Mimi sure as hell isn’t going to bake a casserole.
I lace into my painting shoes and slip on my spattered hoodie, loop an old wool muffler around my neck. Slip on my knuckle gloves. Spur of the moment, I speed dial Nick the Thick.
“Hey, dude, wanna make some money?”
“Be right over.”
Fact is, Nick will work for the sheer pleasure and joy of hanging out with me. Why he likes me so much is a mystery. I don’t like me half as much. But Nick, being younger by seven months, glommed on to Telly and me years ago, in the good ol’ toddle days. Followed us around like a wagging puppy. Thought Telly was the glorious sun.
Smart as he is, a technological mind built on a platform of common sense, Nick’s easy to exploit. Because he’s so trusting. I hate to do that. I will pay him, eventually. (I think.)
I’m on the scaffolding, and it’s drizzling. Correction: it’s mizzling, which is a combination of mist and drizzle. Earlier, it was snizzling. These are important distinctions because, when you write, it’s the little details that lift your wings. Birdwell likes to quote Mark Twain: “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”
So it ain’t a drizzle, it’s a mizzle.
I’m scraping away, making pretty good time. Listening to Pinky Toe on my iPod. To my surprise, the tunes are pretty good. Born in a gut vortex, where all good tunes and poems are born.
All except “Crossing the River Styx.” Gupti’s favorite. It’s born in a plastic clamshell. Fake as a silicone breast.
I could never handle the intro lick in front of a crowd. It’s way too fast and frilly. It’s gotta be pared down and bulked up. But how?
And how do I handle the vocal range? I’m a midrange singer, basically one octave, and this is at least a two-octave song that leaps into a ball-squeezing falsetto.
And how’m I gonna handle my nerves in front of all those people? Just the thought of the Kenny G—Taft’s auditorium—stuffed with twelve hundred pie faces makes me shudder.
I dig into my pocket. Buried amid guitar picks and change is a hard wad of paper. I uncrumple the business card of Frank Conway, musician and music instructor.
Just then Nick shows up.
Kyle is with him. So is Jordan. So is Javon. They pile out of the VW bug.
They’re wearing their soccer uniforms—white jerseys, red shorts. Only Nick—the best soccer player of them all—is dressed in his butt-lows and flannel shirt.
“Hell, what is this?” I say across the sodden grass. “Rodeo clown week?”
What I’m really thinking is Great! My whole team. Now we can finish the south side of the house.
They shamble up in half-laced shoes and floppy shin guards. I’m standing on the scaffolding like Jesus on the Mount. It’s time to preach a sermon. I clear my throat:
“Our Father who art on Delridge Avenue, give us this day our daily bread. Only make it pumpernickel and slap on some French’s mustard and cucumber chips.”
They don’t laugh. They don’t smile.
“Holy Father,” I say, “maybe you should make that focaccia.”
“Shut up!” Kyle says.
Nobody’s got even a glint of “smass,” which is our special West Seattle blend of smart-ass and sass. They glare at me like moronic court bailiffs.
“Here, dudes,” I say, offering my wrists, “I’m guilty.”
In times of silence, when voids gape and leaders are born, no one speaks. That’s because I’m the leader. Telly was, and by rightful ascension and hierarchy, I am now.
Except I’m not Telly. I’m no leader. I have the mouth, but I don’t have the discipline or desire. And I’m no follower either. In between leader and follower is a vast empty prairie where nonleaders and nonfollowers wander alone among the tumbleweeds. Drooling nomads.
I am one of those.
Nick says, “Man, we’re worried about you.”
Nick can say no wrong, twist no truth. He is the shy, smiling compass that points true north, not fake magnetic north. Everybody respects him. Everybody nods.
Javon says, “Ever since—”
“Yeah, yeah,” I say.
“It’s like you’re on drugs, man,” Jordan says.
“I’m not on drugs. Unless you count taurine.”
“Taurine?” they ask.
“A sulfonic acid,” Nick says, “found in the stomachs of cows. What he means is, he’s drinking a lot of Red Bull.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Very high performance. Enhances my cognitive skills. Plus it has all the essential food groups—caffeine, sugar, and bull sperm.”
