The Dokes show opened Thanksgiving weekend amid a Saturday-night early-winter snowstorm, in two spaces in our neighborhood across the street from each other—a clothing boutique and an independent record shop with a gallery space. In John’s usual throw-everything-into-the-pot approach, the evening included a soundtrack and a DJ, a handmade zine, stickers and fliers, a cooler of beer, the Dokes family in attendance, dozens and dozens of people trudging through the snow between the two galleries, filling the night with sound and heat and light.
* * *
I made my annual Christmas Eve visit to John’s house to deliver a gift, the new Sufjan Stevens Christmas album, Silver & Gold, which I knew of only because he’d told me about it. He gave me one of the factory pieces, a painting of a pigeon with a crooked beak and a band on its leg and the word “Jim’s” down in the shadowy corner because, as John explained, that was Jim’s pigeon, a factory pet. And he gave me a bunch of new CDs he’d burned. I stuck them in the center console of my car, and they became the soundtrack of my winter and spring.
We had our standing breakfast date again in January, and as we sat at Wally Waffle, we made plans for a road trip to Pittsburgh in April to see the Black Keys, an Akron band we’d been seeing together since their first shows at a downtown club; they were now filling arenas. We were returning, and I was glad for that.
On my birthday, we shared our annual celebratory drink in a bar where John alternated between talking to me, on his left, and to the very pretty, very young woman on his right.
He turned to me.
“I think she’s still in college,” I said.
He turned back to her, then back to me, raised his glass of red wine, grinned, and offered a private toast, sotto voce: “Making mistakes . . . since 1964.”
12: PATIENCE
* * *
I set out for my dad’s house under a tired, white-cotton morning sky. I had to put the convertible top down to accommodate the eight-foot oak boards I’d stained at home, and I worried all the way there. This was a particular species of Ohio summer sky—not full enough for a good honest rain but too full to hold it all in. More often than not, it would randomly start spitting like a halfhearted water pistol. I drove a little faster, uneasily, to make it there before the boards got wet. Also, I felt more than a little foolish hauling lumber in a car entirely unsuited for the purpose.
I made it to his driveway without incident, shouldered the boards, and entered the barn. Dad, as always, was already in his place, dressed in a russet T-shirt and faded jeans, tinkering. In his cluttered, tool-strewn, sawdust-coated workshop, he’d begun setting up his bench router with a tongue-in-groove bit in preparation for the boards I was bringing. For all my interest and engagement with tools, the router was something I’d never been able to gain any real facility with. My own router was cheap and underpowered, and I’d burned up enough bits and mangled enough boards that I’d more or less given up on this particular aspect of woodworking.
But one of my goals with this endeavor was to learn from him—practical skills and hopefully more. Whatever he would allow. And just to have a reason to spend extra time with him. While I knew he’d be taking charge, I set out deliberately to understand what he was doing. I wanted to follow each step, and I wanted to be allowed to perform as much of the hands-on part as possible.
But this router. Lord. A half hour in, I was beginning to think the reason I want my father to live forever is so I will be spared the tedium of setting up a tongue-in-groove bit. These kinds of joints are tricky, especially in boards so long. But when it was all finished, three pieces would (theoretically) fit together like a puzzle to form a wide plank: two wider lengths of white pine with a darker strip of red oak down their middle. It was beginning to feel like we were doing anything we could to make this simple box as complicated as possible. And by we, I mean him.
I stood on one side of the steel-legged bench across from my dad, who was hunched over the router, which he’d pulled free from its seat in the middle of the mounting bench. He squinted and pursed his lips as he turned the adjustment knob yet again, a fraction of a rotation, raising the height by just a hair. He locked the guide plate into place once more, then set the unit back in its spot at the center of the bench, adjusting its seating there. The exhaust fan filled the air with a hissing sound. The wall clock ticked. It was no coincidence that behind me, taped to the doorjamb, was a yellowed card in the shape of a dove, printed with a Bible quote, Romans 8:25: “If we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.”
