Fuck the president, thinks Liam. Where’s my boy?
Turns out, by midday, Fox will be wondering that, too.
THE SUN SPILLS YELLOW across the windshield—like chicken gravy, thinks Liam. He’s navigating within the thickening Saturday-morning traffic, like a giblet—in chicken gravy, thinks Liam. The sun isn’t yellow it’s chicken—he’s listening to Dylan, and Dylan for the moment covers everything—like . . . He won’t do that. He turns the music off and switches to radio and reminds himself again that he still doesn’t smoke. Oh, how cigarettes used to punctuate the road trips—life measured out not in coffee spoons but in Marlboro Lights—one per county he used to try to do—city, Westchester, Putnam, Dutchess, Columbia, and so on, but always doubled up on each, at least. Still, it was worth the effort. Living longer now, look out! He is over the Spuyten Duyvil bridge now and had better pass that belching panel truck. He gets winding along at better speed and on into rocky Riverdale, light glancing through the bare trees. He realizes he is still scanning through stations on FM mindlessly—without hearing, anyway—and begins to listen. NPR will have something—would it be all-day coverage? The welfare of our president, and the search for the would-be assassin, full team coverage. This should be good, thinks Liam as the back vent of his old tweed coat flaps at him like a signal of hello in his mind, and he wonders, How? What if? No. The road banks and torques under a stone bridge, and a block of Tudor homes crisscrosses in his vision. He can hear Scott Simon, still misses Daniel Schorr, and his heart is pounding and the car is stopped and steaming and there is a rocky outcrop with a bush and a Gristede’s bag caught in it right in front of him. His face is hot and he hears something strange, like a little boy’s voice asking, Are you okay, Dad? Are you okay? Or is it, Are you a hockey fan, then? Are you a hockey fan, then?
When he wakes up, it is with a sense of embarrassment—it is the embarrassment of drool on his chin that has roused him to consciousness and the sight of a young man’s face framed with unruly hair—What are they called? Dread something. He can’t think—looking right at him, his eyes speckled and bright with youth, and he is asking if he is okay.
I don’t know, says Liam. Who are you?
You took a bad turn, says the kid. This ain’t the road here. It’s like a little service road, just from here to right over there. Some kind of turnaround. You okay?
No answer.
Your Jeep looks okay. The brush and stuff slowed you down. You almost killed me, though!
No answer.
Listen, sir, you okay? The cops’ll be here quick, if you want that.
That gets Liam’s attention, and he grips the steering wheel hard and winces in pain, like he’d been grabbed by something steel. Both wrists screaming, now held limp before him like dead animals.
You must’ve sprained ’em, said the kid.
No answer.
THERE’S A HOSPITAL UP HERE A BIT, says the kid, who is driving now.
No no no, says Liam. What?
You need a hospital, for your mitts. And a garage, for the Jeep, or both.
No answer.
What I need—should anyone ask!—the kid says it as a theatrical aside, half over his left shoulder, as if there was a passenger behind him, offstage as it were—and Liam realizes with a shiver that the kid is narrating himself.
Did you say, as the kid says as a theatrical aside? asks Liam.
Hey, he speaks, says the kid, says the young man.
Pull over, says Liam.
I won’t. Can’t. Not here. No room on the shoulder. That was your mistake, Pops.
Hey, the kid continues, looking at the old man, I called you pops, and you got a bump on your head.
IT’S A LITTLE HOSPITAL IN ELMSFORD, the parking lot, and Liam is standing beside the Jeep, bent over, vomiting. Like chicken gravy, he thinks to himself, and then says it aloud, straightening up, laughing.
I’m an asshole, he says, looking skyward, whispering it. The sky is far and gray, and he looks into it, blinking away the shards of tears on his eyelashes. He tries to travel mentally, projecting himself, such as he is, as an entity higher and higher into the upper atmosphere, seeing that little sad tableau below—a red Jeep poorly parked in a half-empty parking lot with two chaps standing either side of it, looking lost. Not even a father, not even a son.
He’s feeling better.
