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

by Joseph Skibell

  Tiger grew listless and lethargic on the Alzheimer’s ward. He told Dad he wished somebody from the family would take him out for the day. He wanted to see a television with this year’s football games on it. The TVs in the retirement home showed games that were at least two years old.

  I hate to think of him, dying there. I prefer to think of him sleeping in the park in Harrisburg, sprawled upon the ground beneath his tree, dressed, like the tigers in Little Black Sambo, in his dapper human clothing, his yellow pants and his yardstick suspenders, my grandfather’s snazzy golf shoes with the cleats removed, an elegant, flowing cape like the cape he wore when he wrestled, magnificently, as the Baby Tiger, his extravagant mustaches and his beard dyed a vibrant red in the hopes of masking his tiger stripes, the fearful symmetry of his savage heart reconciled at last.

  EVERYBODY’S LOT

  I was meeting a colleague at a pizza place called Everybody’s. I’d arrived early so I could go to the Chabad House beforehand. It was just down the street. The rabbi and I were studying the Tanya together, a mystical text about the righteous and the wicked and the rest of us in between.

  I pulled into the parking lot behind the line of stores. I hadn’t quite realized that Everybody’s had its own parking lot on the other side of the building. There were signs in this parking lot listing all the businesses you could patronize while being parked here, and Everybody’s wasn’t one of them.

  YOUR CAR WILL BE IMPOUNDED, blah blah blah, et cetera et cetera, the sign said, above the list of approved shops.

  Now, I could have done a lot of things. I could have gotten back into my car and pulled into the lot on the other side. I could have walked through the back door of the Starbucks, dallied for a moment, taken off my coat, maybe even made a purchase, before walking out the front, confounding whoever might be observing me. I could have driven to the Chabad House and parked there for an hour and driven back.

  Instead, I told myself that it’s easy enough to put up signs like these, threatening this and threatening that, and quite another thing to employ a person to enforce your rules and carry out your threats.

  I come from a long line of rule breakers. As a child, I was taught by the example of these elders that everything is negotiable. Nothing is written in stone. My grandfather Archie was essentially a draft dodger, sent to America in 1921 at the age of sixteen to avoid conscription into the Russian army. He and his sons after him made a fine art of walking freely through the world. My uncle Bernard was perhaps the most adept at this. Visiting friends at the hospital, Bernard parked in the Doctors Only spaces. Going into a restaurant to see how long the wait might be, he’d come out nibbling on things from the salad bar. He’d leave his own reception at a hotel and wander into other people’s receptions. Moving through the receiving line, he’d introduce himself to the hosts, congratulate them on the occasion, and invite them to ours before helping himself to a little something from the buffet.

  I wasn’t like that as a child. I was a nervous kid, fretful, generally expecting the worst. The world was a dangerous place, and you never knew who might be watching you, following you, keeping track of you, perhaps even intending you harm.

  Both of these impulses were alive in me as I stepped out of my car. On the one hand, I felt free to park in the wrong lot and to walk out to the street and away from the stores towards the Chabad House in broad daylight. On the other, I worried that someone might in fact be watching me. There was a man smoking a cigarette in the doorway of one of the businesses listed on the signs. I stared at him as I walked past. He gave me an impassive look in return.

  But was he merely taking a break or was he, in fact, monitoring the lot?

  I couldn’t tell, and in the end, it was my paranoia that undid me. I was feeling paranoid, true, but because I have a tendency to be a little paranoid, I told myself I was only being paranoid, and dismissing healthy paranoia as its unhealthy twin, I walked down the street to the Chabad House where, for an hour, the rabbi and I made our imperfect progress through the hierarchies of the human soul.

  Entering Everybody’s an hour later, I’d forgotten all about the car.

  I took a seat and waited for Kip to arrive.

  KIP WAS THE director of our program, and he and I were meeting to review the semester and evaluate the students and discuss the syllabi and perform the thousand and one other tedious tasks required of college professors. I’d taken a table near the door and was waiting for him when I noticed that the man sitting at the bar looked familiar.

