any alcohol, who despised chemically altered states of all kinds, from drugs and booze to coffee and aspirin, but I wasn’t drinking to his memory. I was drinking because I hoped it would help me get enough sleep to wake up in a few hours and drive to the airport. The thing I was doing for him was where I was going—well no, not “for” him, because it was for me, too, but he’d have approved of the decision. If I had called him to ask for advice like I wanted so very, very badly to do just then—Christ, I will never forget that first time, like Mr. Ramsay crying out to his wife in To the Lighthouse, that I reached for the phone to call him and he was not there—this is what he would have said. I knew it as plainly as if he’d said it to me: Justin, you can’t help me right now. You’ll come when you can come, but for now there’s nothing for you to do in Florida. My sisters have each other. You should be with your sister. He was right, of course. My plane ticket was to JFK.
* * *
—
The endless first night: how I was never going to be able to sleep, but did sleep, waking up every hour or so, seeing dull red 3:30 on the digital clock and remembering, crazily, Dad’s story of the alarm at the Nashville airport hotel. My own alarm was set to 5 A.M. I woke up again at 4:57, shut it off, dragged myself to the shower, and hit the road, driving the borrowed Passat through heavy rain in the predawn black. I remember that Blood on the Tracks was on the stereo because that’s what I’d been listening to while I ran errands the day before. Sobbing, I drove and thought yet again how I am never more my father’s son than when I’m behind the wheel of a car with the stereo cranked all the way.
* * *
—
He’d wanted to be a musician at one time, though he didn’t play any instruments. I don’t know if he ever tried to learn. He always wanted me to learn but I never did. (My sister plays the piano but won’t play for anybody. It’s something she keeps for herself.) He’d had a band in high school, briefly, so briefly that my aunt Francine doesn’t even remember it having occurred. He mentioned it to me exactly once. He was the lead singer. He’d had the hair for it back then. (The same long hair I grew when I went to college, which he hated.) This would have been 1969, 1970 maybe. Did he write lyrics? I don’t know. I know they did Doors covers, may in fact have been exclusively a Doors cover band. He loved Jim Morrison, which when I think about it now is odd to me, because even though he always liked operatic bombast in nearly all its forms other than opera (ELO, King Crimson, Melanie Safka, hair metal, even Barbra Streisand), he loathed mystical mumbo-jumbo of any kind, as well as psychedelic drugs. He considered himself an atheist, a dogmatic realist. He thought it a deep deficiency of both character and intelligence to believe in things you could not see.
It is easy to wish now that I could ask Dad, or that I had asked when I had the chance, what the allure of Morrison was to him, but I doubt he’d have been willing to tell me. He may not have had the words for it himself. I suspect a lot of it was Morrison’s voice: the thunderous rumble of the instrument and the total conviction in his delivery, from the louche proposition of “Light My Fire” to the apocalyptic vision quest of “Celebration of the Lizard King.” I suspect he was drawn to the total abandon that Morrison embodied, to the idea that if he could have been someone totally unlike himself—a perfect inversion—he might have become something like that.
* * *
—
Another airport, another plane. The canned air of the cabin and cold daylight above the cloud line. Memories surface from the murk of anguish, show themselves, and vanish again. Vivid flashes like animals darting across a road.
In 1994, when I was still acting, I filmed what was to be the opening scene of the Sean Connery film Just Cause. I played the lead Boy Scout in a troop that was helping search for a missing girl, Joanie Shriver. We spent four or five days in a swamp, me calling Joanie’s name and then finding her mutilated corpse at the base of a tree, Dad watching from the edge of the set. I remember that the swamp was full of bees, and the pale pink nipples on the latex dummy. How I had to poke it with a stick and it rolled over. I had to give the longest, most horrified scream that I could muster. And I did, over and over and over, until I could hardly talk at all: They must have filmed me finding that corpse two dozen times. My parents and I went to see Just Cause on opening night. If you’ve seen this movie you know that the scene I’ve described does not appear in it. They had replaced my scene with a totally different opening and nobody had told us. “Maybe it’ll come later,” my mom said. “Like a flashback.” We watched the whole shitty, tawdry film in rigid expectation. When it ended, we left the theater in silence. I stormed ahead of them across the parking lot. When I reached the car I started sobbing. I cried so hard I could barely breathe. My father held me. “We’ll get ’em next time,” he said, stroking my hair.
Going with him to see Melanie Safka when she played at a nearby Borders Books and Music, I must have been in my senior year of high school, and he was so excited to be in that crowd of a couple dozen people in an overlit room in a chain bookstore that it might as well have been Carnegie Hall. How when she invited requests he asked for “Photograph,” his favorite song of hers (“Do you have a photograph when you were only growing / And your heart was in it?”) and she told him that she hadn’t rehearsed it for this tour, but that it meant a lot to her that he’d asked to hear it, because it rarely got requested, and was a favorite of hers as well.
Or the summer of 2005, when I was living at the Nashville house before moving to New York for grad school—the last time I would ever live at home. I had requested a promo copy of Tanglewood Numbers, the new Silver Jews record, and secured an interview with David Berman for The Brooklyn Rail. I wa
s sitting in the living room listening to the record over and over on the living-room speakers, the ones Dad had had since college. He sat with me awhile as I listened. I could tell he didn’t really like the music, which was somehow both too sedate and too punk for his taste. (After all, this is a guy who thought the best version of “Love Hurts” is the one by Nazareth.) There was one line, though, that jumped out at him. “Later I come to find / Life is sweeter than Jewish wine,” Berman sings on “Sleeping Is the Only Love.” Dad laughed when he heard this. “That’s good,” he said, and laughed some more. “That’s good.”
* * *
—
My sister was waiting for me at her apartment. We sat around crying and laughing, willing seconds into minutes and minutes into hours. We talked about doing a Facebook post. It went against all Dad’s preferences, and our own habits too. In the end, we mostly did it because word was spreading. By Friday evening our silence had begun to feel conspicuous; at least to me it did. My sister has Dad’s private streak and probably would have ridden the whole thing out in silence. She has a more nuanced understanding of Facebook’s privacy controls than anyone I know, and she expressed displeasure more than once that she’d had to share her loss with her colleagues and superiors in order to excuse herself from work. If there’d been any other option I am sure she would have taken it. But there wasn’t another option. We hammered out some text and rooted through old photo albums to find pictures we liked—him and me, him and her. We chose old ones, from when we were each small. He was so young and healthy in them—so happy, such a proud dad—that it broke my heart all over again. In a good way, I think. The last few years had been so grim, so densely fogged by suffering, all horizon lines had been obscured. The old pictures were evidence that there had been a time before. The harsh reminder of all we’d lost stood as proof of all we’d had.
Riding with the Ghost Page 11
