My Father’s Guitar & Other Imaginary Things: True Stories

by Joseph Skibell

In those days, the family business took care of everything, including our car registrations. For a while even, until the IRS closed the loophole, we all paid for our gas with company credit cards.

  Dad transferred the call to Dorothy, his office manager. She’d renew the registration, she told me, and send me the tags later that day.

  The next week, I went to the town hall for what I suppose was my trial. I found the correct office. A long narrow room, it had nothing in it but a desk and two chairs. A woman sat behind the desk. A man stood behind her chair. The woman was slender, middle-aged, with a helmet of bluntly cut hair. She wore a simple plaid cotton shirt. She squinted one eye against the smoke of a cigarette. The man was squat with a pointed belly, a salt-and-pepper crew cut, and an Errol Flynn mustache.

  I’d never seen the woman before, but the man looked familiar. Later, I realized he was the chief of police, but that day, because he wasn’t in uniform, I couldn’t quite place him.

  Like the cop, they were both Spanish.

  I took a seat on the far side of the desk. They asked me what I was doing there. I told them I’d been driving with an expired registration, and I handed them my ticket and the new registration forms.

  “Why were you driving with an expired registration?” the woman asked.

  “Oh. Well, it was in the mail,” I said. “The registration. It got delayed in the mail.”

  “Ah, it was in the mail,” the police chief said, as though this explained everything. “It was in the mail,” he said to the woman.

  “It was in the mail?” she said to me.

  “It was in the mail,” I said, “yeah.”

  She looked over the paperwork again, the cigarette burning between her lips.

  “But here it says you got the ticket on the twenty-first, and according to this, the registration wasn’t purchased until the twenty-second.

  “Hmm,” the police chief said, reading over her shoulder.

  They both looked at me. I felt a moment of visceral panic. My breathing constricted. While keeping as bland a face as possible, I riffled through my brain for an additional lie that might make my first lie appear true.

  “Well, I thought it was in the mail” was all I could come up with.

  “Oh, you thought it was in the mail?” the police chief said.

  We nodded at each other.

  “He thought it was in the mail,” the police chief said to the woman.

  “You thought it was in the mail?” she said to me, sounding dubious, annoyed, it seemed to me, by the masculine collusion in the room.

  “Yeah, I mean, I thought it was in the mail,” I said.

  She read through the papers again, frowning, comparing the ticket and the registration form.

  “Well, normally,” she finally said, “this ticket has an eighty-dollar fine, but since you thought the registration was in the mail, I’m only going to charge you twenty.”

  The police chief shrugged apologetically.

  “Fair enough,” I said.

  I wrote out a check for twenty dollars and gave it to the woman. She thanked me, I thanked her. I shook hands with the police chief and I walked down the rickety wooden staircase and out of the building into the bright morning light of the plaza, thinking maybe, just maybe, the Mountain had accepted me.

  DON’T MESS WITH MISTER IN BETWEEN

  My uncle Ike had had a rough couple of years, and I was worried about him. My mother’s kid brother, he’d been largely abandoned by my sisters, both of whom lived less than a mile from his apartment. They’d given our father, in the last years of his life, the sort of attention a dying king might receive—his every need attended to during a full roster of daily visits—but for my uncle, it was different. Though my brothers-in-law saw to his financial and medical needs, as far as company went, Ike was on his own. I’m not blaming my sisters. Ike had, in fact, shunned them, partly as a result of mental instability, I think, and partly in order to more freely indulge his recreational drug habit.

  Unbeknownst to almost everyone in the family, he’d struggled with addiction most of his life and had been using now for years. When he went through a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of crack, we had to sell his sister’s condo in Chicago, which he’d inherited, and move him to a small apartment in Dallas, where we could keep a better eye on him.