  Hey, isn’t that that famous movie star? I said to myself. No, no, I think it is!

  Though the movie star was famous and had been for years, for some reason, I couldn’t remember his name. He’d been in everything. I’d seen him in dozens of films, going all the way back to the early 1980s, or maybe even the late ’70s, but still I couldn’t remember his name. I tried to get a better look at him, hoping to jog my memory, though to tell you the truth, I wasn’t sure if it was really him or not.

  I mean, I thought it was him, it looked like him, but I wasn’t entirely sure.

  I made a trip to the bathroom in order to come back to my table and get a look at him from a different angle, and from this other angle, the guy, whoever he was, didn’t look like the movie star at all. No, he was just some guy hanging out at the bar, chatting with the bartender, but then the bartender took a photo of him with his phone, and I realized: No, wait, it is that guy!

  Getting off his stool, the movie star turned around to head out. He walked past my table, and as he did, he ducked his head and stared through the windows at the lowering sky, zipping up his windbreaker, and there it was: the flattened nose, the full head of hair brushed back in a rakish pompadour, the steely blue-eyed gaze, all of which I’d seen countless times in countless movies, thirty feet tall, or whatever it is, on the silver screen.

  He ducked out and was gone, and when Kip showed up a few minutes later, I said to him, “Man, you’ll never guess who was in here just now?”

  “Who?” Kip said, sliding down into the booth.

  “I can’t remember his name, but, you know, he’s that really big movie star.”

  Kip squinted. “Who’s this, you’re saying?”

  “You know him. I mean, everybody knows him. He’s really famous. But for some reason—I don’t know why—his name has left my head. But you’ve seen him in a million things. I mean, he’s been in, like, everything.”

  “Yeah? Like what?”

  “Oh, I mean, he’s been in a million things, but I can’t . . . for some reason . . . the only thing that comes to mind is . . . well, he was in . . . I mean, this was years ago, but he was in a movie called The Falcon and the Snowman.”

  Kip shook his head. “Yeah, I never saw it.”

  “You know, he committed treason or something with Timothy Hutton?”

  “Yeah, I’ve never even heard of that film.”

  “Oh, and he was”—I snapped my fingers—“in that movie they made from that book Cameron Crowe wrote where he pretends to be a high school student, where he actually, I mean Cameron Crowe actually went back to high school and, you know, he wrote that book about the experience and . . . ?”

  “Yeah, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kip said.

  “Oh! And—oh, yeah!—he . . . he was in that movie with Laura Linney where they kill Tim Robbins who’s their friend. They think Tim Robbins has done something, I can’t remember what, but they kill him, and then they find out it’s a mistake. It has the word mystic in the title, I think.”

  Kip was becoming visibly uninterested, which wasn’t surprising. A celebrity sighting lives or dies, I suppose, on whether you can actually remember the name of the celebrity.

  “It’s like Nick Something . . . or Something Nick,” I said. “There are like two one-syllable names or . . . he was married to Madonna, for chrissakes. Sean Penn!” I said. “It was Sean Penn!”

  The name dropped out of my head and onto my tongue like a gum ball dro
pping out of a gum-ball machine.

  “Oh, well,” Kip said, straightening up in his chair, “that is interesting. I mean, Sean Penn. Now he’s cute.”

  “Yeah,” I said, although, in truth, none of this made any sense to me. Without Sean Penn’s name, the story had no wattage. Without his name, Kip couldn’t imagine Sean Penn. He couldn’t conjure him up mentally, but now, with the name, all Kip was doing was conjuring Sean Penn up mentally, and where, really, was the thrill in that?

  This wasn’t even the first time I’d seen Sean Penn. I saw him twenty years before in Los Angeles, with Madonna, no less. I mean, he was with Madonna. Barbara and I had been walking into Tommy Tang’s, a hip new Thai place on Melrose Avenue, when Penn and Madonna, both dressed in white suits, were suddenly standing before us. We passed through the door at the same moment, holding it open for one another, and then they disappeared, whisked off, no doubt, to wherever celebrities are whisked off to, far from the invasive gaze of plebs like me.