Finally, he flipped the switch. The hard whirring of the power tool overtook the room. With a careful hand, my father eased a scrap piece of pine along the featherboard—a guide with a series of flexible plastic tines, like the teeth of a giant comb if they were turned to 45 degrees—and he fed it into the sharp, spinning bit, its zipping whine chewing out the groove at twelve thousand rpm. A faint smell, like toasted oats, rose up. After running ten inches or so, he eased the piece of test lumber back toward him, then drew it away from the bit, switching off the motor.
He eyeballed it, blew dust out of the groove, then checked its depth with a little yellow plastic gauge. At last he declared we were on the money.
He turned and retrieved one of the long pine boards from the stack against the wall. He handed it to me. “I did the hard part. You get the glory,” he said. He switched on the router motor.
I fed the board forward, feeling its vibration as it met the spinning steel.
“Ease off a little,” my dad called over the motor. “You’re pushing too hard.”
I slowed. My dad left the room and returned with a tripod-looking thing, a set of angled red legs with a shiny steel roller on top.
I backed the board out and he set the tripod underneath. It supported the free end of the plank, enabling me to use both hands to control its movement through the router.
“I wish I was the genius who invented this thing,” he said.
He may not have been the genius of its invention, but he was a savant of ownership. He had every tool one could imagine and a number of tools one could not—such as this rolling sawhorse—and yet I don’t think he had any superfluous gadgets. (Or not many, anyway—he did own a branding iron with his initials.)
Slowly, my confidence and facility increased. I routed one board; it passed my father’s inspection, he gave me a nod of approval, and I moved on to the next. I fed it through the guide, hot sawdust shooting out against my palm. An hour passed, then another. Eventually, I became one with the process, a transformation I’ve always savored. First one enters the work, then the work enters oneself.
I was feeling better, more independent, like I had learned enough that I could operate on my own, at least for now. I arranged the pieces of oak, and when my dad had calibrated the new bit and set the featherboard to its proper spacing, I took over again. I began to feed in the thinner piece of harder wood and immediately felt a distinct difference. The wood was denser, the grain less compliant, and its decreased width meant less stability on the bench’s surface. The bit grabbed suddenly and yanked the board—and me—violently forward. The knuckles of my left hand jammed into the featherboard. My heart quickened and my skin tingled with shock and fear: if that barrier of plastic tines hadn’t been in place, my fingers would have been shredded.
I killed the power. The bit stopped spinning. The two middle knuckles of my left hand were torn up and bleeding. A thick red smear stained the board I’d been feeding. I lowered my injured hand to my side, wiping the blood against the leg of my jeans and shaking it. My dad was watching.
“That thing can take over quick,” he said. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I said, and I was inordinately sparked by the realization that I’d just gotten blood—my own blood—on a coffin—my own coffin. I spontaneously began scheming a plan to preserve this stain throughout the sanding and finishing process, and to arrange the boards in such a way that it would be visible. It’s not everyone who can sa
y he’s got his own blood on his coffin. Or maybe it’s not anyone. Except me. And maybe Nick Cave.
I rinsed my hand under the washtub spigot and squeezed the damaged knuckles with a paper towel till they stopped bleeding. I picked up the board to inspect for damage, with my dad looking on. We determined that no significant harm had been done, just a bit of a rough spot that could be corrected with some careful passes through the router. By we, I mean him. Without judgment but also without discussion, he took over the task. He fired up the router and began feathering with sweeping, intuitive strokes until it was right.
13: A MOMENT
* * *
I don’t sleep properly, and sometimes for weeks at a time I hardly sleep at all, so my dreams are rare, and I often enter and exit them haphazardly—waking up in the middle, stirring in a haze of half-sleep, grasping for the tail of an interrupted story. All of this adds up to a confused interaction between my conscious and subconscious selves. I keep a notebook on my nightstand, which sometimes reads like the middle passages of Flowers for Algernon, crazy nonsense in often indecipherable script. I once awoke in the middle of a fitful sleep and furtively scrawled what I believe to be the words “floor shoes” so I wouldn’t lose the important, fleeting epiphany, but to this day I do not know what it means.
