Vexation Lullaby

by Justin Tussing

  “It’ll be over before you know it,” Rosalyn says.

  The waitress delivers a tall orange juice for Gabby. She fills our coffee cups. We’re all too excited to eat, even Gabby, who tells us she’s been hungry all the time.

  “Have you been feeling okay, honey?” I ask.

  I’m not sure I’ve ever heard Gabby talk with such enthusiasm about anything. She tells us that peaches make her salivate and raisins make her gag. For a month, she says, she had to avoid the dairy case at the grocery because some of the smells put her over the edge. No pickles, but she can’t get enough sauerkraut. She’s eating smoked kipper snacks that she gets from the Walmart twenty miles away.

  “What about peanut butter?” Rosalyn asks.

  “I can’t get it down. It makes me gag.”

  “I’ve had friends who say that.”

  “Do you have kids?” Gabby asks.

  “No, no kids.”

  “So when do I get to meet the father?”

  “He’s a pre-med student,” Gabby says. “And tall. Get this: he’s a runner.”

  I look over my shoulder, because it seems like she’s saying these things for someone else’s benefit.

  “Sounds like quite a catch,” Rosalyn says.

  Gabby shuffles through the pictures.

  “So, is he coming here?” I ask.

  “We’re not really . . .” It takes her a couple tries to get the words out. “We’re not really talking.”

  I reach out and put my hand on top of hers. I will myself to do what Rosalyn did for me, to give her strength. “That sounds hard. Are you doing okay, baby?”

  Gabby sucks on her lips.

  I feel sad, for Gabby, for her baby—even, I guess, for this missing guy. I can’t help it. “Things will work out.”

  First Gabby pulls her hand from under mine, then she rolls her shoulders back. “I’m doing okay.”

  “I wish you’d let me help.”

  She lifts her chin and locks her eyes on me, putting me in her crosshairs. “You haven’t offered to help. I had to beg you to see me.”

  I hold her eyes. “That’s true, but I can do better.”

  Gabby blinks a few times before looking away. She lifts her juice and takes a sip.

  “This is very exciting,” Rosalyn says.

  “I’m proud of you,” I say.

  For a moment I think Gabby is going to be mad at me. It feels like we’re on the verge of a fight.

  “Why?” she asks me.

  “Why?” I don’t have to backpedal or buy time. I know why. “First of all because you’ve made a life for yourself here. You have a place of your own. You have a job. You pay taxes, don’t you.”

  Maybe she doesn’t know me as well as she thinks she does.

  “And now you’re going to have this beautiful, healthy baby. You’re going to make such a good mother.” I could say more, but I stop there, which is probably a good thing.

  Rosalyn waves the waitress over so Gabby can order. She gets a waffle, hash browns, and a sausage egg and cheese melt. When she asks us if we’re going to get anything, Rosalyn and I shake our heads.

  The waitress walks off.

  “Okay,” Gabby says.

  That’s enough. It’s probably more than I deserve.

  “Have you thought about names?” Rosalyn asks.

  “I think I have to meet him first.”

  “You have to meet them first, you’re right.”

  “I can’t wait to meet him,” I say.

  My daughter looks me straight in the face. “I know.”

  Acknowledgments

  I never would have finished this book if not for the early support of the Lannan Foundation. Thanks to Tim Johnson at the Marfa Book Company. Thanks to Dr. John Hatzenbuehler and Dr. Ross Wadland for their medical expertise—everything I got right is because of them, while any mistakes are due to my own malpractice.

  Thanks to Bill Clegg, Pat Strachan, Jennifer Abel Kovitz, Trent Duffy, and everyone at Catapult.

  This is as close as I’ll come to writing an album. My parents got me a recorder when I was eight, but I never figured out how to play it.

  About the Author

  Justin Tussing is the author of the Ken Kesey Award–winning novel The Best People in the World, and his short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, TriQuarterly, and A Public Space, among other periodicals. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and currently directs the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA Program in Portland, Maine.

  1 “In a sky as dark as a new parking lot / I’m a tin can zinging / past places and people. / This pinging heart is my Sputnik signal. / I’m a run-down robot. / I’m pirate radio. / Press me to your warm ear. / Whisper ‘Hello.’”

  2 Despite changes to musical direction and personnel, and despite the fact that he usually takes four or five months off each winter, Cross insists that all of these dates be viewed not as a series of annual tours, but as one continuous tour, his Guernica, his Lord of the Rings.

  3 From “Bronze.”

  4 Fans tend to refer to three stages of Cross’s career as the Early Work (Byway Rumors—’62; Runaway—’63; and Knock Out—’67); the Renaissance (Midnight at the Bazaar—’77; Hit and Run—’77; and Double Ditz—’79); and the last thirty years are referred to as his Christ and Cowboy era or, less respectfully, his Moses period. Many argue the last thirty years of Cross’s career have been misguided and misdirected, but I believe time will vindicate him (and me).

