Summer in the Land of Skin

by Jody Gehrman

  “It’s overrated.”

  “Yeah,” he laughs. “I guess that’s right. But wait till you get to old age.”

  “So you’re going to keep building guitars, huh?” I ask.

  “Maybe.”

  “I mean—you’re working on a sketch, so I figured…”

  “Sure. Why not? I forgot how much I liked getting up in the morning.” He pulls something from the ice chest, and I’m shocked to see a can of tomato juice in his hand. “What?” he says, peeling back the tab and taking a big swig. “You want some?”

  “No thanks.” I smile at him. “Looks like you’re wearing one of those shirts we got.”

  He glances down. “Sure am. How does it look?”

  “Great,” I say. “Except it’s— Come here.” He shuffles a couple of steps closer, looking self-conscious. “Come here,” I repeat. “You’ve got a price tag, or something—” He bends down toward me and I peel the label “X-X-L” off his shoulder. “There,” I say, rolling it up and putting it in my pocket. “Much better.”

  He hikes one of his pant legs up a few inches. “Got the new socks on too.”

  “Oooh! Those look really good.”

  “Yeah,” he says. “They do, don’t they?”

  We sit in silence together for a few minutes. Stumpy is out on the docks, whistling the theme to Mission Impossible as he scrapes around in a toolbox.

  “So, Medina?” Bender says. “You still got those letters?”

  “Of course. You want them back?”

  “No, no.” He scratches his head. “Did you read them all?”

  “Yeah.” I look southeast at the land rising up and out of the bay—the houses tucked into the hills, their windows and roofs glittering in the sun. The scent of the mill is strong today; it’s dirty and smoky but somehow it smells good to me.

  “I could give you that last one,” he says. “I still have it, you know.”

  “You keep it,” I tell him.

  He just nods.

  “He was really afraid,” I say.

  “Same as everyone, I guess.”

  “I don’t know. He seemed to think you had it figured out.”

  “Well,” Bender sighs. “He got that wrong.”

  “It’s not like reading them explained everything,” I say. “I mean, I’ve still got plenty of questions.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like why he did it.”

  He sits there, nodding at me, and closes one eye against the sun. “I wish I knew. Or maybe I don’t.” He leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees. He picks at his fingernails and shakes his head. “All I know is, the living can’t dwell on the dead all the time. It fucks everything up.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I think you’re right about that.”

  Stumpy takes a hammer from his toolbox and starts pounding nails into a piece of trim on his boat. The sound reverberates across the water and makes conversation nearly impossible for a good three minutes. When he stops, the silence that falls over us is as soft and light as mist.

  Bender gets up, shoves his hands into his pockets. “You go to Amsterdam, Medina. Hang out with Rosie. Get your mom to loosen up a little.”

  “Oh man. You don’t know what you’re asking!” I laugh.

  “You can handle it.” He comes closer and swats me on the back. “If you can get me out of bed, you can do anything.”

  After I leave Bender, I walk around town for a while. I follow the streets named after trees until I reach those named after states. I wander past quiet cul-de-sacs lined with faded pastel houses. I pass a garage adorned with a worn basketball hoop, eaten by weather and years. A small boy appears from the side of the house, dribbling a basketball and humming to himself. I come to a tire shop. Its windows are plastered with lurid pink letters and frantic punctuation: DON’T MISS OUR END OF THE SUMMER SALE!!! I walk past a little blue-and-white fish and chips place, with a striped awning out front and huge, fly-infested Dumpsters to one side.

  I think about Amsterdam, and the stories people tell of cafés selling chocolate cake baked with hashish, or the red light district where women line up in the windows, combing their hair and flicking their tongues for the people passing by. I figure I won’t need binoculars there; I can watch from the streets, if I feel like it. I wonder if it’s possible for my mother and me to laugh there like we did over sushi. I don’t want to be overly optimistic, but then, this summer was a season of people and smells, colors and tastes that never seemed possible when I was huddled naked in my beige apartment clinging to my binoculars. Maybe Amsterdam will be riddled with impossibilities too.