  For an addict, he was an exemplary fellow: he never stole from anyone; he never hit anyone up for cash. At the first of the month, when his VA and his Social Security checks arrived, he simply took the bus and the DART to wherever addicts go in Dallas and used a portion of the money, dedicated to that purpose, for crack. This was the A-Side of his life, the hit side. It lasted about two weeks each month. When the money was gone, he returned to his apartment for the B-Side, doing whatever it was he did—sitting quietly for the most part and watching television—while waiting for our government to further finance his addiction.

  Despite his using, he was the longest-living member of his family. His parents and his sisters—my aunt and my mother—had predeceased him, and he was older now than any of them had been at the time of their deaths. Lately, though, illness had caught up with him, and he’d been forced to abandoned his hobby. This was his cheerful code word for his drug use. The shortness of breath caused by his COPD made inhaling crack, he told me, a complete waste of time and money.

  I DECIDED TO go see him, and as I was packing for my flight, I noticed a set of CDs on my bookshelf, a collection of lectures I’d bought years before on various aspects of “Jewish healing.” These were basically modern rabbinic takes on ancient Jewish rituals. I’d listened to only a few of these lectures. The CDs had been sitting on my shelf for years. On impulse now, I downloaded one of the lectures to my iTunes and uploaded it to my iPod and sipping a spicy tomato juice high above the clouds, I listened to the first half of it on my flight.

  The subject was the annulment of vows. The lecturer was a rabbi named Tirzeh Firestone. On the CD, Rabbi Firestone calls the rabbinic ritual for the annulment of vows “an ancient form of Judaic medicine” designed to “free the captive soul” from the oaths it has made.

  The ancients, she said, understood the powerful connection between breath, word, and intention, and as a consequence, they took the making of oaths very seriously. In the modern world, we’ve lost touch with the idea that our words might hold power over our lives. In the material world, words seem the least material of things, and it’s hard for us to believe that making a vow might affect our destinies.

  On the other hand, though our thoughts are even less physical, we hold a profound respect for the power of the unconscious mind, and we know that a person might harbor a deep thought, unknown even to his rational, daylit self, that might constrict, inhibit, or imprison him.

  Rabbi Tirzeh tells the story of a boy who developed leukemia at the age of sixteen and who fervently prayed, in his youthful naiveté, to be allowed to live until sixty. The boy recovered, and the man he became forgot all about his illness, until he was sixty and it returned. She describes a woman who, in the thrall of childbirth, screamed out, “I will never bear another child!” and who, ten years later, doesn’t understand why she can’t conceive a second time.

  All this made sense to me. I knew a woman who, in the wake of her breast cancer, prayed to live to see her grandchildren. Her cancer, fatal this time, returned twenty years later, once her grandchildren had all been born.

  According to Tirzeh, although we no longer make public vows, our unconscious intentions, these deep promises that, speaking aloud, we make to ourselves, continue to hold us in their sway.

  MIDWAY THROUGH THE lecture, my plane began its descent. I wrapped the iBuds around my iPod and put it away. I spent the next day with my uncle, driving him to his doctor’s appointment. Without me there, he’d have to have taken the DART and two buses. He had a spot on his lung, a strange shadow, his doctor wanted to biopsy. My intuition told me that he was too frail to survive the procedure, and the thought of him baking all morning
in the Dallas heat, making his train and catching two connecting buses, to meet his death chilled me to the bone.

  I dropped him off at the entrance of the VA and drove down the hill to park. I climbed back up the hill on foot, a steep hill he’d have to have huffed and puffed his way up from the bus stop otherwise. Inside, I asked the receptionist where I might find him. The lobby was busier than Grand Central Station at rush hour, and I moved through its multidirectional tumult until I finally found the examining room they’d placed him in.

  He was already buttoning up his shirt.

  “What happened?” I said.

  “Oh, the doctor changed his mind,” Ike told me. “He said the procedure was too dangerous, and he wasn’t comfortable doing it.”

  I drove Ike back to his apartment. We spent the afternoon chatting over coffee at a bookstore. I had dinner with my sisters and I flew home the following day. I had every intention of listening to the second half of the lecture on my return flight, but things didn’t work out that way.

