Riding with the Ghost

by Justin Taylor

  I would not say that I “forgot” all this, but rather that, as an ex-smoker reaches by reflex for his absent pack, or an amputee’s sharpest pain is in the very void of the missing limb, the act of burning through hours of downtime with an aimless phone call to my old man has been such a central part of my life for so long that it is more than merely instinctual to reach for the phone. Shooting the shit with Dad is a part of who I am or who I was or who we were or all of these. It will be a slow unlearning, an excruciating resignation to this everlasting fact of silence, even as there is in that same silence the booming calm of suffering abated, the eerie peace of armistice after a long and fruitless war.

  * * *

  —

  It’s late August 2017. I’ve been in Hattiesburg for three weeks and I still don’t know where anything is. The school didn’t have housing to offer me, and though I could have afforded to rent my own apartment (or even house!), after Indianapolis I was reluctant to live alone again, so I rented a room in a house whose other occupants are an alumna of the program where I teach and a woman who works at the local paper. I needed Google Maps to give me directions from my house to the on-ramp to 59 South. From there it was a straight shot down to the I-10 junction. I’ll take I-10 west to New Orleans, exit at Elysian Fields, pull the map back up at the first red light I hit, and verify the last couple of turns that’ll take me to Jami’s place.

  For now, though, I can unplug the phone and switch over to the CD player. It’s a six-disc changer, and five of the discs in there are mine, high school and college stuff, dug out of my basement back in Portland on the day before I left—but the sixth disc is a CD-R copy of the Rolling Stones’ Beggars Banquet that I found in a paper sleeve in the Nissan’s center console, labeled in Dad’s supremely disciplined script with a fine-point Sharpie that I can picture in the cup of pens that used to sit on his desk. I put the CD in the changer as soon as I found it and I haven’t taken it out since. Beggars Banquet is what I put on now. I turn the volume up. I’ll keep the windows down until the rain comes.

  * * *

  —

  Before it was my father’s car it was my sister’s. My parents got it for her and she used it during college, then for another year or two after. Melanie gave it to Dad when she moved to DC for law school. He always said she could reclaim it whenever she wanted, but she went from DC to New York to begin her career, and we all knew she was never going to ask for it back. When Dad died the car was jointly inherited by my sister and me, but because he didn’t leave a will, “the estate” (such as it was) had to go through Florida probate court before we could do anything with it. She told me to take it if I wanted it; I said I didn’t. Amanda and I had just leased a car in Portland, and one for us to share was plenty. The Passat, of course, had been returned to my mom’s friend’s kid when the gig in Indianapolis ended.

  Melanie and I had been looking into donating the car to a children’s charity, but by the time we got through with probate I had been offered this job in Mississippi, indeed had spent half a day on the Internet trying to figure out if I should get a short-term lease or buy a used clunker to get me through the school year, when it dawned on me that I already owned a car.

  I had the Nissan shipped from Sunrise to Gulf Breeze (a suburb of Pensacola), where my in-laws lived. My father-in-law received the vehicle on my behalf, put in a new battery, and had the oil changed. I flew in from Portland on August 8. My wife and I go visit every Christmas, and for a week most summers: We had just been there in June. It felt bizarre to be taking that flight a second time so soon, and without her there.

  In the car I found an umbrella, a reflective silver sunshield, and a roll of paper towels. I kept those. I threw out an old thermos that I recognized from my own childhood, and would not have dared open. I threw out faded maps of Nashville and Miami. I did not want to throw out his North Miami Beach Optimist Club ball cap, yellow letters on black foam, a mesh back. This had been his baseball-coaching hat, one of them anyway, and for the last several years his go-to for when he was driving and the sun was in his eyes. It was sitting on the passenger seat: ancient, dusty, stinky from sitting inside the closed-up car between March and now. I wanted to find a way to salvage that hat, to put it on my own head and drive around wearing it, though I recognized in my desire to make this gesture something of Dad’s own intense sentimental streak, an erring on the side of preservation that I had often found frustrating and at times creepy. I imagined my wife seeing me wearing the hat, her palpable discomfort—at the fetish aspect, sure, but also at the undeniable fact of it being old and gross, which I’d told Dad myself any number of times. But she was back home and so that didn’t factor, or not immediately. What I wanted, more than anything, was to drive to Mississippi wearing the hat, and let him make the trip with me that way. I would throw it away when I got there. That seemed like a reasonable compromise, right?

  I heard his voice in my head, clear and sharp as he ever was in his heyday, in my childhood: Let’s not bullshit each other, Justin. If you don’t throw it out now you’re never going to throw it out, so make a decision and let’s get on with our lives.

  I threw out the hat. A few minutes later I found Beggars Banquet. It was with two other CDs, neither of which could have been his. One was the soundtrack to the Beatles-inspired musical Across the Universe; the other was the first disc of a Dave Matthews Band double live album. These must have been my sister’s leave-behinds, and he—characteristically—would not have thrown them out, because what if she wanted them back someday? I sent a picture of the discs to my sister, who was suitably amused.