  I loop back toward downtown and make my way past bars and cafés and funky old thrift shops piled high with junk. I pass the Ranch Room, and I remember how we went there when Grady first returned from Argentina—I think of the moose head and the jukebox, the cheap drinks and Arlan’s eyes. I walk on, and as I near the corner of Walnut and Garden, my legs feel strong and my lungs seem to take in more air than I’m used to. I look up at the windows of Smoke Palace. There’s someone new moving into an apartment downstairs. I can see her standing amidst boxes, her hair tied up in a yellow bandanna.

  I realize with a little tremor of surprise that I’m almost done with this place—this corner with its natives and their gleaming white skin. Lucy and her toxic affection, Arlan and his scent of paint, sweat, smoke. I think of how different I was the day I showed up here. When I first got my room at Gottlieb’s, there was nothing I liked better than to disappear completely, melting into the shadows. My life was all about windows. I wonder now how I could have settled for so little. Windows are cold and fragile, silent. It’s one thing to cultivate the anthropologist’s eye for detail, but making myself invisible was one step from death. I don’t ever want to live like a ghost again.

  Across the street, Raggedy Ann is out in the yard, standing barefoot in the tall grass. She is dancing—at least, I think she’s dancing. She’s got a boom box balanced on her shoulder; it’s pounding out a frenetic bass beat as she thrusts her hips wildly this way and that. The wind is picking up, and it spreads her red hair about in a wild, stormy halo. She keeps flinging her body around the yard, letting the wind make a tent of her trench coat.

  That night, we go to The Skins’ gig at a new bar downtown. Actually, it’s an old bar with a new name; it used to be the Three B, now it’s called the Double Wide. This is supposed to be their grand opening, but it looks pretty much the same inside: pool tables at the front, stage at the back, booths along the walls, a couple of filthy bathrooms by the rear exit filled with inane graffiti. I tell myself not to drink too much, since I know I’m liable to get weepy when I bring up Amsterdam with Lucy. I end up downing a couple of gin and tonics within the first hour, though, out of nervousness and a sort of celebratory sadness that alcohol enhances so effortlessly.

  I sit across from Lucy in a corner booth, watching her smoke. I study her eyelashes and her lips, try to memorize the crafty expression she’s wearing now; she’s assessing the night, toying with her options, and it shows in the set of her mouth, the barely veiled calculations in her eyes. Not for the first time this summer, I wonder what it’s like to be Lucy. I consider all the hidden corridors I never did shed light on—what her childhood was really like, who taught her that sex is hostile, why she’s willing to spend her time in these little dives when there are thousands of other places she could thrive in. There’s so much I still don’t know.

  I watch her stirring her drink with the miniature straw, flicking the red ember of her cigarette into the ashtray. She is a mess of contradictions; it’s part of what makes her so electric. She’s fearless and yet she’s terrified of clinics, boredom, being alone. She’s selfish when it comes to her own survival, but she’s generous with her laughter and her philosophy; she’ll always buy the next round.

  We can never really know what people contain. Their hearts are like sealed boxes. We shake them, trying to gauge by the rattling sounds they make what secret treasure
s or broken pieces might be in there, but guessing is as far as we ever get. We have to live with the uneasiness of our ignorance, knowing only that we’re vast and combustible, shifting, mostly hidden, probably fucked up, but alive and mysterious while we last.

  “So, Lucy,” I say, as we’re nursing our third round. “I’m thinking about taking off pretty soon.”

  “You’re not staying for the second set?”

  “No, I mean—I’m going to leave town. Next week, actually. I’m going to Amsterdam.” Her eyes get wide. “I know—it came up kind of suddenly. My mom’s going and she wants me to go, too.”

  “Oh.”

  “Well, don’t look like that,” I say. “It’s only for a month.”

  She stares into her drink. “And then what?”

  “And then…I don’t know. I guess I’ll just wait and see.”

  She nods. “You’re never coming back,” she says simply.

  “No, I will. I’ll visit, at least.” But it sounds a little hollow even to me.

  “You’re mad because I’m not going to school, aren’t you.” I start to protest, but she holds her hand up. “No, you are. You’re pissed. You think I’m stupid and I’ll never amount to anything.”

