Vexation Lullaby

by Justin Tussing

  Some fans consider the shifting shape of the band to be the central narrative of the tour.2 To that end, distinct periods have been identified and ranked. Among the cognoscenti, the hard-driving guitar work of the late C. L. Boyd is held in the highest esteem; meanwhile, defending Junior Pearl’s dirty southern twang only invites ridicule. The significance of March 7, 1996, the date Frederick Tate replaced Gracie Dean on drums, has been debated exhaustively. While I have been fonder of certain players than others (good riddance, Gary Woodman), on balance I find the band to be a tolerable distraction. I’d much prefer Jimmy appear on stage alone.

  4

  Peter turned a corner and found himself in a sitting room. A man with a shaved head reclined on a sectional sofa, Celtic green basketball sneakers peeking out from beneath the hem of a mustard-colored robe. Beside him, a pasty dude in a leather biker jacket, eyes hidden behind a zebra-striped mask, snored with his arms folded over his gut. SportsCenter flashed on a muted TV. On the other side of a half-wall, a grizzled roadie in headphones sat at a black lacquer table; the man wrote in a ledger, ignoring the fruit salad that overflowed from a watermelon carved to resemble a swan.

  The monk aimed a remote at the TV and Peter saw the serial killer unzip the front of her wet suit.

  “Such big breasts for an athlete,” the monk said.

  The biker lifted the corner of his sleep mask.

  Peter continued down a dim hallway, past an inflated balance ball, a coiled jump rope, two sets of dumbbells, and a tangle of giant elastic bands. Half a dozen identical black roller bags lined up like dominoes.

  At the end of the hall he found a bedroom. A middle-aged woman, her long gray hair spun into a cotton-candy tower, sat at the edge of the mattress reading a magazine. Beside her, a black cowboy hat sat on a pillow.

  “You’re the doctor,” the woman announced, her face hidden behind the phone-book-thick fashion magazine.

  Peter introduced himself.

  With an index finger, she folded down a corner of the magazine, made eye contact. “I’m Kiki Beals.”

  Peter knew the name was supposed to mean something to him. He said, “Ah.”

  “The photographer. I did the Abu Ghraib re-creations in McDonald’s bathrooms.”

  That was it. He’d read about her in Time.

  On the other side of a door someone coughed and a toilet flushed. Peter heard water splash into a sink.

  “Billions Served, that’s the title.” The woman dropped the magazine on the bed. “Jimmy and I are writing an opera.”

  Did people still write operas? Peter wasn’t sure.

  “Have you been to the Arctic?” Kiki asked, hopefully.

  The bathroom door opened and out walked a compact man in a shiny gray suit, his head covered in silver stubble. Heavy-lidded squinting eyes looked out from above a pair of frameless bifocals.

  Peter had twice before had brushes with celebrity. In the fourth grade, Randy Owen, from the band Alabama, came into his mother’s store and bought a jelly-bean-sized emerald, peeling seven hundred-dollar bills from a roll as thick as a soda can. Later, during his residency, Peter ducked into an examination room and came face-to-face with a television actress. In her intake report, she complained of soreness in an elbow she’d had scoped two months earlier. “I’ve been playing tennis against doctor orders.” She turned her lip down in an exaggerated pout. In the closeness of the examination room, her beauty made him feel goofy. He started to write a codeine scrip. “Also,” she said, “I may have contracted gonorrhea.” “The risks of tennis,” Peter said. He was relieved when she laughed. He’d thought of her last fall, when she was nominated for an Emmy for her portrayal of a fertility surrogate who learns that the child she’s carrying is the genetic clone of an eccentric billionaire.

  Unsure of protocol, Peter found himself bowing to the man in the suit. “It’s an honor to meet you,” he said to a pair of burgundy wing tips.

  “Honey,” Kiki said, “this is Peter.”

  “I’m Mr. Kiki Beals.”

  “I don’t like that joke, Nicholas.”

  Peter felt sure he’d embarrassed himself, but the couple didn’t seem to notice.

  “Are you a musician?” Nicholas asked, pursing his lips.

  “He’s Jimmy’s doctor.”

  “You’re a psychiatrist, Peter?”

  “I’m a hospitalist.”

