Glimpses

by Lewis Shiner

  I didn’t have the energy to take the manual out of my suitcase. Instead I went to sleep and dreamed about my father.

  He looks about thirty. I must be a kid, then, because he still looks old to me. He’s wearing a pair of really long Bermuda shorts. We’re at this swimming hole that I vaguely recognize as being in Kansas, where my mother grew up. We chase each other around on the rocks. My father seems to get younger and younger. He’s about sixteen now. Suddenly he stops, like he’s heard something. Then he turns around. I can’t see the look on his face. He dives into the water, a perfect swan dive, and disappears. The water is green and I can’t see anything below the surface. I stand there, waiting, holding my breath. I’m not going to breathe, apparently, until he comes back up. Only he’s not coming up.

  I fought my way up from sleep like it was deep water and woke panting for breath. I had a lead weight in my head and a conviction that something was hideously wrong. I slowly put together where I was and why, but it didn’t help. So I washed my face and brushed my teeth and went downstairs for another drink.

  Saturday morning, Christmas Eve, somebody knocked while I was getting dressed. Elizabeth was still in bed, waiting for the bathroom. I opened the door to find my mother in her turquoise sweatsuit, lightly made up, brittle smile in place. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but I’m not going to apologize for the way I look,” and walked away.

  Elizabeth bit her pillow to keep from laughing. I sat on the edge of the bed and put my head in my hands. “Is she getting better? Or worse?”

  That night around eleven o’clock I shut myself in Edna’s bedroom to call Graham. Because of all the company, Willard is back in the same bedroom with her, and I saw the signs of his temporary occupancy: a robe on a chair, his book and reading glasses on the floor by the right-hand side of the bed.

  It was only nine o’clock in L.A. Graham answered the phone on the third ring, his voice muffled. “’Lo?”

  “Graham? It’s Ray.”

  “Mmmmmmm?”

  “Ray Shackleford, man, I just called to wish you a Merry Christmas.”

  “Yeah. Ray. Yeah, right. Hang on a second.” I leaned back against the headboard and watched the clock on Edna’s bedside table tick off thirty seconds. “Yeah, Ray. How you doing?”

  “Okay. Did I wake you up or something?”

  “No, no, just watching a little tube.”

  “You got anybody there with you?”

  “No, man. But hey, it’s cool. I was never big on holidays anyway.”

  “I got a surprise for you. Kind of a Christmas present. I got ‘Celebration of the Lizard.’”

  “No shit?”

  “Just the one song for now, but the rest is coming.”

  “Man, that’s fantastic. You really got it?”

  We talked for another minute or two, and then I broke it off, embarrassed for having caught him at such a bad time, thinking I shouldn’t have called at all. I wished him a Merry Christmas and he said, “Yeah, right.”

  Elizabeth’s family opens presents on Christmas morning, not on Christmas Eve like we always did. Everybody was in bed by twelve-thirty. I couldn’t sleep. Finally I went downstairs and sat in the den with one of Willard’s Budweisers. Half the room, where the glass-topped table and chairs normally were, has been cleared out to make room for the eight-foot tree and the mounds of presents. In the morning everyone would set on them like sharks, all opening at once, hurling paper, shouting thank-yous in passing and moving on. There are occasional minor injuries, sometimes people end up with the wrong presents, things get lost or broken or thrown away in the madness, but nobody seems to mind. My first time there, after years of twenty questions and numbered presents and lists, it seemed like the end of the world.

  Edna has sisters and in-laws all around Massachusetts, and the Dean family is big in Indiana and Florida. It’s the exact opposite of mine, which is the narrow end of an inverted pyramid. Both my mother’s parents are dead. Before I married Elizabeth the two of us went to Laredo so she could meet my grandmother on my father’s side. That was when I found out my father had a sister. She died before I was born, but still. My father never mentioned her. When I confronted my parents with it, my mother said, “No, I’m sure we must have talked about her sometime.”

  Her name was Janet, same as my grandmother’s. She was two years older than my father, blonde and clever. She always got my father in trouble. He was convinced his mother loved Janet and not him. Finally he ran away and lived with his father; his parents had divorced when he was just a baby. Janet grew up wild, ran around with lots of men, and died young in a motorcycle accident. My father never forgave her for being his mother’s favorite. He wrote her out of the family history like she’d never lived.

  I’m the last Shackleford I know. Unless something drastic happens, the line stops with me.

  I stood up and looked out the window, rolling my shoulders just to feel them move under my shirt. No weather out there at all, really. It was too warm for December, and the lights of the city had turned the cloudy skies a dull red.

  My father’s Nikonos underwater camera was sitting on the coffee table. My mother brought it down for Elizabeth’s brother-in-law, who dives. It’s smaller than my Nikon SLR, sleek and black and compact. And, I saw, the lens doesn’t open up any wider than f/4. Which explained our last argument.

  He’d been a pretty good underwater photographer. He kept framed blowups of his favorite pictures in the living room where he could see them from his recliner: a black-and-electric-yellow angelfish, an anemone like a cluster of pink jelly fingers, a clown-faced puffer fish, a single nurse shark. Never any other divers. He spent most of his last two years in that chair or in bed, dozing off during the day and unable to sleep at night.