  “Lucy! It’s nothing like that.”

  She downs half her drink and slumps back in the booth, looking very small and deflated. “Yeah, right,” she says. For a moment I see her at forty, sitting in a dark, cheaply furnished room, the shades drawn tight against sunlight. In her hands she cradles a highball glass as if it might explode.

  The Skins start in on a slow, mournful ballad—a love song about Rosemary, one of Arlan’s countless fictional women. “Lucinda, listen. You’re not stupid, okay? It doesn’t matter if you go to school or not, you’re still brilliant. This summer was—” I stumble, wanting so much to find the right words “—so incredibly important to me. Okay? You know that, don’t you?”

  “Oh God,” she says. “I hate it when you get cheesy.”

  “I—I just want you to know, you know—?” I stammer, tears stinging my eyes. “Come on—come dance with me.”

  “To this? No way.”

  “Please? Suppose the apocalypse comes and we’re brutally killed—you want to spend your last minutes slumped in a stupid booth at the Double Wide?”

  “No, but I don’t want to spend it making a fool of myself, either.”

  “Come on!” I cry, jumping up and grabbing her hand. “Just one song.” I drag her forward until we’re right in front of the stage and we wrap our arms around each other like shy fifth graders at a school dance. I can tell she’s giggling because her chin is bobbing up and down as it rests on my shoulder. We move in slow, deliberate circles, like two moons in orbit; we’re the only ones on the dance floor, and I can see people on the fringes laughing behind their fingers, but we just keep spinning, letting Arlan’s music wind us round and round, and I think to myself, if the apocalypse comes, I’m ready.

  EPILOGUE

  In Amsterdam, I’ve discovered an amazing instrument: the harp guitar. The minute I saw it I knew it would suit me perfectly; it’s curvaceous and eccentric, sensual and freakish. It took me over a year to make one of my own, but when I finally finished, it was worth it. It looks like a regular acoustic guitar, except on one side this big, sweeping arm reaches up and curves back, ending in a strange mushroom shape. It’s got twelve strings, and the sound it makes is so spectacular, like the score to some wild lucid dream. I could never go back to a regular acoustic; I’ve finally found something that fits me in every way.

  I told Mom during her last visit that it’s DNA in action—a little bit of her, a little bit of Dad. She didn’t say much, but I could tell she was thinking about that. I joked that if I could only play the sax and Rosie’s old drum kit at the same time, I’d be channeling the whole family tree. She laughed uneasily.

  She’s still not exactly free and easy when it comes to the topic of my father, but I will say we’ve inched our way carefully in that direction. Every time she visits, things get a little bit easier. At least now her mouth doesn’t clamp tight and form all those furious wrinkles when I mention him; she’ll even tell me stories sometimes, when she’s had a bit of wine. Funny how you get what you need as soon as you don’t really need it anymore. Of course my father still fascinates me, and I’ve spent long hours with Rosie soaking up elaborate tales about their wild years when music was everything. As my own musical identity struggles on wobbly knees to stand upright and move about, I love to hear about his past as an artist. But he’s no longer my obsession. I’ve got other things to think about, like harp guitars, and turning my Suicide Maps into a medley of ballads. I figure I spent all those years dreaming up people’s deaths; I might as well turn them into something I can use. I’m thinking about calling it “Another Garden of Earthly Delights.”

  I’ve been in Amsterdam two years now. Almost immediately I started working nights at a bar in the red light district, where the tips are really good and the education is priceless. Nothing can tear me away from the visual orgy of street life here—I can lose myself, just watching, for hours. These days I talk to the people that interest me, if I feel like it—I don’t just imagine them. I figure a good anthropologist has to get right in there and ask questions—you can’t live on speculation alone. That’s how I met Peter. He was playing slide guitar on the corner outside a bakery when I noticed his moody eyes, and his skin, which was several shades darker than that of the pale, wintry crowd around him. I just walked up to him at the end of a song, threw a couple of coins in his guitar case and said, “You remind me of someone. Can I buy you a cup of coffee?”