  Nicholas turned to his wife. “Do you know what that means?”

  “I studied the delivery of medicine in a hospital setting.”

  “I was just telling Peter about the opera.”

  “Do you know Charles Leale?” Nicholas asked.

  Peter recognized that eternal cocktail party game of establishing common ties. Unfortunately, the name didn’t ring a bell. Which milieu was the man reaching out to? Was Leale from Rochester? A friend of Cross? “Remind me.”

  “Leale was the first physician on the scene when Lincoln was shot. He published a book about his experience.”

  “The opera concerns Lincoln’s assassination,” Kiki explained.

  “Oh,” Peter said. He wanted to ask what the Arctic had to do with anything.

  Kiki stood up from the bed. “We really ought to get going. It was nice meeting you.”

  This time Nicholas bowed.

  AFTER THE COUPLE walked out, Peter checked in with his apprehension. He found it substantially increased. He’d left his condo intending to engage in a little noblesse oblige, but circumstances had changed in a way he didn’t fully understand. He wanted to slip out, but how does one slip past a bodyguard? He imagined himself getting tackled, tasered. He’d wait.

  Almost silently, hidden machines recycled the air.

  The room phone rang twice, quit. Peter read a laminated card detailing instructions for operating the suite’s electronic blinds. At some point, Peter realized, he would need to use a bathroom. He set his backpack down on a dark wood card table, beside a tray of Jordan almonds. He picked one of the candies up and popped it in his mouth.

  “You got a sweet tooth?”

  The speaker’s heavy-lidded, bloodshot eyes peered out from behind a pair of thick-framed reading glasses. Peter thought he recognized the roadie he’d spotted writing at the table when he’d first entered the suite.

  “I just ate the one.”

  “Anybody hassle you?”

  “Nothing I can’t handle.” It sounded like a reasonable approximation of what Martin Vinoray might say. During the week Martin headed Internal Medicine at Rochester Memorial, but on the weekends he served as the front man for a seven-piece surf band called the Steel Retractors. Peter considered Martin his best friend.

  “Do you need anything? You want a something to eat, maybe a drink?”

  “Have you seen Mr. Cross?”

  The roadie smiled, a smirk of a smile, as thin and as crooked as an earthworm. “Man, you’re looking at him.”

  A switch flipped and everything about the man’s face became familiar, the palest blue eyes, the downturned corners of his mouth, that battering ram of a nose. The glasses were the thinnest of disguises, standard reading glasses from a drugstore spinner. A sentence wedged itself in Peter’s throat. If he so much as breathed, “You’re Jimmy fucking Cross” would come spouting from his mouth.

  “You’ve got your mother’s eyebrows,” Cross said. “She was like a Jewish Frida Kahlo.”

  Judith had finally started trimming her eyebrows. The last time Peter was in Boulder, his mother had dragged him into a little shop off Pearl Street so he could watch an aesthetician tame her brows with a loop of thread.

  Sticking his hand out, Peter said, “It’s an honor to meet you.”

  Cross clasped his hand as though he were trapping a butterfly. “We’ve met before.”

  It was a ludicrous idea, but Peter decided it would be easiest to play along. He retrieved his stethoscope and a blood pressure cuff. He plucked a pair of examination gloves from a crumpled box.
“Do you mind opening your shirt?”

  “Right to business.” Cross sounded relaxed, but Peter noticed that the singer kept opening and closing his right hand.

  “Did you meet Judith in Colorado?”

  “Not Colorado.”

  “Not Colorado?”

  “She turned up at my farm.”

  “Where’s your farm?”

  Cross, who had started to unbutton his shirt, paused. “Someone told me it’s under a Lowe’s parking lot, but I haven’t been back to check.”

  Here was something: a purple scar started at Cross’s suprasternal notch and ran down past the xiphoid process, bisecting his sternum.

  “Someone crack you open?”

  Instead of looking at his chest, Cross kept his eyes on Peter. “Down in Baja I flew a three-wheeler off a limestone cliff. Busted four ribs and punctured a lung. I wound up in this whitewashed adobe hospital that looked like a Spanish mission. This Swedish doctor who’d gone down there to catch black marlin saved my life.”