  “It’s like Halley’s comet,” I say to Kip. “Every twenty years or so, I see Sean Penn. But perhaps even more importantly, every twenty years or so, Sean Penn sees me. You know, he was probably stealing glances at me and wondering, Hey, there’s that guy again! How come I see him every twenty years?”

  “Yeah,” Kip says flatly.

  I was kidding, of course, but it’s possible. I mean, it’s possible that Sean Penn has a preternaturally acute photographic recall of faces. Or maybe he’s read my books, though I doubt it. They’re not the type of books you imagine Sean Penn’s having on his nightstand. (I don’t really imagine Sean Penn having a nightstand.) Also, I hadn’t written any of them in 1985 when we’d last seen each other. In the twenty years since, Sean Penn and I have traveled in quite different circles, it’s true. Famous twenty years ago, he’s even more famous now. I experience a kind of red-hot envy towards him. Twenty years ago, all I wanted was to live as an artist, supporting myself with my work. Writers, of course, are never as famous as movie stars, but still, I wanted to be as famous as a movie star, and it’s always felt a bit of a defeat to have to teach for a living, hiding out in the hinterlands, far from the glamorous coasts.

  “I’ll take a beer,” I told the waitress.

  “Pint or a half-pint?” she said, standing over our table.

  “Make it a pint,” I said.

  Kip ordered a pint as well.

  I’m not much of a drinker. I might have a little wine with dinner, but not always. Still, when the waitress returned with the beer—a nutty brown ale—it not only tasted great but, since I hadn’t eaten much that day, I got a little buzzed, and as Kip and I spoke about syllabi and prerequisites and credit hours, the thought occurred to me, Ah! So this is why people drink in the afternoons!

  I had no idea what I’d been missing. It was amazing to me to think that a person could feel this way every day of his life after four o’clock! When the waitress returned and asked if we’d like another one, I said yes without hesitation; and a half hour after that, when Kip and I parted, and I walked through the little alleyway connecting Everybody’s to the parking lot next door, I felt agreeably bibulous, so much so that even the sight of the Denver boot shackled to the tire of my car, along with the garish orange sticker plastered to the driver’s window, didn’t put a dent in my mood.

  “Oh, no!” I cried aloud. “Well, this is not entirely unexpected!” I said to myself. I may even have laughed. The beer had somehow anaesthetized any anger I might have been feeling, coddling it as though it were an infant and keeping it asleep. “But how am I supposed to drive home with such a device on my tire?”

  I approached my car.

  WARNING! DO NOT ATTEMPT TO MOVE YOUR VEHICLE! the orange sticker shouted up at me, and beneath these and other helpful remonstrations, it supplied me with a telephone number.

  I dialed the number on my cell.

  From where I was standing next to my car, even in the twilight, I could see into the parking lot of the drugstore across the street. A man was standing over there, and he began waving at me, pointing to his phone, shouting happily, it seemed.

  “It’s me! It’s me!” he cried, waving his arms and pointing to my phone and back to his phone. “You’re calling me!” he said. “There’s no need! I’ll be right over!”

  I watched as he made his way across the street, snaking through traffic, and soon he was standing before me, a handsome African American man, shorter than I and a bit on the stocky side.

  “Ah, so it’s you!” I said, greeting him like a long-lost friend. “You’re the one who put this contraption onto my car.”

  “I did, yes,” he said. “It’s me!”

  “Oh, man,” I told him. “I wish you hadn’t’ve done that.”

  “I know, I know,” he said. “Most people, I have to say, feel that way.”

  “Understandably.”

  “Sure, sure.”

  It’s hard to explain. We were standing very near each other, smiling into each other’s faces. I was feeling lax and limber from the beer. That had something to do with it, I’m sure; but there was also something agreeable about this fellow. He was soft-spoken with a playfulness about him that you don’t often encounter in people.

  “I’ll tell you what. There’s a good man,” I said. “Unlock the contraption, no hard feelings, and I’ll be on my way.”

  “Well, but I can’t do that,” he said.

