But I could have been better. I could have done more. Of course, if I was looking for reasons to feel less guilty about things like Uncle Donny dropping the ball and me not being there to immediately recover the fumble, convincing arguments could be offered, rationalizations could be made, legitimate excuses do exist.
My wife had been alive one morning and was dead by dinner time that same day and this does tend to make one a little self-absorbed. My father’s Alzheimer’s was the aftershock, after the buildings had all been leveled to smoking debris and the power grid had already gone down. It was during this period that once, on the subway, nauseated by the cheesy smell of some homeless person I couldn’t detect and move away from, I eventually realized it was me—I was the one who hadn’t showered in days and who was probably making everyone around me queasy. When you’re getting your fruit in pie form and your only exercise is walking from the couch to the fridge for more Colt 45, and Jagermeister-induced diarrhea is your idea of an effective weight-control technique, it’s tough to be a flawlessly conscientious son, let alone happy.
Bottom line, though, I was, am, and will continue to be a selfish sonofabitch. And I’m okay with that. In fact, for the particular line of work I’m in, being a selfish sonofabitch is a professional prerequisite. Underpinning a poet’s love of language and a playwright’s ear for dialogue and a philosopher’s itch for absolutes is the novelist’s screaming only-child egoism that will not allow anything or anyone to stop him from doing what he wants to do: namely, playing God with the people and places he creates. And fortunate is the creator of extended works of imaginative prose whose life companion feels the very same way, whose definition of spending quality time together as a couple is, first and foremost, doing a good day’s worth of what she herself cares about most, and then—and only then—killing a bottle of red wine while watching a DVD that can even be bad because two satisfied and spent people slouching on the couch at the end of the day is the only possible way of making a good day even better.
But fifteen thousand dollars by the end of the month or else.
Playing God is the easy part; it’s getting along with all the other mortals that’s difficult. Especially when there’s no one around to drink wine and watch bad DVDs with at the end of the day.
* * *
Clichés are sins, and tonight, anyway, I’m an everlasting malefactor. Four straight hours head down at the dining room table and all I’ve got to show for it is words, 1,021 words. No pictures, though. No smells, either. And, most damning of all, no sounds. And how can you possibly make Ronnie Lane live on the page if you can’t compel the reader to hear the music he made? I turn over the CD case with his picture on it—a half-in-the bag, naughty little woodchuck in filthy white overalls with a sparkling secret in his dancing brown eyes he somehow managed to smuggle into every one of his songs—and decide to give it another shot tomorrow night. Because if I can’t look him in the eye, I sure as hell can’t conjure up his soul. Maybe Monday, after I talk to the people at the bank and get Dad’s financial situation sorted out, I’ll have a clearer head. Right now, I need the opposite of that; right now, I need to get stoned. I tuck a bottle of red wine underneath my arm for intoxication insurance.
I’ve got one foot on my front step just as the girl from across the street is stepping onto hers. There’s nothing she can do now except charge or retreat. She holds onto the screen door so that it doesn’t slam shut and then heads right for her swing. I take my spot on the bench.
I light up and lean over, partly to help shield the joint from the stinging wind, partly to help stay warm. Of course, I don’t have to be a martyr to the February cold—I am, after all, blessed with a heating blanket and a lengthy extension cord and four well-insulated walls to bump into—but I stay hunkered over where I am. The girl is behind me, but I can only presume she’s doing the same.
The girl is a good teacher, I’ll give her that; two tokes in and tonight’s forecast looks promising: plenty of brain fog with isolated patches of pleasant confusion mixed with persistent forgetfulness. I’ve changed my mind; weed’s a good drug after all. Good for doing nothing and wanting nothing and being nothing, but as I’ve got nothing in particular to do or want or be right now, I say it’s good, I say it’s all right.
“What? What’s all right?”
Apparently, involuntary speech is one of marijuana’s less appealing attributes.
“No, I—It’s a nice night, I said.”
“No it’s not. It sucks.”
Kids these days. I will not let this girl kill my buzz. “So why are you out here then?”
“My dad’s funny that way, you know? He’s not really down with the whole getting-high-in-the-house thing. What’s your excuse?”
A good question. A good reason to take another toke and change the topic. “I saw someone yesterday.” We both wait for what’s next. I lift my head in the hope that the icy wind will help clear my head enough to finish my thought. “On your front step. He looked … suspicious.”
“Fedora? White overcoat? Moustache?”
“You know him?”
“Not really.”
“Not really?”
“It was my dad.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. Oh.”
The girl deserves to have the last word, even if it’s only Oh. Sara and I had an understanding when it came to each other’s relatives: I’m allowed to criticize my family; you’re not. You’re permitted—expected, even—to commiserate with my complaints; only not too enthusiastically. But it’s not acceptable for you to pile on with your own objections. This wasn’t an arrangement arrived at without a certain amount of antecedent loud trial and error.