THEY ARE HAVING A DECENT BREAKFAST at the El Dorado Diner in Elmsford. They are almost out of the city, almost across the Hudson. Almost gone, Liam is. And he really rallies, over a short stack and scrambled eggs. The kid has a chef’s salad and a seltzer. Liam considers a Bloody Mary—he could use it—but decides for the moment, his breast flushing with pride, that he will not corrupt the youth—or his driver.
The kid says his name is Henry Gibson—at which point Liam orders a Bloody Mary.
Did you say, you did, Henry H-E-N-R-Y Gibson?
Yeah, Pops.
Not Henrik Ibsen. Hen-Ree Gib-Son?
Yeah. It’s a simple name.
It is, it is. But it sounds like—do you know what a homophone is?
An instrument?
No, no. You’re a sweet kid, Henry. No. I just saw a play last night by Hen-Rick IBB-sen. A great Norwegian playwright. Say it fast—say your name fast.
Interesting. The kid picks around at the curls of ham that sit atop his salad. Liam draws on his Bloody Mary. This is not that interesting, to the kid.
It gets worse.
Did you know—of course you wouldn’t know—that when I was your age there was a comic—he was from around Philadelphia—who took the name Henry Gibson in drama school because it sounded like, it was, a spoof on Henrik Ibsen, the playwright. A Doll’s House, stuff like that. And the play I, er, we, saw last night. By the unexciting name John Gabriel Borkman.
The kid drums his right-hand fingers on the tabletop, but silently.
No. I mean no, I didn’t know that.
Spicy, Liam says, trying a weak whistle. The vodka brightens his eyes. His mood. His hands still hurt, but a little less. His head still throbs, but a little less. He jumps up—somehow renewed—and grabs sections of the New York Times spread out on the adjacent sit-down counter.
So, who do you like in the game tomorrow, kid?
The Super Bowl. I don’t care much. I play music.
Liam is plowing into his pancakes, his palate absolutely alive from the spicy tomato juice. He’s never tasted pancakes this good—and from the El Dorado Diner, no less. I like Green Bay. I’ve got a hundred units on ’em. I gave the points, he mumbles to himself, distracted.
What do you mean, you play music? Liam notices a stout waitress lingering, with a look on her face that says she’s spotted a pederast, or doesn’t like the look of a slight black kid having a meal with an older white gentleman. Crime’s all over—and in her precinct! He puts down the sports section.
I play, man, the kid says, and then hauls up a black trumpet case, holds it there for a second, and then returns it to a spot under his chair.
Oh really?
I’m on my way to Montreal, to see Roy Hargrove. Do you know Roy Hargrove?
Liam nods and smiles and leans back. He wants to just listen, as does, apparently, the waitress, who busies herself at a nearby table.
But the kid returns to his salad.
Well, then, what about Roy Hargrove? says Liam. No, I don’t know anything about Roy Hargrove. Tell me.
He’s my teacher is all. A great, great horn player. He’s taught me a lot. And that’s why I was hitchhiking on the Saw Mill. To get to Montreal. He’s playing at the Monument National, Sunday night. Tomorrow. He’s left a ticket for me.
LIAM IS CHARMED AND WARM and getting comfortable in the front passenger seat of his Jeep. He’s asked to see Henry’s driver’s license, and Henry, producing a legitimate Delaware card, has agreed to chauffeur them north, as that’s where they both are heading, though Liam has a destination short of Montreal. At least it will get Henry, they figure, four-fifths of the w
ay there.
The kid’s got quite a story, and a lot like Hargrove’s. Hargrove played trumpet in the high school band in Waco, Texas, back in the eighties, when Wynton Marsalis visited the school. He spotted the young man, then sixteen, and got him a scholarship to Juilliard. It was Hargrove twenty years later, visiting a YMCA in Philly, who spotted Henry, and worked the same magic. Henry’s family was poor, and living and studying in New York, even on scholarship, has been tough.
Henry is eighteen, according to his license, born on the Fourth of July. Like Satchmo, Liam thought.
Liam then told the kid everything he knew about jazz.