  ON THE FLIGHT in, I was in seat 16E, and my arrival gate, I noticed, was E16. This must have done something to my head, because on my return flight I sat in 18E, but as it turned out, I’d misread my ticket. The departure gate was E18. My actual seat was an aisle seat almost at the back of the plane.

  I settled in, put my iPod in my shirt pocket. From where I was sitting, I could see all the way up the aisle and I watched as a man, a late arrival, came dashing towards the back of the plane. He was sweating visibly, his blond hair matted brown in places it was so wet. The tails of his half-untucked Hawaiian shirt and his mustache were flying. He was clutching a briefcase and what looked like an enormous leather-bound Bible to his chest.

  Perhaps it was his Bible—I tend to attract on-the-edge types—but somehow I knew this guy was not only heading for the empty seat next to mine but that he would invariably want to speak with me. Both of these things turned out to be true. He was, in fact, heading to the middle seat in my row. Standing over me, he juggled his Bible and his briefcase and checked his ticket, moist in his hand, against the seat numbers.

  “I’m here,” he said. “In the middle.”

  I unbuckled my seat belt and got up to let him in. He took a not small amount of time settling in, letting his sweat dry and placing his Bible and his briefcase on his pull-down tray. As the plane took off, I kept my eyes in front of me, hoping that this and my iBuds would serve as a DO NOT TRESPASS sign. Keeping his briefcase and his Bible on his lap, he nervously bounced his knees. He was wearing olive-drab shorts, and his legs were covered with little coils of coppery hair. When we reached altitude, I turned on my iPod and dialed up the second half of Tirzeh’s lecture. In my peripheral vision, I watched as the guy tried to engage the woman in the window seat in conversation, but she was having none of it.

  I closed my eyes and pushed my chair back, but it wasn’t long before I thought I heard him speaking to me. I ignored it, but when he addressed me again, I caved. There was something too heartbreaking about this guy trying to speak to his seatmates and being completely ignored.

  I took off my iBuds.

  “Did you say something?” I asked him.

  “I just thought I’d say hello,” he said, “and perhaps speak to you for a moment about God.”

  “Ah, yes,” I said, straightening up in my seat. “I thought that’s what this would be about. What exactly about God would you like to know?”

  “Oh, are you a religious man?” he said, brightening.

  “Well, that’s a complicated question.”

  “You’re telling me,” he said, shaking his head.

  I don’t remember exactly how the conversation meandered there, but eventually we got to his life story. He’d been raised a Catholic, he told me, but he had long ago turned his back on the church. His entire life, he’d had no use for religion, really, and so this whole thing was new to him. He’d never even read the Bible before. He hadn’t quite made his way through it yet, but he felt he had to go around and spread the word of God. He knew he wasn’t very good at it, but still . . .

  “Maybe I should start at the beginning?” he said.

  “Sure. Why not?” I said.

  He owned a lighting design company in Florida, he told me. They were the people who’d install lights in your trees, you know, so that you could swim or barbecue at night. Everything was going well, too. He had more work than he could handle. He had had to hire a few extra people, and one of them was his son. Now, the thing of it is: he’d never been close to his children, but now that his son was working for him the two of them were getting closer and closer. He really enjoyed having his boy near him. It felt as though they were making up for lost time.

  One day, though, he gets a call: You’d better get here, they tell him. Your son has fallen out of a tree.

  “He’d been hanging lights high up in a palm tree and he lost his balance and fell.”

  No one told him how his son was. He had no idea if he was even alive.

  “I had no experience, really, praying,” he said, but as he dashed over to the project site he found himself saying, “Dear Lord, you can have my house, you can have my business, you can have my wife, if you’ll just let my son live.”

  Uh-oh, I thought. Not good. Not good at all. I knew enough about theology to know that despite prominent counter examples in both the Bible and the Talmud, one is discouraged from placing limiting conditions on the Lord Almighty. The Holy One is famously arbitrary and willful. He cannot be subjected to our little deals and schemes. My seatmate’s throwing of his wife into the pot made me cringe even more. How could he lump his wife into the same category as his business and his house?