  I thought about sending her a picture of the hat too but that seemed sad, and anyway I’d already thrown it out. Beggars Banquet, as mentioned, went straight into the changer. Dave Matthews and the movie soundtrack went back into the paper sleeve, which went back into the console. I have never listened to them. I will never throw them out.

  * * *

  —

  I drove to Hattiesburg with an expired Florida tag and upon arrival attempted to register the car there. It turned out that since the probate court had determined us to be joint owners of all of our father’s possessions, my sister either needed to present herself at the Hattiesburg tax assessor’s office to put her name on the title, or else she had to grant me limited power of attorney in order to transfer the title to me exclusively. This she did. “The Nissan,” I texted her, “has officially experienced the least likely of all its possible fates: a Mississippi license plate.” I attached a photograph. “Well there’s a thing I never thought I’d see,” she replied.

  * * *

  —

  I had a month left in Indianapolis when Dad died, and the end of that semester was a blur, a fugue. New York to see my sister; Portland, Maine, to present a paper at a conference (I thought about canceling, but Dad would have disapproved); South Florida, where I rendezvoused with my sister and my wife, to see my aunts and grandparents, to clean out Dad’s apartment, and to begin the process of settling his affairs. In between each of these trips I went back to Indianapolis to teach. During the month of April 2017 I was on a plane every third or fourth day. The chair of the writing program had suggested I cancel classes, but I refused to do this. It felt better to keep moving, to have work to do, and the prospect of making up those classes at the end of the term, of extending my stay in Indianapolis, was more odious than teaching through my jet lag and grief.

  I got back to Portland on the first of May. On the ninth of May I got an email out of the blue, inviting me to apply for another visiting writer position, this one in the PhD program at the University of Southern Mississippi. I had not planned to apply for anything else in 2017, indeed had been looking forward to a return to self-employment—in other words, to being a house husband. To staying home and licking my wounds. I’d promised myself while in Indianapolis that I was never again going to complain about having to go to the grocery store
because my wife was at the office all day: I would just be grateful to have a wife with whom to eat dinner every night. But the Southern Miss job was an attractive one. Amanda and I had several long talks about it. It was a tough decision, and we really didn’t want to do the long-distance thing again, but we were trying to buy a house in Portland and getting outbid over and over, so if I took the job and saved a decent chunk of what I made down there…

  We all know the words to this song. The pros and cons on our list were exactly what you’d think they were, and they aren’t the point of this story. We decided I’d take the job, and with that decision the summer of 2017 turned into a kind of shore leave, the restful stretch between lonely tours of duty.

  * * *

  —

  I hate that Dad does not know, can never know, that I got this job: the 2017–2018 artist-in-residence of the University of Southern Mississippi PhD in creative writing. Just the kind of title he would crow over.

  He will never ask me how the students are and he will never scoff when I insist that Mississippi’s not so bad, or at least not all bad. No, Dad, really. I will never be obliged to explain why boiled peanuts are awesome or to tell him that he’s being an asshole when he goes on and on about the Bible-thumping sister-fucking rednecks and Trump-voting Nazi scum—Jew-haters, every one of them—and I’ll never get to tell him that I see far more bumper stickers for Bernie Sanders than for Clinton and Trump combined.

  It’s not that Dad would be wrong exactly, about the South, where even as I write these lines I can see thunderheads menacing the small group of Confederate loyalists protesting out by the school’s front gate for the restoration of the Battle Flag to the state flag. They’ve been out there every weekend for one hundred weeks and counting, someone told me, ever since—surprise—the university got its first black president. So yes, the South is what it is. It is the worst thing you might think about it. But it isn’t only that.

  He would not believe me but he would hear me out, listen and raise objections, scold me on my naïveté, and this—the un-had argument—is what I’m mourning. The heated parrying, the talking too fast, points and subpoints and digressions, talking over each other. Our shared pastime, our common tongue.

  This is the first time I’ve ever lived in the Deep South. Now, I know what you’re thinking: Wait, didn’t you grow up in Miami and didn’t you go to college in Gainesville? Yes and yes. But as I’m sure some of you already know, and the rest of you will never fully understand, Florida’s status as a Southern state is hotly, permanently contested. Everything south of Disney World is basically considered part of New York. Everything above is granted Southern, but not Deep Southern status. The Deep South doesn’t start until you either get west of Tallahassee or hit the Georgia state line. (Tennessee isn’t part of the Deep South either; it’s too far north.)

  That said, Hattiesburg and Gainesville remind me of each other. Sure there are differences: Hattiesburg is a much smaller town and Southern Miss is a much smaller school than University of Florida. Hattiesburg’s ragged edges are more ragged; the barbecue is better but the coffee is worse. And things are different for me too: I’m a professor, not a student; I’m thirty-five, not nineteen. And yet I live on a shady street in a slightly shabby neighborhood a lot like the one where I lived in Gainesville, in a house that reminds me of the old house, in a bedroom that is so similar to my college bedroom (down to the wood-crate bookshelf and Grateful Dead poster) it sometimes feels like I fell down a rabbit hole and landed in my own past.

