“Well . . .”
“You take the first right, right up here after the McDonald’s. That’s Westview Road, and you just follow it as far as it goes. There are two forks; stay to the right. Go all the way to the end. The key is in a fake rock at the base of three walking sticks by the front door to the shop—there’s nothing there but the trailer and the shop. The guitar and a small amp are in a room in back of the shop—the only extra room—straight ahead on the floor. Can’t miss it. Bring the amp too.”
The First Breakfast
THE FOLLOWING WEDNESDAY, on his long lunch hour, Carl follows the narrow road to L. Ray’s Airstream. The road winds around and down, so that the whole place can be seen from above. Behind the Airstream is a tennis-court-size woodworking shop; a grown-over garden plot; several stacks of wood slabs covered by sheets of clear plastic held down by bricks; a fire pit surrounded by wide, flat boards resting end to end on stumps; barrels; buckets; two refrigerators (meat smokers?); plastic chairs; an orange plastic “danger” fence around a scrubby area behind an outhouse; and a small sawmill. A broom leans against the outhouse.
Carl is surprised that the inside of the workshop is well organized and clean. The amp sits on the floor in the back room, and lying on the floor, in an open case with yellow lining, is the honey-colored bass guitar.
AT ROSEHAVEN, L. RAY asks Carl to move books and magazines from the armless cane-bottomed chair in his room. “Have a seat there. I bought that guitar in 1968 when I was playing with my first gospel group. Everybody played guitar, so I bought the electric bass and played it for eight years on the road. I wore out three cases. Would you hand me that other guitar over there? I’ll tell you, if I’d stayed in music and out of the pulpit, I might be a little farther along. Speaking of good songs, do you know ‘Farther Along’?”
“Sure do.” Finally, Carl thinks, somebody who knows the music he knows—but he also feels awkward. He can’t remember being with a man in a room, alone. His father’s face flashes before him. His father was a quiet man who spent most of his spare time in the little shop behind their house, which was usually off-limits for Carl. His father’s name was Jacob. But nobody called him Jake.
L. Ray sits directly in front of Carl—face-to-face—so he can instruct. “Listen, before we start, I need to tell you about what happened yesterday.” His eyes glow; he leans forward in his wheelchair. “This is big stuff.”
The guitar feels heavy and solid in Carl’s hands. He is ready to get on with his lesson.
“I was on the porch,” says L. Ray, “with Miss Clara and your aunt—what a duo they are—and they were talking about religion, and I got involved, and they came up with this idea, which I refined just a tad into this: a worldwide movement that will work to make churches and nursing homes interchangeable. Think about it: why should Christians, or anybody else, go to church on Sunday morning when they can go down the street to a nursing home and visit and gladden these wrecks of old women lining the grim halls of nursing homes?”
Carl thumbs the fourth string, then reaches over and turns the amp on. But he leaves the volume down because L. Ray is still talking.
“Look at all those ramps and empty rooms in every church in the nation—empty rooms all week long. Why shouldn’t a few needy old people be staying there with church members taking care of them, in shifts? Or seeing that they’re looked after. Let’s see—in a very small church with a hundred and eighty members, each member would be on duty for two days a year. Doable. And there are churches out there with a thousand members. Why not? Practice what they preach. Why not? Why should churches and nursing homes not be interchangeable? Forever.”
Carl looks up. L. Ray is staring at him—a half smile, raised eyebrows.
“Well,” says Carl, “I don’t know. I never thought about it.” The room is feeling just a little bit smaller.
“This notion—this very simple idea—is where every religion on earth can intersect. Something every decent human being can believe in. I’m talking nursing homes interchangeable with synagogues too, and temples, mosques, whatever else.”
Carl feels embarrassed, keeps his eyes on his thumb, which is on the top string of the bass. He doesn’t say anything.
“Do you go to church?” asks L. Ray.
“Used to.”
“Baptist?”
“Yes.”
“And you left it?”
“Well, I don’t know. I just . . .” He looks up.
“Are you a believer?”
“Yes. I am. But . . . What about let’s play some music?”
“I can’t think of nothing more Christian. And that’s the genius of the idea. Idn’t it?”