  5 I drive a ’96 Toyota Corolla Wagon. I’m closing in on three hundred thousand miles on the original engine. Besides regular oil changes and brake pads, the only maintenance the car requires is an occasional Freon shot for the air conditioner. Previous to this car, I had a Ford Ranger with a fiberglass camper trailer—if you’re in a camper when some drunk kids start pelting the cap with beer bottles the only thing you can do is wait them out, but in a wagon you can slide into the front seat and drive off. I’ve made a few modifications to my vehicle. I picked up a portable desk (they’re marketed ambitiously as “executive travel organizers”), which usually rides in the passenger seat. I also paid a cabinetmaker to build a flat storage unit in back that doubles as a platform for my air mattress—when I need to, I fill the mattress with a compressor that plugs into the cigarette lighter. My build thread on CarCamping.org earned 5 stars.

  6 Credit goes to Greg Harvey’s Excel for Windows 95 for Dummies.

  7 With my annotations (at first, I called them “reports”), I try to capture the mood of the show. Sometimes I engage in the very sort of interpretation and theorizing that I condemned earlier.

  8 It wasn’t as sinister as I imagined: Cross had dined with NYT columnist (and notorious glutton) R. W. Apple Jr. (now deceased).

  9 So that you don’t imagine a schoolteacher forgoing a hot breakfast so that she can send her ne’er-do-well nephew a few nickels, my aunt Liddy’s biggest challenge was trying to spend the dividend checks from her second husband’s holdings in Goodyear, Coca-Cola, and GE. (I have been much more successful with this task, unfortunately.)

  10 I’ve discovered that I have better memory for email addresses than for faces.

  11 When JCC first took off, I was uncomfortable with strangers knowing my name, so I signed everything “Restless One.” There’s a precedent for choosing a tour name. Your old name, your original name, was a gift from your parents, but the tour is a choice, so it only makes sense that you choose a name to represent who you really are. People assumed I lifted “Restless One” from a lyric, but I came up with it on my own. “Restless One” has a couple of meanings. First, a tour is restless, and therefore, as a follower of the tour, I am restless. And then, taking a step back, there’s the Oneness of the tour and also the Oneness of the individual. I was part of the Restless One and I was the Restless One. More recently I’ve been signing everything Arthur Pennyman.

  12 Frederick Tate and Moses C
olchester.

  13 Like a cross between a bullfighter’s traje de luces and a Nudie suit. He gets them from a Mexican tailor in LA.

  14 How does a man who has everything know so much about a person who has nothing, a girl who “divided by zero the sum of her days / in cardboard high heels and a petroleum dress”?

  15 When I used to go backstage, I didn’t need a pass. I had something better than a pass, a familiar face. Security and roadies recognized me and I recognized them. I used to tell Jimmy to break a leg when he was making his way to the stage. “Break a leg” is a traditional way to wish a performer well. Everyone knows that, but in Toronto I said, “Break a leg, Jimmy,” and he stopped in his tracks and said, “You’d like that!” It was only the second time he’s ever spoken to me. Then he said, “Get this old goat out of my sight.” Old goat! And he’s more than ten years my senior! I haven’t been backstage since. Everyone knows I’m blackballed.

  16 She’s a librarian. Though she would never admit it, no occupation has more in common with what I do.

  17 I think women are sadder than men because the world is harder for women. Their bodies, which, like uranium, have a half-life, are valued more than their minds, which, like cement, continue to grow stronger.

  18 I think women are sadder than men because the world is harder for women. Their bodies, which, like uranium, have a half-life, are valued more than their minds, which, like cement, continue to grow stronger.

  19 Or so I believe. Over the years (yes, years) that he’s been writing, certain facts have slipped out. Besides Neil Young, he also likes Nina Simone, Paul Butterfield, and a band called Goldenfloss. He’s left-handed. Like me, he eats frequently at Subway restaurants.

  20 After the protagonist of “Provisional Sunday”: “Captain Bisquick sicced his black dogs / upon the suet necks of the geese.”

  21 Typically, Cross has appeared at the Kleinhans Music Hall, a slightly larger and (I’ve always felt) colder space.

  22 Some of the multiuse halls Cross plays are little more than food courts with stadium seating—they’ll squeeze him in between a weekend of monster trucks and a home and garden show.