  * * *

  —

  My freshman year at the University of Florida I lived in an honors dorm with a friend from my hometown. He was a pre-med student who wanted badly to switch his major to music but was afraid to disappoint his parents. He spent that year studying hard science that he hated and playing an online RPG. He sometimes hung out with me and my new friends, but mostly I think we terrified him. We were all aspiring artists of some kind or another, and though the core friend-group was all students, we were less interested in the university scene than in the local punk and activist communities, which themselves overlapped and put us into the orbits of still more marginal people: squatters, train hoppers, gutter punks, other castaways and survivors. These were people who had, for whatever reason, abandoned their so-called normal lives, or had been kicked out of them, or (in a lot of cases) never had remotely normal lives to begin with, and were living the only way that made sense to them, though to most people (my parents, for instance, or my roommate) they registered as weirdos and petty criminals, which needless to say some of them also were. From the tender and damaged to the conniving and deranged, these people were free in a way that we had never before encountered, and some of them became part of the new community that we were building for ourselves.

  When summer hit I found a part-time job fundraising for the university and moved with a couple of like-minded guys into a house a few blocks off-campus. The house was christened “Abraham,” after the old Sunday school song that goes, “Father Abraham had many sons / many sons had father Abraham.”

  Abraham had previously been the home of a local jam band, so it was pretty much wrecked when we inherited it. That suited us fine. The house was a base for friends, activists, and sundry travelers. Food Not Bombs would come over and cook sometimes. One guy lived in his van in the backyard. A couple shared a VW bus out front. Another friend, though she’d stayed in the dorms a second year, had a tent set up on the side of the house as a sort of gutter pied-à-terre. People would drop by for a beer and end up staying for days.

  This was the beginning of a time in my life—two years, give or take—when for me and a handful of my closest friends, there weren’t necessarily clear lines where any one person ended and another began. It was like experience itself had been, in the Deleuzian sense, de-territorialized. The best I can liken it to is what Freud, in Civilization and Its Discontents, calls “the oceanic feeling.” It’s a sense of being at one with the universe. This feeling, and the desire to achieve it, is consistent across all religions throughout the world and throughout history, so much so that it seems to be the precondition for religion itself. Freud goes on to say that he has never felt this feeling. I imagine most people don’t want to, and fewer still ever get the chance.

  My parents came up from Miami to visit in what must have been July or August of 2001. I tried to convince them not to, but despite my objections (or, more likely, because of them) they were determined to see this house for themselves and help me get settled. They arrived a couple of hours earlier than expected, and so found me barely awake, viciously hungover. The front door was hanging open and they were bade welcome by a man with long tangled hair and an Old Testament beard, who was sweeping leaves out of the living room and into the yard. This was C, an ex-Mormon turned latter-day flower child turned accidental hobo after he got evicted from his apartment, at which point he started a rotation of friends’ couches, which over the ensuing months would narrow to mostly just our couch. An alcoholic to the point of incontinence, he’d taken to wearing bathing suits instead of regular shorts because they were easier to hand-wash after he inevitably pissed himself while sleeping. (Needless to say, but he also washed a lot of couch cushions.) His daily routine was to do a few chores around the house to earn his keep, then go steal a case of beer from a grocery store. (A case? A case. He had a system. I don’t know what it was.) He’d bring the case of beer back to Abraham and work his way through it while he read philosophy until those of us with jobs and/or classes were done with them and could come home to drink with him. That is: He drank until it was time to start drinking. C was basically a Denis Johnson character: well-meaning, weak-willed, regularly blessed with epiphanies from which he failed to gain anything.

  C was, as I said, sweeping leaves out of the living room when my parents arrived at the house. The reason that the living room was full of leaves was that neither the front door nor the
back door nor any of the windows had been closed in days.

  The visit did not go well. When my mother saw the state of my bedroom, she cried. Instead of a bed I had this big gross oval cushion my friend Friedel had found for me at a garage sale for a dollar. It was stained and had no sheets on it. My parents wanted to take me to buy a bed but I wouldn’t hear of such bourgeois pretension. I knew people who could live for three months on what a bed cost! Why not just give the money to them? Or better still, give it to me and I’ll live on it.

  The whole day went like this. We somehow ended up at a Best Buy, where I consented to have some extension cords and a CD tower purchased on my behalf. Dad, I remember, had become obsessed with the problem of electrical cords left out where people could trip on them, and he had a plan—which he duly executed—to set things up so all cords were run flush to baseboards. They left the next day, and not too long afterward I got a letter in the mail from Dad: four single-spaced pages in which he detailed his disappointment in me, his outrage and disgust at the way I was living, and his culminating demand that I change my life or else.

  I’m not sure what he meant the or else to be, since there was not much money to cut me off from. My tuition was paid for by a state scholarship; my living expenses were covered by my part-time job and the dregs of my child acting money. Given my lifestyle, said expenses rarely amounted to $500 a month, including rent. More to the point, he would never have gone through with any threat that cut us off from each other. It was too close to the kind of shit his own parents had put him through. Also, as someone who really had supported himself, who knew what it meant to be entirely self-sufficient, he knew that I was utterly incapable of doing what he had done. I wasn’t going to work at a door factory. I didn’t even know how to drive a car!