  Of course, I still think about Arlan. And Lucy—how could I not? They were the beginning of all this, the alchemical elements that began a shift in my chemistry so dramatic, I’m hardly recognizable anymore. I don’t know if I’ll contact them when I go back to the States. Occasionally I fantasize about showing up on the doorstep of Smoke Palace, savoring that rare moment of surprise, a look Lucy’s face seldom wears. But then what? My daydream never takes me past that point, and when I force myself to speculate, I have to admit it would end up just being awkward. Who knows? They might not even be there anymore, though I suspect they probably are. We had our summer; it was crazy, and hard, and just what I needed. I was ripe for their brand of moodiness, for Bellingham’s charms and disasters. That’s good enough for me.

  I won’t be caught dead in beige anymore. I shop in secondhand stores and flea markets where my eye is always drawn to explosive colors—indigo stripes, magenta silk, even a shocking orange now and then. Rosie’s beside herself; she sends me leopard-print skirts and bloodred sweaters, glittery sunglasses and canary-yellow go-go boots. I wear most of what she sends me; some of the really out-there stuff I give to the prostitutes that hang out at work. I think I slept through most of my adolescence, and now, at twenty-eight, I’m still making up for all those dull, numb years with all the sensory stimulation I can get.

  I’ve discovered that I like to be watched. I started playing a few gigs with Peter—just at small coffee shops and local pubs, no big deal—but I’m gradually learning to crave the sweet high of stage fright and the even sweeter narcotic of getting over it. Rosie’s crazy outfits come in handy on those nights; Peter says I’m getting to be a full-blown exhibitionist. I guess we’ve all got a little rock star in us, aching for a debut. I’m no exception. When my harp guitar is in my arms and I’m finding all the right notes, letting my voice reach into the air like some strange, prehistoric bird taking flight, I feel something extraordinary—sexual, almost—the pleasure of being absorbed by strangers. I can see why my father wanted it so badly, why he would give anything for the baptism of a screaming crowd’s applause. I don’t need to play Carnegie Hall with Dylan, though. A handful of stoned admirers is plenty luxurious, at this point.

  I just got a letter from Bender last week. We share a spotty correspondence—irregular, but nourishing. He’s building guitars with gusto thes
e days. He even teaches classes a couple of nights a week at Whatcom Community College. He’s not so sure about this harp guitar kick I’m on. He insists it’s just a stage, and I’ll come back to the good old classic shape before long: “We all have our weird fascinations.” His letter is written on a torn-up paper bag, and there are smudges of something—peanut butter, maybe—here and there. “Chet used to mess around with mandolins, when he got bored. Hell, for a couple years I did nothing but sitars. Those head-trips are exotic, for a while—they teach you a lot—but you’ll get tired of them. Everyone comes home, eventually.”

  He’s got it half right. It’s true that we circle back to what we’re made of—isn’t that what home is? The place that shares your most intimate ingredients? But he doesn’t understand that the harp guitar is more me than anything I’ve ever known; it’s the freakish hybrid I’ve always been, but never understood.

  Tonight it’s raining in Amsterdam. I take the garbage out, and then I find myself standing on the sidewalk, closing my eyes, letting the drops cover my face and hair. Peter’s leaning out the window, bare-chested and laughing. “Anna!” he yells in his thick Australian accent. “Come inside! You’re crazy!” But it’s a good night, one of those smooth August evenings, and the rain is a sweet surprise after a long, hot day. The pavement is turning fragrant as it gets wet, and I just want to smell it for a while. A window is open across the street, and there’s a hand reaching out of it, holding a cigarette, though the face is lost in shadows. I think of that summer, filled with smoke, gin and tonics, that aromatic rosewood sawdust. It seems like a long time ago, now, but when I smell the rain, it all comes rushing back.

  SUMMER IN THE LAND OF SKIN

  A Red Dress Ink novel

  ISBN: 978-1-4592-4625-6

  © 2004 by Jody Gehrman.

  All rights reserved. The reproduction, transmission or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without written permission. For permission please contact Red Dress Ink, Editorial Office, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.