  When he arrived at the work site, he found his son alive, though barely. The boy had broken a dozen bones and ruptured a scad of internal organs, but they rushed him in an ambulance to the hospital and he survived.

  Meanwhile, it wasn’t long before the guy’s business dried up. “Completely. I mean, we went from feast to famine in two short weeks. There was literally no work.” As a consequence, he was unable to pay his mortgage and he lost his house. His wife had been flying to Phoenix on a regular basis to visit her daughter—she’d been married once before—and while she was out west she’d begun sleeping with her daughter’s father-in-law. Now his marriage was over.

  God had taken him at his word, he said, looking at me with a frank look on his face. I looked at him. We were silent for a moment.

  “This may strike you as odd,” I told him, “although perhaps it won’t, but I happen to be listening to a lecture right now on the annulment of vows.”

  “That is surprising,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Wow,” he said softly, and even more softly, “Wow.”

  “It explains how to annul your vows.”

  “That’s an extraordinary coincidence, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah. I mean, I’ve had these CDs for years. I never really listened to them until now, and now, for some reason, this is the one I thought to put on my iPod.”

  “As though it were a message meant for me.”

  “That’s what I was thinking,” I said.

  “Wow.”

  He was silent again for a moment.

  “But it’s too late now, isn’t it? I mean, everything’s already gone,” he said.

  “I know, but at least from a Jewish perspective—I don’t know how Christianity deals with these things—but perhaps you made this vow too quickly, under a kind of emotional duress, and could be released from it and get everything back.”

  He bit his upper lip. His knees bounced nervously under his pull-out tray.

  I have to say: there was something endearing about this fellow, something endearing in the way he couldn’t quite master the rudiments of evangelicalism. He had no slick presentation, no working overview of the Bible, no real understanding of theology. On the contrary, he was a shambolic mess, all flying shirttails and perspiration. Certainly he was the last pers
on the woman in the window seat wanted to be stuck with for a two-hour flight, and who could blame her? Who would ever listen to a man like that about matters of life and death?

  Still, my heart went out to him. I wanted to help him out of his predicament. I mean, what were the chances that he’d tell his story to a stranger who was listening to a lecture about how to annul your vows?

  As it turned out, though, he had no interest in the rabbinic opt-out clause I was offering him.

  “I don’t care if I end up living under a bridge,” he said. “I can put my arms around my son, and that’s all that matters to me.”

  As far as he was concerned, he’d had a profound experience. He’d felt the hand of God in his life, and it wasn’t an overly gentle hand either. Taking him at his word, God had thrown him into bankruptcy, into home forfeiture, into cuckoldry, but he had his son, and it would be churlish to complain.

  “Everything has its cost,” he told me.

  Something in the way he said this made me think of my uncle.

  “But even in the book of Job,” I told him, “God knocks Job around a bit, but in the end, Job not only gets new children to replace the ones he lost, but God restores his possessions and his health.”

  “Does he?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah,” he said, nodding towards his Bible, “I haven’t really gotten that far yet.”

  I offered to burn a copy of the CD for him, in case he changed his mind. He gave me his address, and when I arrived home I made the disc and dropped it in the mail.

  Not long after that, I received a letter from him. He’d listened to the lecture, he wrote, and he was grateful for the gift of it, but he was adamant. He’d made his agreement with God. He was content with the terms of the deal and had no interest in annulling his vow.

  I leaned back in my chair and tossed his letter onto a pile of papers on my desk. Through the windows of my study, I watched the postman in his little truck making his halting dash from mailbox to mailbox on the other side of the street. I picked up the phone to call Ike. I was still worrying about him, though I suppose the guy on the plane was right: everything has its cost, and there’s only so much you can do putting yourself between a man and the bargain that he’s made.