This dream was different, however. It was the true depth of night, and I was in bed, the covers over my head, but I wasn’t asleep. I began, in that hyperaware, obsessive-math sort of way, to wonder where and who my mother was in her life at exactly the moment I was in my life right then, early morning on the day she was forty-eight years, seven months, and one day old. In the way a fellow insomniac will probably understand, I spontaneously calculated the chronology—it would have been predawn, October 6, 1987. That was when she would have been exactly who I was at that same moment in her life.
I began to ask her questions. What did she feel like in the morning? Did she feel pain? Did she feel happy about the day ahead?
And she started to answer. Not directly, and not in an artificial talking-to-a-phantom scenario, but neither in an entirely imaginary exercise. It was some sort of intense connection that wasn’t like anything I’d ever experienced. It was happening. Like Gina had said. My mother was communicating with me.
Her answer was that she never felt great in the morning, and she never thought too much about happiness in that way. In this strange wordless communication, she indicated who she was and what a life is about. And then I felt the same sensation of her eyes connecting with mine as I’d felt in the hospital, in that final moment when I knew for sure we were sharing a wavelength but soon she would be gone. She delivered a single phrase, then disappeared.
Don’t become lonely.
14: COLLAGE
* * *
He was walking through the late-morning shade from the back of his small yard when I arrived. I’d been out for a run and had spontaneously turned in the direction of his house, a mile and a half from mine. Down the tree-lined hill, past the bungalows and Cape Cods, across the stretch of sidewalk where our kids once raced with sparklers in the night. I slowed as I came up his blacktopped driveway, and there he was, taking one small careful step, then another.
He was gaunt and gray, clothes cinched to fit. He was down sixty pounds from before he got sick. He looked older than his father. His glasses, chunky with clear plastic frames, now seemed too large, giving his head the effect of a caricature. He looked like a bug. Even though I’d been seeing him often, each new visit required a new way of seeing him, a recalibration of what I wanted to say, of what I should say, of what I could say. He saw me from across the hedge and held up his hand as if to say “wait” while he worked a breath into his lungs.
It still shocked me how fast this had happened, how fast it was continuing to happen. Less than six weeks after that birthday toast, John and I had taken a two-hour road trip to the Black Keys show in Pittsburgh. John drove, as always. But he was having a lot of discomfort in his chest and was popping ibuprofen at an alarming clip. He kept pulling his seat belt loose. I told him that if he wanted, I would drive home. “I might let you,” he said.
This was the first time in a lifetime of such excursions when he’d ever offered to let someone else drive. As he took me to one of his favorite Pittsburgh stops—the funky old Primanti Bros. restaurant by the Allegheny River, for sandwiches overstuffed with coleslaw and french fries—and then to the huge, glossy Consol Energy Center for the concert, I noticed that John was repeatedly lagging behind me. Farther and farther. It was the first time since his recovery that I saw a hint of anything other than progress. He knew something wasn’t right. With his usual diligence, he’d been gathering information from two different doctors, one in Akron and one in Cleveland, comparing it, trying to solve the puzzle of his own insides, to see if he could find the cheat code. Something like a moment of truth had arrived. As in the “Call me” text two years before, he let down his guard and revealed it to me that night as we drove. Something was wrong. He had a consultation scheduled for the following Monday.
He called me when he returned from the appointment, and swore me to secrecy. There were “cells”—he refused to call it anything else—taking over the lining of his lungs.
“I need you to keep my head straight,” he said.
I promised him I would.
* * *
I loved him. I knew no matter what that I could rely on him. I’d always known that. I knew how much he loved Gina. The three of us were our own version of a family. We could complete each other’s thoughts on matters of Evel Knievel, on Wilco’s career trajectory, on tequila, on the history of our hometown—a hard place to love that we both loved fiercely—and on the epic nights we saw Hüsker Dü and Guided by Voices play in Cleveland, and the days we saw our children born. We had each turned to the other in every crisis and joy. We had marked together the curious map of growing up. We had made each other better.
He took another step.
I stood on his patio just outside the back door, waiting for him, sweat gathering under my bandana and at the center of my T-shirt now that I’d stopped moving. I didn’t know if he was young or old. I didn’t know if I was young or old. He took another step, then another. I sat. He arrived and sat, too, leaning forward, elbows on knees.