Was he talking about music or the idea? Carl wonders. “You know, I just—”
“I mean, Jesus will sure as hell be happy with it. I told Miss Lil and Miss Clara that they’d come up with a real certified revolutionary idea. It’s just so simple and plain . . . and right! And I’ve got my first sermon on it right here.” L. Ray turns in his wheelchair, grabs a yellow legal pad from the bed, drops it onto his lap, clasps his hands together, and looks up at the ceiling, then at the legal pad.
He reads aloud, as if preaching.
“I’ve been to the mountain; I’ve been to the valley. I’ve been to Mary; I’ve been to Sally. I’ve been to Peter; I’ve been to Paul. I’ve seen the river; I’ve seen the mall. Glory, hallelujah. And now I’m settling down to do one thing right, and lasting. We’re going to make history. We are going to change the world.”
There is something rhythmical about it, almost musical. It kind of flows. Carl looks up into the corner of the room, avoiding L. Ray’s eyes. His voice is not unlike that of Mr. Dayton, the main preacher when Carl was growing up. But the words are sure different.
“Listen. Old people are still alive. Alive. Their corpuscles breathe and move like little tiny white things in tomato sauce. It’s all any of us are given at the outset: life. It’s all any of us lose: life.”
Carl looks at L. Ray. L. Ray goes on reading.
“Now I’m a God-delivered, -sanctified, and -reformed preacher for the Wayward Traveler Map of Bethlehems, Buddha Gems, and Baptist Hymns. A lot of religions are wrong about a lot of things. All religions are right about a few things. And that’s where our Rosehaven World Movement starts—where they all intersect: relieving the suffering of old folks at homes. We’ll call it the First Breakfast, maybe.
“Oh, feckless, reckless Christians. Reward. Reward. Reward. Do your duties, go to church—do something, anything—to get to heaven, the big reward. How childish! Selfish! How like a little boy! How babyish!”
Oh, man, thinks Carl, this is going to get him in trouble.
“There is—or should be—no victory except in work itself. Religion has killed stoicism; people had rather think right for heaven out of sight, than fight right for old people in plain sight, else old people wouldn’t be lonely and sad in all these stinking places across the globe.”
They sit, L. Ray reading, then staring at Carl, Carl nodding his head slowly, then eyeing the corner of the floor.
“I’ve got it mostly memorized. I can memorize a sermon. So now I’ve got to come up with a name for this movement—call it something completely different: Bob’s Church for the Weary. The First Breakfast. I don’t know. The Umbrella Religion for Easing Suffering among the Wrinkled. You know, whatever. It’s just . . . just brilliant—the idea is—and I don’t see why I can’t launch the whole thing from right here. Do you?”
“I don’t guess so.” The man is just a little bonkers.
“And I think some of these old ladies will help me out, so I need to stay around Rosehaven for a while to get the thing launched. Let’s play some music. The movement is going to need a little music. Whoa!” L. Ray closes his eyes, raises his right fist, tilts his head back: “Besides playing the blues at the First Breakfast, O God in us all, we’re going to invoke the spirits of Ralph Stanley, Mother Maybelle, Ernest Tubb, Bob Wills, John Prine, and Hank
Williams. We’ll have Carter Family nights, and we will sing out of the Broadman Hymnal till our heads fall off. Just a Friend We Have in the Old Rugged Rock of Ages.”
A different slant for sure, thinks Carl.
“Praise the God in us all. Love Jeremiah, and feel sorry for Judas. In Judas, and at his pleasure, is the God in us all. He kissed Jesus and thus carried out the will of the God in us all, showed the failed human heart in us all. Love the Chinese; praise the Pygmies. Kiss the Aussies; bop till you drop. I am ready for a revolution. I am ready for a revolution of language, song, spirit, rock, sock, bebop, hip-hop, anthropology, morphology, geology, Scientology, holyology, holy water, dishwater, dishrags, and ragtime. Kiss my foot.”
