I Was There the Night He Died

by Ray Robertson

  Two fresh pitchers on my credit card do what an entire evening of Toronto cocktail party chit-chat could never accomplish, propel me from stranger to brand-new-buddy status in the time it takes the first sixty ounces of soapy beer to turn into suds. I’d forgotten how easy it is to hop right on and ride the bike of Chatham barroom buffoonery.

  First you laugh at someone else’s tasteless joke, in this case Dougie’s (or Kevin’s or Billy’s, it’s hard to tell them apart):

  “These two drunks are walking down the street when they come across this dog sitting on the curb licking his balls. After awhile one of them says, ‘I sure wish I could do that!’ The other guy just looks at him and says, ‘Well, I think you better pet him first.’”

  Next, you tell your own:

  “Know what the difference between Michael Jackson and a grocery bag was? One was made of plastic and was dangerous for children to play with. The other one you used to carry groceries.”

  Finally, someone emits an angry blast of gas—in this case, Steady Eddie, accompanied by the happy rejoinder “Speak, o’ toothless one”—which elicits not only groans of delighted disapproval from everyone present except the defiantly proud blaster, but four rapidly raised glasses and the sudden panic of three empty pitchers. It’s not my round, but I can use a time out. Willful imbecility is a great place to visit, you just wouldn’t want to live there.

  Waiting for the girl to fill the pitchers—she can’t be a girl if she’s slinging beer, although the blonde ponytail tied back with a blue ribbon and the gum-snapping boredom argue otherwise—I turn toward the eruption of women’s laughter from the other room. I wonder if it’s Rachel and a tableful of other CCI do-gooders; wonder enough that I stroll over and peek my head around the corner to discover that it’s not, is just two middle-age women in Swiss Chalet uniforms, each with a bottle of Coors Light in front of her. I pay for the pitchers and am surprised I’m disappointed it’s not her.

  When I return with the pitchers Steady Eddie is telling a story about his brother Todd. If Todd hadn’t already been the coolest person we knew simply by virtue of being twenty-years-old when Eddie and I were only eleven, his job as a Lay’s Chips delivery man clearly sealed the deal. Number one, he got to ride around all day in a truck—a truck!—and number two, what was he hauling but a thirty-­foot-long cabin full of potato chips. Anytime the mood strikes you, just pull that big rig over to the side of the road, good buddy, and help yourself to whatever flavour you like. It didn’t seem possible that any one person could be so lucky.

  “So after conning Mum into letting him have Dad’s new car so he’d be able to look for sales jobs, not a month later he ends up selling it to some other loser he knows for a thousand bucks straight up, but without the ownership and the tags—tells the guy not to worry, the car is his outright, and the guy believes him—so when the car gets repossessed, this other nitwit, he threatens to call the cops unless Todd gives him his grand back, plus an extra five hundred for all the inconvenience.” Eddie lifts his glass, but doesn’t drink, is waiting until he’s delivered the coup de grace we all know is coming. “Which of course Mum does. When hasn’t she cleaned up one of Todd’s messes? Which puts her out not only fifteen hundred bucks but also a two-year-old car with less than a thousand clicks on it plus the nearly five grand already lost on the down payment Dad made before he got sick.” Now Eddie can drink. “Todd. You know what I say to Mum? I say, ‘He’s not my brother—he’s your son.’”

  I wonder what happened to Todd’s potato chip truck. And his expensive stereo Eddie and I weren’t allowed to touch, but we’d play anyway when Todd was at work. And the white Les Paul, on which Todd could play nothing but the introduction to “Smoke on the Water,” but which looked so fantastic museumed in the corner of his bedroom on its shiny silver stand. Maybe everyone only gets so much luck in their life. Maybe Todd used all of his up.

  Dougie or Kevin or Billy decides that things have gotten just a little too grown-up, so one or another launches into another sure-fire knee-slapper. “This guy answers the phone and it’s an Emergency Room doctor. The doctor says, ‘Your wife was in a serious car accident and I have bad news and good news. The bad news is she’s lost all use of both arms and both legs and will need help eating and going to the bathroom for the rest of her life.’ The guy says, ‘My God. What’s the good news?’ The doctor says, ‘I’m just kidding. She’s actually dead.’”