“What’s on the playlist tonight?” I say. I hadn’t noticed whether or not she has her iPod with her, but odds are yes. No one under the age of twenty-five, it seems, dares go anywhere anymore without being armed with either a cell phone or an iPod or an iPad or, more often than not, some combination of the three. When I was a kid, we all dreamed of one day growing up to be just like Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock, happily weighed down at the hip by all of our phasers and communicators and everything else needed to kill the bad guys and keep us in close contact with the good ones. Three decades later, I don’t even wear a watch, three keys hanging from a plastic Siemens’ keychain that my dad gave me my only adult concession. Thankfully, dreams don’t always come true.
“I thought you didn’t like music,” she says.
“I never said that.”
“Oh, right. It’s just music made in the last twenty years you don’t like.”
“That’s not true.” And it’s not—it’s more like the last thirty years, roughly around the time of the fourth Ramones album—but I resent the insinuation of incipient old-fogeyism anyway. Even dinosaurs have feelings.
“Really,” she says. “Who died tonight then?”
I don’t ask her to repeat herself; turn around on the bench instead to better determine whether she really said what I think she just did.
“In the book you said you’re writing. The one that’s not a novel. Isn’t that the deal? That some ex-roadie or somebody else like that that you made up talks about a bunch of different musicians that he somehow just happened to be there with when they kicked off?”
I swivel back around and decide not to tell her the topic of tonight’s disquisition, and not just because it’s a dinosaur’s right to graze wherever he pleases. Talking about a book in progress sucks away its oxygen, fills up with contaminating chit-chat the brain-breathing empty spaces it requires to flow and sow and grow. Sometimes Sara would casually ask me what I thought about this or that subject, and I’d excitedly answer that I was writing about that very thing in the book I was working on, so for now could only say it was an interesting question I hoped to do justice to in my novel and that maybe we could talk about it after she’d had a chance to read what I had
to say. To which she would usually reply that she’d really just prefer to have a conversation with her husband and not have to wait for publication day. To which I would usually get us talking about something else. Good manners get in the way of good art.
“No one you’d know,” I say. “No one you’d find interesting.”
“No doubt. But who is it anyway?”
“Someone who’s been dead for a long time.” Only about fifteen years, actually, but to an eighteen-year-old, that is a long time.
“Jim Morrison,” she says.
“No.”
“Jimi Hendrix,” she says.
“No.”
“John Lennon.”
“No,” I say, both to shut her up and to prove that I’m not the classic-rock zombie she obviously thinks I am. “And not Keith Moon or John Bonham or Brian Jones either.”
“So who then?”
Christ, it’s no wonder her old man is a drunk. “Ronnie Lane,” I say.
“Is he the one from the Rolling Stones?”
I pause, and not just to take another toke, either.
“No. That’s Ronnie Wood.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Don’t you have any homework or a science project or some extracurricular activity to attend to?”
“Nope. And all my chores are done for the day, too, pa. Please tell me all about the life and times of Ronnie Lane.”
If I wasn’t starting to feel the effect of the weed and the house wasn’t so empty and everything wasn’t so not enough or too much, I’d just stand up and go. I stay where I am.
“Ronnie Lane … ” I begin. “Ronnie Lane, he … ” I continue.
When you can hear yourself talking, you’re not really communicating. Pot may be the ideal fuel for contentedly puttering around in your own consciousness, but booze, it seems, is still the drug of choice when tongues need to be loosened and the race for the right word is preferable to slouching on the sidelines. I extinguish the joint and twist the cap off the wine bottle and take a long pull.
“I guess you’re not shooting for the bestseller list with this one, are you?” the girl says.
“Give me a minute.” That minute plus one more and two more slugs of wine later, I’m ready.
“Ronnie Lane was in a British band in the 1960s called the Small Faces and in another band in the ’70s called the Faces. They both played rock and roll and they both played it the way it’s supposed to be played: loud, rude, and horny. Around the time of the Faces’ second album, though, Ronnie woke up to wooden music—US dusty high-lonesome twang goosed just right with blood-pudding British dancehall stomp—and even though the Faces’ audience was getting bigger and everyone’s bank account was getting fatter, Ronnie took his bass and went home, used the money he’d saved up not buying Cadillacs and rhinestone jumpsuits and vacation homes in Bermuda to purchase a farm on the English/Welsh border to raise his family on and to make his new music at, and a mobile recording studio to rent out to other bands to help pay the bills. Because the guy was no dim dreamer—it was 1973, he knew what he heard in his head wasn’t what the kids watching Top of the Pops wanted to hear. He knew what he was up against. For Christsake, he called his band Slim Chance.”
Offering a writer an audience is like inviting a drunk to an open bar; they simply can’t help themselves. All I lack is a big blast of dexy and this freezing winter night amended to summery mild. I settle for a big swallow of red wine instead.
“But the deck wasn’t stacked against him quite enough, not yet. To promote his first album with Slim Chance, he decided he wasn’t going to gig the usual big city concert halls, but to bring something he called The Passing Show to every provincial outpost in England that would have failed a cost/benefit touring analysis, a rock and roll circus with clowns and jugglers and fire-eaters and, most of all, the rocket fuel mandolin music he wanted to tell everyone about. And naturally it was the wettest British summer in thirty years and the antique gypsy coaches he’d bought to haul around the musicians and their families and all of the equipment broke down every fifty miles and local firemen wanted to see permits and the sanitation officials wanted to know where exactly the portable toilets were going to be located and by the end of it they were pawning equipment just to buy enough diesel to get to the next show. Ronnie lost a small fortune and nobody bought the album, but the seventeen people who saw the show or heard the songs never purchased another Rod Stewart LP again.”