L. Ray lowers his arm, looks at Carl. “I’ve memorized a bunch of stuff. Now I can use it again.” He hands Carl a sheet of paper on which he’s written bass guitar tablature—the visual directions for where to fret the bass guitar neck for each chord L. Ray will play on his six-string. “You want to pick with your middle finger, not your thumb. Like this . . . there. That’s right. And see, the basic setup is like the top four strings of a six-string. Do you know what an octave is?”
“Yes.”
“You get an octave from here to two strings up and two frets, see? Good. You’ve seen tablature, haven’t you?”
“Yes.”
“All this is, is a kind of vamp, back and forth. That’s right. You’re quick. You just stay there in G. Listen to this—a song written by my old buddy Marvin B. Watkins. Okay, do that vamp there. Now on the chorus, where it starts,” says L. Ray, “you’ve got:
The right tool at the right time.
Don’t give me two nickels when I need a dime.
The right tool at the right time.
Scoobie doobie doobie do.
“Okay, right here you’ve got to go to an E minor, which is just four frets down from the G. I’d drop from the high G rather than the low one . . . good. Now come right back to G, then D, then G. Watch.
“Okay, now we go back to that first vamp, and I’ll play a little break.” L. Ray plays his old J-45 Gibson. Carl notices that he plays like Mother Maybelle Carter and Jim Watson—thumb on a bass melody run, with an index-finger strum. He plays and sings while Carl backs him up on electric bass.
Carl can hardly believe how easy it is. “It makes a difference if you learn an instrument while you’re playing music you like.”
“Well, yeah. It’s kind of like a breakthrough. A ‘Paul on the road to Damascus’ kind of thing. It happened to me with some sharks.”
“Sharks?”
L. Ray turns his guitar upright in his lap. “Yeah. Right. I’ll tell you about it.”
Not that I asked, thinks Carl. I want to play music.
“I was on this sandbar, fishing around an old shipwreck. Me and three other guys. McGarren Island, Outer Banks. The great release: fishing. Jesus went after some fishermen, you know.
“And the tide starts coming in. Water up around our ankles, and then our knees, and the current is pretty strong, so somebody says, ‘We better get on back.’ Where we are, see,” he says, describing with his hands, “is on this sandbar that you can get out to just during low tide—water up around your shoulders getting out there—and when the tide comes in, you have to swim back across. It’s in Charlie’s Inlet. We’d been doing that every day for two, three days. We were catching blues around that old shipwreck. In fact one of the guys was Marvin B. Watkins, the music man I was telling you about. We go fishing most every summer.”
Carl wonders who he might go fishing with—what kind of group like that does he know? Well, there’s Bobby, at work. He fishes.
“So Marvin B. swims back, then another, then it’s just me and one more left. Guy named Skip Hodges. And everything’s fine.
“Then they holler at us, scared-like, and I turn around . . . and see two black-gray fins cutting along behind us. You can almost see, you know, scars on them. Ugly things that made you see the red dust of the sacred stars in a far corner of the universe. And the thing is, we’d been cutting the throats of those bluefish, to bleed them. So I suddenly realize there’s all this blood floating around us, and we’re amongst sharks. My legs go a little weak and ice water runs down my back.”
Carl wonders if somebody has taught L. Ray to talk the way he does.
“We start pulling fish off our strings like crazy and throwing them out toward the shipwreck. This is all work, no play. I’m concentrating on my fish string and I lose sight of the fins. Then I hear somebody holler, ‘There’s more than two!’ We got a whole choir of sharks around us, see?
“So Skip gets his fish throwed away because he hadn’t caught that many, and he starts swimming back, with the others yelling, ‘Don’t splash! Don’t splash!’
“I glance at him. I’m still throwing away fish. God, take my fish away—clean the water of blood. Lift and deliver my sweet, fat fanny to shore.
“Well, Skip don’t have a shirt on, and he’s swimming a kind of a dog paddle, with his rod in his teeth—the little end—sort of dragging the reel along behind him. And I don’t see no fins. Anywhere. God, hear my prayer.
“I suddenly realize I can sort of sling the whole string of what’s left, maybe three blues, away from me, so I do, but they don’t go far. They’re just starting to sink and whap! They’re gone.”
“A shark.”