  Hospitals maintained flowcharts to steer patients through their visits. Physicians and nurses gathered information according to prescribed channels; sometimes a headache pointed to dehydration and sometimes it pointed to a medulloblastoma. Medicine required structure. Doctors Without Borders was something of a misnomer—every time they helicoptered into a remote disaster, they brought borders with them, Tyvek-walled field hospitals, blue wrap, mosquito netting, even triage cards were a kind of border.

  “What else should I know about your medical history?”

  Cross pulled an electronic cigarette from his shirt pocket and set it in the bowl among the candied almonds. “I’m an open book.”

  “Are you on any medication?”

  “You mean prescription medicine?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Peter pointed to the vaporizer. “How long have you smoked?”

  “I don’t.” Cross centered the candy bowl on the table. “Someone handed me that backstage.”

  “Maybe we should start with why you wanted to see a doctor.”

  “What do people usually say?”

  Peter took a deep breath. “They usually tell me what’s been bothering them.”

  “Last week,” Cross began, “I met a friend in Quebec City. He used to deal antique books but he’s in power now, transmission lines, turbine generators. We’ve been going to this Italian place since forever. As soon as I walk inside it’s 1978—this Romanian heartbreaker I used to know is sitting at the bar chewing on her thumb. Next to her is Bobby Swain, my first manager. Bobby’s heart killed him in Toronto fifteen years ago.”

  “You were hallucinating.”

  “Last I heard the girl had a bunch of Romanian babies with a French duke. I ducked into the bathroom and splashed some water on my face. When I finished, I found my old friend at a table popping some pill that allows him to eat dairy.”

  “Did you speak with a doctor?”

  “You’re a doctor.”

  “Have there been other incidents?”

  Cross slumped into a chair beside the card table. “I spent half my life trying to give people the slip, and now I’m scared some vital part of me will split without leaving a forwarding address.”

  Peter didn’t like standing while his patient sat, but neither did he want to sit down across the table from Cross. Instead, he got down on a knee, like a quarterback or as if he were about to ask for Cross’s hand. “Have you considered speaking with a mental health professional? A psychiatrist or a psychologist?”

  “I see Ari Mendelsohn, on the Upper East Side. He lets me do phone sessions while I’m on the road. When we started I paid him less than my dog walker, but I made the mistake of mentioning that to him. Now he charges me the same as White and Case bills for lead counsel.”

  “And he knows about this episode?”

  “Ari keeps all my secrets.” Cross got up and walked to the bed. From beneath the black hat he retrieved a small manila envelope. “This is for you.”

  Peter set his stethoscope down and extracted a single 3-by-5-inch photo from the envelope. The picture’s subject, half-veiled beneath the branches of a willow tree, a squat sports car with round headlights and an open grille—Peter thought the car resembled a kid sucking on a bar of soap.

  “You recognize it?”

  “Is that a Fiat or something?”

  “That’s a Sunbeam Tiger. They bolted a small-block Chevy to a British frame with drum brakes and bad wiring. Your mother drove that car through snowstorms. She was fearless.”

  Fearless. That was Judith in a nutshell.

  “I should have sent you tickets,” Cross said.

  “Tickets?”

  “For tonight’s show. I take it you weren’t there.”

  The room phone rang again, an expensive, dulcimer sound.

  “Do you want to get that?”

  “I’m not obliged to be convenient.” Cross settled into a chair and rebuttoned his shirt.

  Peter got the feeling he wasn’t there to deliver medicine; at best, he could advocate for it.

  There was a knock as the door cracked open. Cyril said, “Bluto wants you to know the plane cleared Teterboro. We should leave for the airport in thirty.” With his message delivered, the large man retreated.

  Peter said, “I’d imagine losing track of time is an occupational hazard.”

  “Did your mother tell you how we met?”

  Was it possible Judith hadn’t realized that her friend Jimmy happened to be one of the most famous recording artists on the planet? “Tell me.”

  “I went out to pick up the newspaper and found her sitting on my porch with a sleeping bag wrapped around her shoulders.”

  “Judith?”

  “I asked if she needed to use the phone. She said she didn’t have anyone to call, so I brought her some coffee. She wouldn’t drink it, so I brought her a glass of milk. She finished it in one gulp. She was just a kid.”

  The world had to be full of bushy-browed Judiths.