  Everyone howls but Eddie and me. We drink until the other three raise their own glasses. Eddie puts on a wild smile and leans over like he’s about to tell me the world’s lewdest limerick. “They don’t know, they didn’t mean anything.”

  “No problem,” I say.

  “You know what’s what, that’s all that matters.”

  “It’s not a problem.”

  Someone says, “What’s not a problem?” and Eddie answers back, “Guy walks into the doctor’s office and says he’s got a real memory problem, he can’t remember anything at all. The doctor says, ‘How long have you had this problem?’ Guy says, ‘What problem?’”

  “Hilarious.”

  “That’s fucking hilarious.”

  “That is hilarious.”

  “That really is.”

  * * *

  What I want is music and warmth, not wintertime’s squall and shiver, but ten minutes after arriving home from the Montreal House, ten minutes spent on my mother’s couch listening to CDs through tiny tinny earbuds sends me outdoors with a bottle of wine and a determination to track down a record player as soon as possible. I thought I’d be busy enough taking care of Dad’s affairs and working on the new book that digitized music on an old Discman would suffice until I got home. It won’t. Music is magic and magic needs conjuring, otherwise it’s just entertainment. Music magic means I need a record player.

  Besides, my phone is inside, and on it Uncle Donny’s latest message, unlistened to but unlikely to be different from the previous three. Uncle Donny was the only uncle I had who never forgot to give me a birthday present—the same five dollars tucked into my shirt pocket that seemed like such a small fortune when I was ten, but which had shrunken to a deflationary family in-joke by the time I was sixteen—and could be annually counted on for an always groan-worthy “See you next year” farewell after enjoying another of my mother’s Christmas turkeys, but repeated apologies and inquiries after Dad’s well-being don’t make up for months of systematic embezzlement. Blood isn’t thicker than the misappropriation of entrusted family funds.

  I’m getting used to this bench, this park. Maybe a few frozen wooden slats and a patch of partitioned dirt are all anyone needs. Or maybe I’m just drunk. Red wine was another thing Sara taught me. Not etiquette tricks like what year and vintage to purchase or what kind of cheese to eat with it, but how a full-bodied red, even if slugged right out of the bottle, is as close as alcohol can come to a conduit of cosmic consciousness, every other bottled spirit hurling you along happily with every sip toward this and that thing but never ever The Thing. William Blake didn’t need booze to glimpse a world in a grain of sand, but since most of us aren’t William Blake, these hard hoary stars in the sky above me and this icy air feeding my lungs and the music I can hear in my head if not in my ears are closer to what they really are because of the 2009 Hecula Monastrell stirring in my stomach. Doctors and dieticians will tell you that alcohol is only empty calories. They’re wrong. Empty is just about the only thing it’s not.

  All I’ve got is the moon and a streetlight, but it looks as if the girl—Samantha—is talking to someone in her front yard. Looks as if, because although they’re standing face to face and both busily gesturing with their hands, I can’t hear a word either one of them is saying. Young lovers’ quarrel, probably: fiery whispers, bursting hearts, I’ll die tonight if you don’t say yes or no or something else equally epochal. I’m disappointed she’s capable of such an out-and-out teenage cliché. Disappointmen
t that is, it must be admitted, odd, considering that she is, after all, a teenager.

  A car comes around the corner—rude headlights on the rain-glistened street, unta-unta-unta thumping dance music in danger of bursting the car’s windows—and slams to a stop in front of her house. The boy she’s talking to drops his hands and climbs into the backseat. The car speeds off, leaving Samantha standing alone in the middle of her yard. She looks like she’s considering going back inside, but crosses the street and walks past me without returning my nod and smile volley, takes her usual sulking spot on the swing.

  “Boyfriend trouble?” I say.