WHICH WASN’T MUCH. He only knew the stories. He didn’t know anything about the music, all the stuff the kid knew. He knew Charlie Parker—Liam listened to Phil Schaap’s Bird Flight for years, the entire chronology of the recorded Bird, but wouldn’t know a chord change from a key change—though he knew that it was Bird’s changes that made him a legend. But he went on.
Now kid . . .
I invented you as a plot device, says Liam as Henry turns cautiously back onto the Saw Mill River Parkway. Now I can drink and drive, and still keep myself on the right side of the law—most worthy of the sympathies I hope to attract. It’s my genius, you see: I drink; you drive.
XIII
HE TRIED TO TELL HIS STORY in several voices. He could never find one. The first person was his first choice and the obvious one—this is my story. The I has the authority of firsthand experience of the tale to be told; incident and emotion are conjoined in the one, the first. There’s no guessing at how love or pain affects the I; for I will tell you. And life’s early stories are filled with emotion and a kind of amazement at emotion—a thrall—to feelings that are being felt for the first time; the early stories are filled with accounts of events experienced for the first time. It’s the coming of age and its first voice is often first person.
That’s not to say that one outgrows the first person and then it is of the past. And he did not believe that, as, on the contrary, the first person and the novelty of experience appealed as an option for the telling throughout his life. And every time, from first to last, he discovered that, perhaps for want of genius, perhaps not, his story was not his own; he did not possess himself or his tale. Because there were more people in his story that were not him. What could I tell about them? And who cared to know the limits of what I knew?
Third person suggested itself, and often did so first. A thousand times abandoning the first will eventually recommend you start somewhere else. A dog would do it. And so would he. Like now. The spirit of some intelligence, disembodied, grazing over incident and time and conveying what happened, happens, and is said or thought or felt. But third person, in the end, is always too scary. It is like a hand grenade in the pantry. It has too much power; it might go off. If it knows everything, then what doesn’t it know? And wouldn’t it always have to tell? If it doesn’t know, why doesn’t it know? What is it? How can the authority of a story being told reside in an unknown force? Who made it God? Is it a device or is it an ideology? Is there a person in third person? And what’s he doing in my kitchen? The kitchen is mine.
Frustration leads to the final choice—the second person. This is death. This is the intimate accusatory voice—sharp and deadly whether accusing the self or others: “You are the body and the blood.” Really, who says so? You?
The different voices, different tenses even, have their appropriate moments and applications. Liam’s work—his career, for better or worse—consisted of a series of weakly related pieces, poems and stories and memoir essays, composed over a thirty-year period, each apt enough for the time and its modest ambitions. But as to a larger work—his capstone, as he would have it—that called for something more sustained in execution and broader and deeper in ambition, and he could not settle on a person, much less a place or a thing.
Then he seemed to have it, somewhere up the Taconic. Somewhere up the Taconic, rolling through the tight corners and rock-shaded glens, he’d begun to fade. He’d managed to establish a deal with the kid—one hundred dollars Liam gave him, right there, on the dashboard, yours, to drive him north; he’d established that the kid could drive and was decent company—though he was quiet, the kid had told a sweet, economical story about the trumpeter called Brownie, who was the sweetest man with a “buttery” tone and he didn’t do drugs or drink and was a math whiz and was killed in a car wreck at night in Pennsylvania, and the kid, the kid said, would drive careful and slow. Is that okay? Because if it isn’t, I can’t take your money.
And by then, Liam is in a dreamland raked by the shadows of bare trees in a space and day emptied of color or perhaps drained of it as when you are about to pass out, all the familiar objects around you turning slowly and evenly white and then there is a filling up; the air around things fills with a pale tea. The car sounds rock him as a child is rocked in days of old in the back-seats of deep-seated sedans, the growl of the engine jiggling your diaphragm pleasantly and your world takes place in a black boxy shape of space in the foot well behind your mother’s seat.
Liam saw what he should do, and it was a confusing thing, complex and simple—give everything all you have all at once. That is, it was the road that would save him (now that he had a driver!), the road swerving through familiar towns and stretches, allowing him to move nowhere while traveling, to think of his wife and what to do, his son and the trouble he’s in, his own work, how to fashion it all as his own; this boy here; the blues, the blues as art form, and why not: a buttery tone.