  “You know why she wouldn’t drink the coffee?”

  Cross stared at Peter hard, tried to will an idea into his head.

  It worked. “She was pregnant.”

  Cross leveled a finger at Peter’s heart. Bingo.

  Peter didn’t feel like he’d hit a jackpot. “Did you call me out here because you weren’t feeling well, or . . .”

  The singer patted the air in front of him. “Maybe I went about this the wrong way.”

  “I don’t know what this is,” Peter said. “I should have sent you straight to the hospital.”

  “I’ve never been a big fan of those places.”

  Peter held the long end of the lever. He’d gained the upper hand. “Those places happen to be where we keep the cool machines. If you’re having cognitive lapses, you need to get that looked at. Bluto mentioned you were off for a few days.”

  “He was talking about the tour, not about me. The roadies don’t pack me with the gear.”

  “You can’t spare an hour to get checked out?”

  “We just spent my last free hour talking.”

  Had an hour passed?

  “If you were my patient, I’d tell you to make it a priority.”

  Cross said, “There’s room on the bird. When I first started, the label paid a voice coach to shadow me. A doctor would probably be more valuable now.”

  Had Cross asked if a doctor was more valuable than a voice coach? Was that a question? “What bird?”

  “The plane, man. What do you think I’m talking about?”

  It was an unanswerable question. Their conversation didn’t make any sense. “Are you offering me a job?”

  “Maybe I am.”

  Peter wasn’t some shade-tree mechanic. He had a mortgage to service and a ficus that needed watering. Would anyone drop everything to hop on a plane with a hallucinating recording star? “I’ve already
got a job.”

  Cross smiled. How would Peter describe the expression to Martin? A fox’s smile? A pickpocket’s? “It was nice seeing you again.”

  He’d been dismissed. Peter tucked the photo into his backpack—he needed a proper bag, something dignified. He tried to come up with something else to say; he wanted to have the last word, but Cross already held the room phone to his ear and was stabbing buttons with the middle finger of his left hand.

  5

  The major rock magazines used to send someone out every year to take Cross’s pulse, but he’s fallen out of fashion or outlived it. The baby-faced smart aleck with the shoelace guitar strap is gone. At best, he’s a haggard stand-in for the counterculture icon who melded Nostradamus and James Dean.

  Plus, Cross has a track record of making those magazines look foolish.

  In ’76, after he’d stopped performing music for almost a decade, Rock Fan decided to poke his corpse with a stick. They gave their lead critic twenty thousand words to bury Cross. He challenged the myth that Cross was “the poet of his generation” or the “Bard of Greenwich Village.” If Cross is lucky, the writer predicted, he’d wind up in Vegas, doing two-a-days at the Golden Nugget, blowing an oversize chrome harmonica that would dazzle like the crown jewels. In a final insult, the article concluded with one of Cross’s lyrics: “the dirty pigeons whisper / on the shoulders of the general / that his past is but a wasteland / and his name is lost to history.”3

  Eight months later Cross released Midnight at the Bazaar4 to universal acclaim. The critics crawled all over one another trying to praise him—they said he’d put away his childish things and finally found a canvas vast enough for his prodigious talents. Cross ended his exile and went back on tour. He played sold-out shows at Wrigley Field on back-to-back nights in October, a feat that the hapless Cubs hadn’t managed since the 1940s. In the next three years, he would marry the eldest daughter of a Sacramento artichoke king, father a son, Alistair Doyle Cross, and release two more iconic albums.

  Then he disappeared, again.

  WHEN ROLLING STONE sent a stringer out to Cross’s Texas ranch in ’83, it was clear that they weren’t interested in rescuing him. The profile opened: “For two hours I sat on a silk damask sofa beside Jim Cross and watched TV while the legend sipped RC Cola from a can. I had a speech prepared for the occasion. I wanted to tell him that I believed Midnight at the Bazaar and Double Ditz to be more important than the Declaration of Independence and the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk, combined. At some point—we were watching St. Elsewhere—he began to snore. A woman who may have been his wife came into the room and removed his crocodile boots. She carried the boots upstairs. His feet smelled like rotting meat. It occurred to me 1.) I might snuff him with a throw pillow and 2.) that he might want me to.”