  23 While Cross’s earliest albums addressed political issues, his recent work has been almost obsessively personal. This shift has not gone unnoticed. A segment of his audience (as well as many critics) believe Cross owes them a post-9/11-Patriot-Act album. In ’06 Cross went on CNN to promote a nonprofit that had started rebuilding parts of the Lower Ninth after Katrina:

  ANDERSON COOPER: You’ve been oddly silent about the war on terror. Is there something you want to say about that?

  JIMMY CROSS: Oddly silent?

  A.C.: For a person who got their start as a protest singer.

  J.C.: I got my start as an apple polisher.

  A.C.: You heard it here first, America.

  J.C.: Apple polishing used to be an honest job, but now they won’t hire you unless you’re a machine.

  A.C.: Let me back up a second . . . you first gained attention as a protest singer.

  J.C.: That’s what I’m protesting.

  A.C.: Some people say that, like a politician, you’ve moved toward the middle, that you’re afraid of offending your audience.

  J.C.: Who are these people?

  A.C.: Well, obviously, your critics.

  J.C.: My critics say I don’t want to offend people?

  A.C.: What’s your response to that?

  J.C.: A bumper sticker.

  A.C. (nervous laughter): Do you think we should end the war on terror?

  J.C.: I think we should escalate it.

  A.C.: Really?

  J.C.: Absolutely. Let’s get to the end.

  A.C.: And how would you like it to end?

  J.C.: With a marriage.

  24 She may be alluding to Mary Santos, Jimmy’s second wife. Santos is an essayist and Eileen Fisher model.

  25 The actual line is “How come you let him stew at . . .”

  26 5/17/94 (Denver, Colorado). He never points into the audience. Most of the time, Cross hardly seems aware that he has an audience.

  27 Which is why it hurts to see the CrossTracks community turn so quickly. At the same time, perhaps their anger should be viewed as a yardstick of the project’s success. There is so much anger directed toward me because I have done so much! As Gabby says: Haters going to hate. If I were a purely rational person I might allow myself to view their response as a testament to my success, but it still stings.

  28 Full disclosure: I am an alumnus of Carnegie Mellon, and when I was twenty-two I couldn’t get out of Pittsburgh fast enough! The city has improved mightily in the last forty years.

  29 From “Painted Horses”: “The mastermind of petty crime retires to his desolate oasis / after his second wife shacked up with his Minister of Finance. / Well the boundary of his realm retreats until he’s no longer sovereign of his body. / And the Texas Rangers, on their painted horses, do vow to cross the river. / Yes they vow to wow the river on their lathered ponies.”

  30 Cross released “A.D.C.” before Allie’s first birthday. He stopped playing it around the time Allie had his first run-in with the court. Maybe it seemed hubristic to celebrate Allie’s recklessness in a song. Especially when songs are immortal, but people aren’t.

  31 That’s what he says when he’s pushing through a crowd. Is he the “big man” or is he referring to Cross? The ambiguity confuses people, which may be the point.

  32 I’m thinking specifically of the opening verse: “Sleeping on the Avenue de Montaigne in my borrowed mourner’s suit / you pranced in with your motley crew and returned me what I’d lost.”

  33 Cross relies on Milton Fletcher, a mild-mannered Buddhist who, in his wilder days, reputedly rode a stolen pony into a Kroger grocery.

  34 Pittsburgh might be his best show in a decade. And I was in the bathroom listening to Muzak.

  35 He owes them precisely nothing.

  36 With the exception, of course, of books on Cross—which is no small task. Last year there were five monographs, a new anthology of scholarly essays, a revised edition of his complete lyrics, and a two-volume graphic novel inspired by his seminal Double Ditz.

  37 I don’t think she was making a pun with my name.

  38 I almost never listen to music, since a car stereo isn’t so appealing when you’re accustomed to a concert hall crammed with living sound.

  39 The ones with the most remarkable voices, almost universally, have terrible personal histories that lend their voices a battered weight. I’m thinking of Etta James, Roy Orbison, Sarah Vaughan, maybe, to a lesser extent, Dolly Parton. Pretty people with pretty voices end up on Broadway.

  40 It seemed a mystery at the time: later it came out in GuitarStar that he’d had surgery for a bone spur.

  41 When Cross took the stage at the Springfield Armory on September 16, 1994, Mark Washington sat behind Jeff Hickok’s drum set. Deke Purcell replaced Owen Soppe at rhythm guitar and Fat Ronnie Hood—the Gospel Don—didn’t return after the first set.

  42 That majestic building now houses the utterly soulless Hard Rock Hotel.

  43 Sutliff has a real voice and Albert can sing. Dom, on the other hand, sounds like he’s testifying in a deposition—it’s joyless.

  44 The nicest thing any reviewer said: No one will ever allege the younger Cross had help writing these songs.

  45 That no one thought to bring out a chair earlier suggests to me that the whole appearance is unscripted.

 

 

 
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