The wind, a barking dog, the frozen moon. And that’s just about right.
“You talk really fast for someone who smokes pot.”
I hold up the wine bottle. “I had some help,” I say. “I’ll try to be more mellow in the future.”
“Don’t. Don’t be more mellow.”
“You don’t like mellow?”
The girl doesn’t answer. The barking dog does. “I hate mellow,” she says.
“It has occurred to you that you might be fond of the wrong drug, then, has it not?”
The girl doesn’t answer; instead, asks: “Then what?”
The sweetest sound a storyteller can hear, the two words that can defeat even a busted microphone and being clean and sober.
“Then you can imagine then what. Then there were three more records that a year after they came out you could buy in a discount bin for a buck, but now go for close to a hundred dollars each on eBay. Then he found out he had Multiple Sclerosis—MS! The guy’s nickname was Plonk, he drank so much, and what does he die of but MS!—and he decided to circle his broken-down wagons and raise chickens and sheep until the coldest British winter in thirty years and the diseases that blew in with it killed most of his animals and he was forced to sell his farm and move back to London and do the best he could do trying not to hurt too much.”
My hands are cold and my mouth is dry in spite of the half bottle of wine in my stomach, and I must have said something right because even I’m sad. I get up from the bench without looking at the girl and head home.
From the direction of the swing set, “What else about Ronnie Lane?”
“There is nothing else.” I don’t like the way that sounds. I pause at the front door. “Listen to him,” I say. “Listen to Ronnie Lane.”
* * *
When I woke up the next morning I felt ashamed of myself. You simply don’t talk about your work. It’s bad manners, it’s bad for the writing itself, it’s bad to blather to strangers. Bad, bad, bad.
That wasn’t me, I’m not like that.
I’d rant and rave to Sara, sure. Wouldn’t discuss or dissect or delineate, but when something work-related was cooking in my head, I’d occasionally spout verbal steam while we were out walking the dog together or while doing the dishes or over breakfast’s second cup of tea. Which would never detract or impair what I was up to—would only, in fact, turn up the inspirational heat a notch or two higher. Someone to talk at, basically, someone to help you discover what it is you really want to say.
But that wasn’t someone. That was different. That was Sara.
* * *
There’s a message on my cell phone from Thames View asking me to please drop by the director’s office as soon as it’s convenient—it’s urgent—obviously the oral follow-up to the written-word warning that Uncle Donny has just sprung on me. I feel like I’m being called into the principal’s office for something I didn’t do but that I know I’m going to take the heat for anyway. That’s what I get for forgetting for fifteen minutes what I was supposed to be so upset about. Bad news is always just one voicemail message away. I’ll call them back once I’m finished at Uncle Donny’s.
Visiting Uncle Donny is like seeing the Grand Canyon again for the first time in decades: the only thing that’s changed is you. Maneuvering around the stacked cases of Cott Cola on the way from the cold room to the kitchen is a challenge, particularly as there’s a light s
witch but no light bulb, Uncle Donny a firm believer that feeling your way along a wall is a cheap and effective substitute for seeing where you’re going. The same gold-speckled, white Formica kitchen table supports the same two-slice toaster, dual am radio/alarm clock, clear plastic seven-day pill dispenser, and several years’ worth of Farmer’s Almanac that were there the very first time Dad took me along on one of his innumerable service calls disguised as Uncle Donny social calls. From the wiring inside the walls to the carpeting in the hallway to the shingles on the roof, Uncle Donny’s house is a museum of Dad’s dedicated handiwork. For that, anyway, I’m glad I’m here, despite the reason I’m here.
I hang my coat on the back of a kitchen chair and am on my way to the living room when Uncle Donny practically steps in front of me. “That room’s a mess,” he says. “Let’s sit in here.”
The table in Uncle Donny’s kitchen is for a lot of things, but eating at it, never mind simply sitting at it, has never been one of them. Just as Uncle Donny will never stand if he can sit, slouching is always preferable to sitting upright. Uncle Donny’s default position is leaning back as far as his recliner will allow with the TV remote control in one hand and a cigarette and a can of Cott Cola alternating in the other.
“Like I care if it’s messy,” I say. Maybe it’s because I’m already weary of what we’re doing before we’ve even begun, but I’d much rather go through Dad’s financial records on the couch. Or maybe it’s just laziness by osmosis, a classic case of when in Uncle Donny’s house, do as Uncle Donny.
“Well maybe I do,” he says. “Ever since this business with your dad has been going on, I’ve had to let a lot of things slide around here.”
“I’m sorry that your dusting time has been compromised by my dad losing his mind.”
“Now, don’t say that.”
I Was There the Night He Died Page 6