Nobody laughs.
Jordan says, “That why you’re all scrawny and pale-lookin’? Why your voice shakes? Why you don’t sleep at night—and can barely stay awake all day?”
“You do look scrawny, dude,” Kyle says. “No offense.”
“Gaunt,” I say. “The correct word is gaunt.”
Javon says, “You’re gonna flunk, man, if you miss any more school.”
“Hey, I haven’t missed a class all week.”
Jordan says, “We feel it, too. We have to deal with it, too. But it’s been almost a year, man. Pull yourself together. Start living again.”
“I am living. In my own way, I’m living.”
I stare down at them. Now, instead of feeling like Jesus on the Mount, I feel like Jesus on the cross.
“Hey, I forgive you,” I say. “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
“Oh, we know what we’re talking about,” Kyle says.
Nick nods. “Yes, we do.”
My earphones are dangling from my pocket. All through this trial, amid the drip-drop-plop of rain, I can hear Pinky Toe playing. The sound is puny and scratchy. The others begin to hear it, too. The song ends, and—wouldn’t you know it—here comes Gupti’s favorite.
Kyle points to my earphones. “What the hell’s that?”
“A tune called ‘Crossing the River Styx,’” I say.
“What?”
Nick laughs. “Perfect.”
“Why’s that so perfect?” Kyle asks.
“Styx—named after the river in Hades,” Nick says. “Remember, in Miss Scardino’s class, The Odyssey: when you cross the River Styx, you cross from life to death.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I’d like to jump into that river right now. Anybody wanna grab a towel and join me?”
“Not me,” Javon says. “I don’t wanna die.”
“And what’s all this I hear about graduation?” Kyle says. “You really gonna do some tune?”
“Yeah. As a matter of fact, this tune.”
I toss him my iPod, and he plugs the little buds into his ears. At first, his face is thoughtfully bland, and then it darkens.
“This is a faggy old-man band,” Kyle says.
“Yep,” I say.
“He’s doing it for Gupti,” Nick says. “It’s her favorite song.”
“Then you better do it right,” Jordan says, “if you wanna come back next year.”
“Not sure what I wanna do next year,” I say. “I might join the circus. Or climb Mount Everest.”
“You gonna play the Ric?” Kyle asks.
Whoa! That’s something I hadn’t pondered. The Ric—the custom-built cherry red electric guitar that’s smarter than me and all other humans. In my limited thinking on the subject, I’d seen myself playing Ruby, with a pickup or standing mike. But Ruby—my sweet little princess from Saskatchewan, pretty as she is, my own true love—is a shy wallflower compared to the Ric.
“I’m thinking about it,” I say.
“Hold up!” Kyle says. He punches his palm. “Dudes, my mind is on fire.”
We watch as flames engulf his mind.
“Listen,” he says, “it’s quite obvious that Jonathan needs our help and expertise, so we’re gonna produce this little segment for him. I will personally be the director and executive in charge. Javon, you do the lights
.”
Javon nods. “Yeah, I can do that.”
Both Kyle and Javon are taking Advanced Theater from Miss Yan-Ling. And not just because her name means “voluptuous tinkling of jade pendants.” Both of them have the gamer’s touch with the control board—namely, speed and intuition. I’ve seen them work. Both are bold theatrical thinkers, especially Kyle, whose goal in life is to produce a Super Bowl halftime show starring Janet Jackson and some rapping chimpanzees.
The offer smacks of possibilities.
“We’re talking the Kenny G—big stage, dudes,” Kyle says. “Proscenium arch. Whew!”
Javon says, “Man, I could throw a pin on you and make you glitter like gold.”
“Dudes!” Kyle says. “This is gonna be maximal.”
“Hold up,” I say. “I’m a minimalist.”
Kyle nods. “One man’s maximal is another man’s minimal. But hey, I respect you as a fellow artist. However, you’re gonna need help getting your stars in alignment.” He smacks his palm again. “This is perfect.”
“No, it ain’t,” I say.