  “He’s my brother,” she says, the roll of her eyes audible in her voice. “And he’s fourteen.”

  “Oh.” I need a quick recovery so as not to appear to be the hopelessly out of it fuddy-duddy I so obviously seem. “In that case, you might want to tell him he’s going to go deaf listening to that shit his friends were playing. In addition to ruining his sense of taste.”

  “It’s too late. He already is.”

  “Already is what?”

  “Deaf.”

  I lift the wine bottle. Red wine isn’t just an excellent means of stripping the obfuscating veil of familiarity from everyday objects and events—it also does a swell job of helping you forget stuff. Like how easily an eighteen­-year-old girl can make you feel like an unqualified fool.

  From the swing set behind me, “Speaking of shit, that shit you’re drinking will end up ruining a lot more than your sense of taste.”

  “You are aware, I presume, of the expression ‘The pot calling the kettle black?’”

  “I don’t drink alcohol. I don’t. And pot isn’t a drug.”

  “I see. I wasn’t aware of that.”

  She pauses, presumably to puff. “It’s an herb. It grows naturally.”

  “So does Athlete’s Foot. That doesn’t mean you want to put it inside your body.”

  An SUV rolls past. The bored faces of two small children strapped into the backseat are briefly illuminated by a flashing video screen. They’re talking about making smoking inside automobiles illegal when there are children aboard. If they really cared about them, they’d make televisions against the law, and not just in cars.

  “Anyway,” the voice to my rear says, “in case you forgot, you smoke weed too. On doctor’s orders, if I recall.”

  “I’m starting to think that the cure is worse than the disease.”

  “You should listen to your doctor.”

  “Do you?”

  I pull on my bottle, she sucks on her joint. It’s started to snow.

  “I’d listen to a real doctor,” she says. “My doctor’s not a doctor, she’s a shrink.”

  “I’m sure she knows what she’s doing. And if she’s not helping you, why do you go then?”

  “Duh. Do you really think it’s my choice?”

  Actually, no, I hadn’t thought about it. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  Samantha sighs. Ordinarily, only people in hauntingly lyrical novels or daytime television dramas sigh. Samantha sighed.

  “Who died tonight?” she says. “In your book, I mean. What musician died that you wrote about and what important moral lesson will we all no doubt glean from it.”

  Sarcasm—even when directed at you—is always preferable to sadness, particularly Sara sadness, so, “Buddy Holly,” I say. “Buddy Holly died tonight.”

  “The plane crash guy?”

  “The plane crash guy.”

  Fine snow drifts across the road, like the snow that fell that night fifty years ago and blew across three bodies scattered across an Iowa cornfield. But the story of the rise and fall and 40,000 foot crash of Buddy Holly isn’t happening tonight. Crashes of any kind are definitely not on tonight’s agenda.

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “And what’s so special about Buddy Holly?”

  “You’ve got ears, listen for yourself.” Reminded of her brother, “Your brother and you—you were signing pretty intensely.”

  “You won’t tell me about Buddy Holly, but you know what people are saying when they’re signing?”

  “I know when people are intense.”

  I drink. The wine is cold in my mouth but warm in my stomach.

  “He’s a little shit,” she finally says.

  I consider answering, but lift the bottle again instead.

  “But the little shit is my brother, which makes him twice the asshole he already is when he acts like such a … ”

  “A little shit?”

  “You know, if that whole writing thing doesn’t work out for you, you could have quite a future in family counselling. You really do have the knack.”

  Undeterred, “I thought being a little shit is what younger brothers did.”

  “Haven’t you got enough dysfunction in your own family?”

  I nod before realizing she can’t see me. “Point taken.”

  “So tell me about Buddy Holly. He’s got to be more interesting than our stupid families.”

  “What I want to do is listen to Buddy Holly.”

  “What’s stopping you?”

  “I don’t have my record player.”

  “You mean like what DJs use, in clubs?”

  “No, not like DJs use in clubs. Like in sound. Like in superior sound.”

  “I thought records were supposed to skip and stuff.”