XIV
LIAM ACTUALLY KNEW A LOT about Brownie, or Clifford Brown, the brilliant young trumpeter out of Wilmington, then Philly, whose inventive playing and spectacular technique—and that round, warm tone—caught the attention of Gillespie early, and then Max Roach, who formed a band partnership with then twenty-two-year-old Brown. He was the present and future of jazz till Bud Powell’s brother’s wife ran the car off the road at night in rural Pennsylvania, killing Brownie, Richie Powell, and herself, ending something, making Brownie part of jazz’s past. It was a loss that shook a lot of players—like Scott LaFaro’s death in a car wreck would clobber Bill Evans five years later. Liam had seen the play in New York that won a Tony and featured the main characters sitting around in the last scene listening to a Clifford Brown solo played at a jam session—a five-minute marvel of all that Brownie brought to the art of the horn. He’d always thought that, after the tape picks up Brownie thanking the crowd, and saying he has to go, it’s such a hot night, and, well, good-bye, that he’d gone out and got killed that night; the kid corrected him.
That’s what people say ’cause it seems true, but it’s not. They want it to be true. Weird. When it’s not. What it is is the last sound we have out of Clifford—it’s hot, he says. And then you know we don’t hear anything again. But it was a couple of weeks before the car wreck.
Liam made a mental note—Get the Clifford Brown biography—just as he drifted off toward sleep near Jackson Corners. Outside his window, the grass was long and brown and worn. And the kid was wrong.
LIAM GOT TIRED OF THE KID. He did. Things wore off, he got sober, and here was Kingston. He’d had enough. He gave Henry fare for the bus to Montreal, and begged off their deal. He doubled it, for food and whatnot. Now, Liam needed a room and some rest. He’d try the Skyway, he told the boy, who seemed concerned for Liam’s well-being. The motel sat high off the Thruway, with a big sign, which they’d seen coming off the ramp, kind of a throwback to the time of motoring vacations—AIR CONDITIONED/COLOR TV.
But when Liam had said his good-byes at the little Trailways stop—he loved this kid, really, but where was the room to love another kid?—he pulled the Jeep back onto 87 North, and, with darkness sifting in, he felt free. He hooked his iPod into the sound system and found some Clifford Brown–Max Roach stuff, and tooled to the north.
These mile markers he had clicked off a thousand times—okay, perhaps a hundred, a handful of hundr
eds, but then he began to wonder: Could it be a thousand? No.
But it pleased him, as Clifford walked his kind of bright delicacy up and down the scales, that he’d established a beachhead for himself—what was he talking about, a beachhead! A mountain aerie, a retreat, rather, which he had never needed like he needed it now. Perhaps that was his plan. He’d go to the cabin. Yes, of course. He wasn’t just driving aimlessly, was he?
His BlackBerry buzzed and he knew it was his wife. I’m gone, dear.
But he checked near Saugerties and it was an unrecognizable number and no message, so he pulled off to take a piss.
XIV
LIAM LOOKED NOT WITHIN HIMSELF but beneath—seated on the rest-stop toilet. His head down between his knees, he could see himself, his sad, sorry self, the essence of him—the he that had created his boy—his half of him—right there, the inverted turret, old, turtled or tortoised, a sad hide, hanging abjectly, in the dimness, waiting for water to come, looking down at the bowl, one blind eye: nothing.
He winced in the moment sometime after admiring his own thoughts and how they rolled themselves in language—for the length of one self-regarding glimpse at what he had just thought, he did admire his “inverted turret, old, turtled or tortoised, a sad hide”—the prosody of it, if you will. The inner rhymes, the assonance he’d once prided himself on—assonance mixed with alliteration—his specialty! But this gave way like an instant hangover to a recognition of cliché—musical, prosaic cliché—merely doing what a habitual blank-verse mind will do given English. He thought of an interview with Sonny Rollins in which Sonny recoiled at a playback of one of his famous improvised solos, shaking his head: Gotta delete the clichés, he said.
The Business of Naming Things Page 14