“Were you doing laps?” I joked.
He grinned and worked up an answer. “I walked ten feet. Have to keep moving. It’s my exercise.”
He sat back in his chair, working his way through labored breaths. This patio had been a center of our friendship for fifteen years. It was a gathering place, with a wood-burning chiminea at one end. A series of clay ones had come and gone, including a crumbling and oft-repaired number that John had christened “Ol’ Never Quit.” When it finally did quit, a group of us, regulars at John’s backyard gatherings, took up a collection to buy him a fancy black aluminum model, which now sat here at the edge of the patio, full of ash.
Before us, perched on the electric meter box near the back door, was his home’s only permanent fixture: a forty-ounce bottle of King Cobra malt liquor, which someone had brought over the night we celebrated the signing of John’s divorce papers. From that moment it stayed there, a monument. When John hired a crew to install vinyl siding, he told the men the story of the bottle and issued strict instructions that it not be moved. They honored the request, reverently sliding the vinyl slats behind the bottle as they worked on that section.
“Hard to talk today,” John said. “Yesterday was chemo.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “Hey, guess what I found at the thrift store? The first three Joy Division records. Thirty cents apiece.”
“Nice. You buy ’em?”
“Of course I did. But I don’t know if it’s right for Joy Division to make someone so happy.”
After a while, we moved into the living room, where John had been spending his days and nights in a recliner, wrapped in a rumpled Captain America sleeping bag. It was freezing; John had been keeping
the air conditioner cranked. A close family friend, an angel of sorts named DonnaLee Pollack who worked as a nurse in Texas, had traveled up to Ohio to be his caretaker, and the two of them binge-watched crap TV— Duck Dynasty and Swamp People—and movies checked out from the library.
DonnaLee was out on an errand. I moved her blanket aside and sat on the couch. John and I made small talk.
* * *
We never discussed my casket. It’s something we would have discussed in different times, under different circumstances. But we didn’t. He never knew about it. But I thought about that, about what would happen if he were involved, which he almost certainly would have been. If John and I were making a casket, we would decorate the shit out of it. We would put a window in the lid, or maybe a mirror, or one of those eyeholes from a hotel-room door. We would hand-paint it. We would line the inside with free verse or band stickers. We would make it play music whenever the lid opened. We would make it a shrine to something; who knows what? We would work our way through a lot of bad ideas.
John kept a pocket-size journal, and every day he made a point to write down an idea. It didn’t matter what it was. It didn’t matter if it was good. Some days it was just a line sketch; others it was a full project outline. He kept plugging. Always, every day. One of his catchphrases, adapted from Gertrude Stein’s poem “Picasso,” had become the title of his website: “Never not working.”
* * *
When the time came to miss him—and it did, a month and two days later—I didn’t know how. He was gone, but he was everywhere. Fishing blindly through the front seat console for a CD to play, I pulled out the stack of discs John had burned for me in December, and selected Radiohead’s The King of Limbs, which I hadn’t listened to yet, and there he was, giving it to me. Sitting in my desk chair, in whatever direction I turned: The funeral home memorial card, printed with his picture and the Serenity Prayer. The low-rent local semi-pro wrestling poster—“The Bushwhackers vs. the 7' Giant T. and Zoltan”; “Doink the Clown vs. Mystery Superstar”—of which he had an identical copy at his house. The megaphone on the floor by my filing cabinet, a birthday gift he’d eventually regret having given me. The matchbook from Corky’s Thomastown Restaurant & Lounge. The framed photograph from his trip to Amsterdam, its white matte covered with his narrative of the journey, a dense, continuous stream of handwritten words that wraps around and around and finds me turning the frame in my hands, close to my face, turning and turning, reading his words, translating that lost language: “. . . have an Amstel, Mica, Marta (Austria), the Gambrinus pub, bean soup with chicken wrapped in a pancake (tortilla), walk, tallest building is my hotel, chocolate for Bridget, shoes for Salty, a lot of these guys look like the villains in the airport hijack movies . . .”
Furnishing Eternity Page 9