  “And stuff, yeah. Stuff like a vinyl record being an analog recording and CDs and MP3s and all the rest of them being digital recordings, meaning that digital recordings take snapshots of the analog signal of a musical waveform and measures each snapshot with only a certain degree of accuracy, which means that by definition a digital recording is not capturing the complete sound wave, is only approximating it. Stuff like since a record has a groove carved right into it that mirrors the original sound’s waveform, no information is lost. Which means that the waveforms from a vinyl recording can be much more accurate, which can be clearly heard in the richness and warmth of the resonance.”

  “You mean records sound better.”

  “You could put it like that.”

  Lifting the bottle—even fanatics needs fuel—“You’re right, though,” I say. “There is a downside. Any specks of dust or damage to the record, like scratches, can end up as skips or pops or static. Digital recordings are like robots: they’re quietly effective and they never get old. Records are like people. They get noisy. They get noisy and then they get hard to hear and then they die.”

  I let the back-to-back honking announcement of a locked car half a street down double dot the end of my sentence. I hadn’t noticed any automobile pass by. Paying attention to what’s important tends to make one blind to everything else.

  “If it’s so important, why didn’t you bring your record player and some of your records with you then?” Samantha says.

  “I guess I didn’t think I was going to be here long enough for it to matter.”

  “I guess you were wrong.”

  “I guess I was.”

  My bottle is almost empty and her joint has to be dead. There’s nothing left to do for either of us but go home.

  “I’ve got Creature Speakers,” she says.

  I turn halfway around on the bench, rest an arm across its back. “That’s either the beginning of a confession I don’t want to hear or the first line of a joke I don’t understand.”

  “That’s what I have to hook up to my iPod. I can go home and get them and download some Buddy Holly and we can listen to him.”

  “At my parents’ house, you mean.”

  “It’s not as if they’re coming back any time soon, are they?”

  “No.”

  “And it’s what you said you wanted to do, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah.”

&nb
sp; “I could be back in ten minutes, probably more like five.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay?

  “Okay.”

  I know I’ve made a mistake as soon as I stand up and have to sit right back down. A semi-drunk forty-four-year-old man plus a stoned eighteen-year-old girl plus the greatest hits of Buddy Holly can’t add up to anything but something you shouldn’t be doing. “Samantha,” I call out.

  She turns around. She’s smiling. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen her look happy.

  “Don’t take all night, all right?”

  “Ten minutes, tops.”

  Inside the house there’s nothing to tidy up or put away because there isn’t anything. The only things that would indicate I’ve even been here are the abandoned Discman lying on the couch where I left it and my laptop on the kitchen table. I go into the bathroom to take a pee and splash cold water on my face, use the same towel I’ve been using all week to dry off. It smells how I feel: used-up and mildewy. Because I worked from home and my schedule was more flexible, I was in charge of laundry. Even Sara’s dirty clothes smelt good. Mine, you’d be wise to use surgical gloves to get them from the laundry basket to the washer, but hers weren’t even really dirty, just more like Sara.

  The doorbell rings, the first time since I’ve been here. Doorbells still make me jumpy, a part of me still expecting Barney to charge the door, fangs bared and barking. Especially if you were asleep or reading, this could be disconcerting, the near-heart attack you endured not quite worth the advance warning that the mailman was delivering the gas bill. No fatal coronaries were ever suffered, however, and Barney felt needed and we felt protected and what’s a little uproar among loved ones? Clamour and clatter are the inevitable byproducts of a happy home.

  I answer the door and Samantha pushes past me to the living room with a Holt Renfrew bag drooping full of brand-new-to-me technology. I move out of the way like a matador who’s lost his cape. I watch her set up her equipment on my mother’s mahogany coffee table and I pour what’s left of my wine into a milk glass. It’s a good thing the dead only haunt you for things done to them when they were alive—my mother didn’t allow even coffee on her coffee table, let alone an iPod and Creature Speakers. The number of new fingerprints Samantha’s responsible for alone would be enough to necessitate an exorcism.