My gut is sinking. Just the thought of facing all those people makes me sweat.
If Delridge Avenue were the River Styx, I’d dive in and swim across.
“The point is—” Kyle says.
“The point,” Nick says, cutting him off, “is thickness forever.”
Nick’s words sink in.
We remember, silently. Standing in the fast-fading light on the scaffold or sodden grass, we remember Telly. If you cried for my brother, you are my thick. Go ahead and commit a felony against your grandmother, but you are my thick for life. You can’t revoke that.
“Hey,” I say. “Grab some scrapers and get to work.”
“Can’t,” Kyle says, sweeping his hand across his soccer jersey. “Brotherhood of the team.”
“Yeah,” Jordan says, “we got a night game.” They tramp across the grass and fold themselves into the VW bug.
All but Nick, who stands there smiling after them. “Don’t you have soccer, too?”
Nick grabs a spar and swings onto the scaffolding. Suddenly, he’s taller than me. Skinny as a skeleton, but wide shouldered. Perfect aerodynamic design for flight on a soccer field. He grabs the scraper from my hand.
“Only thing I like better than soccer,” he says, “is scraping houses in the rain.”
The rest of my team is gone.
But Nick the Thick . . .
Sticks.
Chapter 19
Nick and I scrape like madmen. Darkness falls, and we’re still scraping. Blindly. In the mizzly, moonless ink of West Seattle night, we are sponges of humanity, black, unrecognizable blobs. Hunchbacks of the scaffold. Brothers of the blade. Nothing stops us—not even four calls from Nick’s increasingly pissed-off mom ordering him home for dinner.
Each time she calls, something aches inside me. Nick has a warm home and kitchen to go back to. He has homemade lasagna waiting for him, probably slathered with extra cheese. He has a mom who knows what moms do. A dad who knows what dads do.
He has a little brother and sister. All his people are in place.
The way he shrugs it off seems careless, almost cruel.
If I had a home like that to go to, I’d pitch my scraper at the sky and retire from my drooling nomadism.
I’d be so damn happy.
But all I have is Mimi.
We finish the south side of the house, and Nick slips away before I can buy that apple pie. This depresses me, and I lose my appetite.
I go up to my room, peel off my wet clothes, put on a dry T-shirt and boxers, and get under my quilt. Everything starts calling to me. My books. Murchison. My poems. It’s like they have their own puny voices, and my room has become a Tower of Babel.
I pop a Bull and reach for my Spanish text. As I settle back I hit the remote. Rush Hour 3 is just starting. Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker have landed in Paris. I decide to multitask.
For the next two hours, I’m amazingly efficient. My thirst for taurine is opening my mind to new realities. What I discover is this: All knowledge is built upon transitions. Whether it’s Spanish or the French Revolution or physics, the focus is on change.
So as I study, I rev my brain each time a chapter pivots—whether it’s discussing the conjugation of Spanish verbs, main currents in eighteenth-century French political thought, or wave patterns.
I call my discovery “Transition Theory.”
Following the principles of Transition Theory, I blast through Spanish, physics, and Talleyrand, skipping huge chunks of text that seem merely trivial or repetitious.
My theory applies to Rush Hour 3, too. All of the key scenes are sharp-focused action, and everything else is just patter or buildup. I realize that if you edit the movie according to Transition Theory, you have about eighteen minutes of pivotal moments in both dialogue and action. All you really need are those eighteen minutes—that pure essence. Forget the other seventy-five minutes—the jokes, the scenes in the taxi, the sex. They are unnecessary.
Well, maybe the sex is necessary.
Transition Theory may be the key to my survival.
Yippee-aye-oh-cuy-ay.
A little after midnight, I toss my books aside and pull Murchison over to my bed.
I dig out a thick gray folder labeled “Sinking of the USS Gabriel Trask.” The folder is full of official files and documents. And more photos. As usual, the photos are black-and-white snapshots of sailors. By now, I recognize some of them:
The tall sailor with dark, curly hair.
The stocky sailor with light hair.
The sailor who looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger from the bellybutton up and Mickey Mouse from the bellybutton down.