  “But of course you can,” I said.

  “I can’t.”

  “You put it on, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, then I assume you know how to take it off.”

  “Oh, I do. I do. I know how to take it off. That’s my job.”

  “There you are! You see, you’re just the man I was looking for. Because you realize—I’m sure you realize—I can’t drive home with that thing on my car.”

  “No, no,” he said, “I wouldn’t try it.”

  “And it’s time for me to drive home.”

  I tapped the face of my watch with my index finger.

  “Well, I’d be happy to take it off,” he said.

  “Happy! See, that makes me happy, too!”

  “But you’re going to have to pay first.”

  “Pay first. Right, right. I understand. I mean, I understand why you might feel that way. But . . .”

  “But what?”

  “I’d rather not.”

  “You’d rather not pay?”

  “No, yes, I’d rather not pay.”

  This seemed to amuse him.

  “Well, but you parked here illegally,” he said.

  “No, I was a patron at one of these stores.”

  “But you weren’t. You weren’t,” he said. “I saw you.”

  “You were hiding?”

  “I was hiding, yes, and I saw you park, and I saw you walk out, and I saw you wander down the street towards those apartments over there.”

  “That’s exactly right,” I said. “You see, I had an appointment. I had an appointment with the rabbi at the Chabad House to study Chasidut, although to tell you the truth I’m not really a mystical person. My wife is the mystical person in the family. She can go on and on for hours about the sephirot and chesed and gevurah, and the Garden of Pomegranates, and things like that. We’re not really making much progress, the rabbi and I, but I go, I go, and I went today, and yes, when I went today, I parked here and I walked over there, but then I came back and I had a beer, or two beers actually, at Everybody’s. And you know who I saw there?”

  “Who?”

  “Sean Penn.”

  “Who’s Sean Penn?” he said.

  “You don’t know who Sean Penn is?”

  “No, man.”

  “The movie star?”

  “Yeah? Well, I don’t know anything about that, but I hope he didn’t park here, because, if he parked here, I don’t care who he is, he’s going to get a boot. This parking lot isn’t for Everybody’s.”

  “Yes. Yes, I know that. I k
now that now, you see. I realize that now, you see, but I didn’t then. So you see it was all an honest mistake.”

  He smiled an extravagant, indulgent, benevolent and gracious smile.

  “What’s your name?” I said to him.

  “Eugene,” he told me.

  “Ah, Eugene. It means well born, you know.”

  “Hey, how did you know that?”

  “It’s my business to know things like that, Eugene. Now, Eugene, my parking here was an honest mistake. I had an appointment down the street, as I told you, but I knew I was coming back here, and there is a little alleyway—you see it right there—connecting this lot to Everybody’s lot, and so it’s a reasonable mistake to have made. Now, fun’s fun, Eugene, and though I’m enjoying our talk, the hour is late, the day is short. Be a good chap, be a good well-born chap, and take this thing off my car.”

  “I will,” he said. “I’ll be happy to do it. I really will. As soon as you pay the fine.”

  “And what is the fine?”

  “Sixty dollars.”

  “No, Eugene, sixty dollars is excessive.”

  “But that’s the price.”

  “Yes, that’s the price, but it’s an excessive price. I’ll give you twenty.”

  Smiling, Eugene looked at the ground, he looked at the sky, at the purpling light of twilight. He seemed as relaxed as I was. He had all the time in the world, I was beginning to realize. He was on the clock, after all, with nothing else to do.

  I moved in nearer to him.

  “Look, Eugene, I didn’t want to have to bring this up, because you seem like a nice person, but your sticker—that garish orange sticker you put on my car—has done considerable damage to my window.”

  This was true. I’d tried to remove it, and while some of the sticker came off, some of it didn’t, and some of it, in fact, never would.

  “I mean, just look at what you’ve done. I’m afraid there’s an eighty-dollar fine. So I’ll tell you what: you give me twenty, you take the boot off my car, we’ll call it even, and I’ll be on my way.”

  “I’d like to help you,” he said, laughing, “but . . .”