“Right. I toss my rod and reel and head for the kind, white sand of shore, swimming the sidestroke, trying not to splash, knowing I’ve got to swim across this deep part, realizing I should have kept the rod in case I need to poke at them or something. Then I’m up over the deep part and picturing in my head how deep it is, and picturing them grinning, coming up, eyes on my legs, when all of a sudden I think, My T-shirt’s got blood and bait all over it. So I stop swimming and my legs drop down, and I get the T-shirt off and sling it back behind me as far as I can, without looking, and in about two seconds I hear this”—L. Ray slaps his hands together—whap!
“And then I’m swimming sure enough, sidestroke, and I’m thinking if I can just get to knee-deep, if I can just get to knee-deep, O God, my Savior, where I can stand up. And then there I am, about waist-deep. I stand and start striding as carefully as I can, not splashing, then I’m knee-deep and I start running, lifting my legs real high, and then I’m on the sand and I sit down with the others. And here’s where I cried and cried and cried.
“So for weeks after that I wadn’t right somehow. God was no longer somebody I had a phone line to, God was more . . . I don’t know, very different. Because I didn’t see it like God had saved me. I knew he hadn’t. What had happened was the sharks just didn’t hit me. Period. End of remarks. It had been up to them, not God. I saw that—clear. And so I was a wanderer for a while, until I had my last heart operation, and they told me it’d be the last, and while I was recovering from that, I got to reading some, and it’s been all new and pretty strange and fun since. When I think about it, right this minute, I think all this has been a kind of preparing for Rosehaven, for this movement.”
“That was a pretty close call.”
“It was. Now onward and upward. Next Thursday, me and you is playing a little gig for the ladies, in the lobby. Lobby the ladies in the lobby library. Or maybe in the activity room. It’s already on the calendar. We can practice a couple times more. And I might have to say a prepared word or two after we do a little music—about the movement. Are you with me?”
“I guess so. With the music anyway.” Carl feels himself pulled along a little faster than he intended, but the whole idea of performing a song he’s written, cowritten, is something else, different, new, secretly dreamed of.
“You take that bass with you. I don’t need it anytime soon. You’re a natural. And didn’t you tell me you used to sing in a church choir?”
“When I was little, but I—”
“Can you sing harmony?”
“I guess. But I’m not much for singing.” Carl looks at his watch. L. R
ay will probably want him to sing high tenor, and that’s not something he wants Anna to hear. He’s been practicing relaxing his vocal cords. “I’ve got to stop in to see Aunt Lil and then head on home, but I appreciate you showing me this.”
“Don’t you want to take the bass and amp?”
“Well, no, I . . . okay.”
“Take that book of songs over there. That’s a good little book. The ones I do are checked in the table of contents, and I’ve gotten tablature written out for the first three. And see if you can work out a harmony part for the choruses—a high harmony would be great. But only if you feel like it, and on ‘Ain’t Got No Problems’ the harmony should be simple.”
IN THE BEDROOM of his small apartment, Carl opens the guitar case, takes out the guitar, and slings the strap around his neck. He turns and faces the mirror. Maybe the guitar should be a bit lower. He can reach the strap buckle. He adjusts it. He doesn’t even have to take it off. Now it’s lower. That looks better. He plugs the cord into the guitar, then the amp. Plugs the amp into the wall outlet. Stands back in front of the mirror. His thumb rests on the fourth string. He switches to his middle finger. Yes, that looks better. He plays a note, reaches over, turns the volume up a notch. He starts playing. Then he starts singing, “Way downtown, fooling around. Took me to the jail. Oh, me . . .”
He likes what he sees in the mirror.
Part 2.
Thunder Road
Stand Up and Boogie
IN THE ACTIVITY ROOM, Carl sets his chair facing a half circle of tan folding chairs. L. Ray will sit beside him in his wheelchair. He sets the small bass amp beside his chair and moves another chair from the back of the room. That’s where he’ll place his “cheat sheets”—notebook paper with tablature. He checks his watch. He is nervous, sweating under his arms. He was afraid of that and has worn a white shirt so the perspiration will show less. He figures there is little chance Anna will be around to hear, though, this late.
Lunch at the Piccadilly Page 5