A wind snaps through nearly every photo. You can see it in their hair and uniforms. Other photos show them in port cities, with the names inked below: Wellington, Sydney, Nouméa.
Nouméa? Where the hell is that? I Google it—capital city of New Caledonia, a French territory in the South Pacific.
Sailors with their arms around girls, grinning at the camera.
Sailors, sailors, everywhere.
Drink enough taurine and those grainy black-and-whites come to life, like one of the old newsreels Mr. Mandelheim shows in history class.
I start to think of these guys as thicks. Like my own thicks. Curly, Shorty, and Arnold aren’t too different from Kyle, Nick, and Javon.
If my thicks and I could swim back in time, right onto the deck of the USS Gabriel Trask, we’d fit right in. Time and fashion may change; thickness does not. Thickness is one of the few constants in the universe.
What makes you thick? It’s a mix of things—sharing major experiences, sharing day-to-day stuff, through many seasons, and relating to them, and each other, with instinctive honesty. Getting mad at each other and forgiving.
Plus that edge that is sometimes sharp, sometimes rubbery, depending on your mood.
And, of course, getting used to each other’s farts.
Thickness is everywhere, among young and old, on street corners and on school playgrounds. I’m very conscious of it. I even see it as a color—soft blue.
The dudes at the Alamo were thick.
Odysseus and his men were thick.
The sailors in the pictures are probably dead, or ninety, but their thickness lives on.
Thickness transcends death. Is an eternal torch.
If you are not thick with someone, you are very much alone in the world.
Still, even thickness can’t always shed light on a truly dark soul.
And mine is truly dark.
Deeper in the files is a document entitled “War Department Inquest.” The subtitle is “Examination into the deaths of thirteen sailors aboard the USS Gabriel Trask, 7 April 1945. Based on the testimony of Lt. David O. H. Cosgrove, USN.”
The document is 152 pages long.
The last page, entitled Glossary D, is a list of the thirteen sailors by name, age, rank, serial number, addres
s, and next of kin. They pretty much represent a cross section of the country: Bozeman, Montana; Truro, Massachusetts; Wink, Texas; Los Angeles, California.
And so on.
I peel off another Bull. Pop a Doz. Gargle it down. Pull the light closer. Settle back on my pillow.
Then I load some Transition Theory into my brain. Let the rest of the world sleep—I’m swimming back to April 1945.
Chapter 20
Out David’s window, it’s raining. The afternoon is dark and drippy. A bit Dickensian. A bit Stygian. Very Seattle-ian. The birch trees across the street wave their tendrilly fingers at me. Every few seconds, the third tree on the left rotates its wrist and flips the bird at me.
“Fuck you, Jonathan! . . . Suck it, Jonathan! . . . Go jump off a bridge, Jonathan!”
Since we started our little project, I’ve watched those hands sprout green mittens.
I’ve watched David’s shoulders drop more and more—sloped by the totality of his illnesses and years.
I’ve listened to his mucous cough hack away at his ribs till they seem ready to break.
The Delphi is hell’s putrid gutter. But deeper inside are doorways to other places, like Agnes’s world or the South Pacific.
And these places I can handle. In fact, I would almost rather be there than anyplace else.
Today, David sits in his wheelchair. Buttoned in his tattered old-man sweater. Trying to get his breath back. He stares blindly at the floor.
Pretty soon, he lifts his cup. Sucks shaved ice through a straw to “lubricate” his vocal chords. Then he starts to talk again. Many words arrive cracked or scratched.
I start copu-noting on the canary yellow legal pad.
Jot this idea for a bumper sticker: “I’d rather be copulating.”
On average, I fill one legal pad with my copu-noting per session. So far, I’ve filled thirty-one legal pads. Stuffed them into my backpack or Ruby’s zippered pocket. But I haven’t written a single word of David’s book. Not a single word!
Maybe I could just type up my notes. Garnish them with some poetic parsley. I could power myself with twelve-packs of taurine and write that damn book in one marathon session, sprinting the whole twenty-six miles.
But Gupti would see through it.
Adios, Nirvana Page 9