  My mother had brought four rolls of film back from Mexico, his last pictures. It was stupid of me to think they would tell me anything. Still I had to know. I took them into the camera shop the day after she got back. They were ready that Friday afternoon. Slides, of course. There’s a certain kind of person that has to make other people sit through a slide show.

  My mother set up the projector and stacked the first boxful in the feeder. There were three shots taken from the bow of the boat, underexposed. It made the clear blue waters off Cozumel look dark and foreboding. There was one cockeyed shot of my father, taken by somebody else, not quite in focus.

  The rest of the slides, four boxes worth, were completely dark.

  We drove back to Austin on the twenty-sixth. That night I woke up and went into the living room to find my mother watching the videotapes of my father again and crying. I wanted to scream and throw furniture. If she couldn’t get over it, why did she have to make me watch? To jerk my guilt over something that I didn’t feel?

  I was cornered. If I went into the kitchen for a beer my mother would make a big deal about it. If I went upstairs she would likely follow me and talk about meaningless trivia. So it was back to bed, to Elizabeth’s soft snores and Dude’s accusing stare.

  My mother flew home the next day. Elizabeth had assigned herself a stack of books over the holidays and was holed up in the bedroom. I wanted to finish Celebration. It had gotten tangled up in my mind with the whole sad, frustrating holiday and I wanted it over with. I knocked out a couple of simple repair jobs and went to work.

  In the end, the best I could manage was a couple of songs a day. Elizabeth tried to get me to stay in bed, telling me I was having a relapse of whatever I’d had before Christmas. I promised to take it easy, and then I went upstairs for a couple more.

  Friday was my thirty-eighth birthday. Elizabeth bought me some new clothes and my mother sent money. Pete gave me a new CD from Carnival Dog called Soul Carnival that has great stuff like “But It’s Alright” by J.J. Jackson and “My Pledge of Love” by the Joe Jeffrey Group. That night Elizabeth and I went to Louis B’s downtown, her favorite restaurant, and she had a few glasses of wine. I wore a coat and tie. She was decked out in an antique silk blouse and
Chanel sweater. She imitated some of her kids on the way home, and cracked me up. I thought that once we were inside I would just put my arms around her and kiss her, like when we first went out. Then maybe one thing would lead to another.

  I unlocked the door and opened it for her. She went straight into the bathroom. I stood by the stairs to wait. She came out and fed the cat and sat on the couch and turned on the TV. “It’s Dallas. You don’t want to watch, do you?”

  “I guess not,” I said.

  The next night was New Year’s Eve, and a party at Elizabeth’s school. I’d found an old pair of jeans so tight they fit me like Morrison’s leathers. Over them I wore a loose cotton shirt from India and my leather jacket. Elizabeth, as usual, was dressed to the teeth. “You’re not actually wearing that, are you?” she asked me.

  It was my cue to sigh dramatically and change clothes. But they felt right and I knew I looked good. Appropriate, no, but good. I heard myself say, “Yeah. I think I am.”

  It was Elizabeth’s friends at the party. These are people who watch PBS and read biographies and take politics seriously. They seem to still be depressed over George Bush being elected and the party never quite caught fire. It was in the school cafeteria, which still smelled of institutional food, despite the overlays of booze and cigarettes and perfume. The stereo was too weak for the room and too many people had brought music from the seventies.

  I felt a little crazy. My friends were either down on Sixth Street getting shitfaced or stuck like me at semiofficial parties that weren’t any fun. Sondra and Gary were there, and another teacher friend of Elizabeth’s named Frances. Frances was too tall for me, and moussed her black hair straight back into a pony tail that seemed too severe. Tonight, though, she was wearing the same perfume that Alex had worn in high school, floral and strong, and I orbited around her like a lost moon.

  At midnight I kissed Elizabeth and said, “Rabbit rabbit rabbit.” It’s supposed to bring you luck if it’s the first thing you say in the new year. I don’t remember where I got it, but of course I can’t stop now. Superstitions will hook you that way. Alex and I used to hold our breath whenever we crossed a bridge so we wouldn’t ever lose each other. There’s that long, long overpass on Loop 12 between Dallas and Arlington that used to give us fits. I could always hold my breath longer and sometimes I would slow down near the end.

  Elizabeth and I danced to an echoing “Auld Lang Syne” and then there was a lot of kissing. I kissed Frances and then Sondra and then I kissed Frances again, maybe a little longer than strictly necessary.

  About twelve-thirty Elizabeth started to cry.

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  She put her hands on my shoulders and dried her tears on my neck. “I don’t know,” she whispered. She was still crying and people had started to notice. I could hear rumors about to fly. “It’s been a long year. Can we go home?”

  When we got to the car she said, “I’m losing you. And I don’t know what to do about it.”

  I stood there in the street and held her while she cried some more. Finally she pulled away. “It’s the white wine. I should stay away from it.” She handed me her keys. “Drive, will you?”

  I walked her around to the passenger door. I didn’t know what to do about it either.

  I finished my cassette version of Celebration of the Lizard on January 10. It’s different than I expected, raw and lean, more physical and less intellectual than the first two albums. It opens with “Unknown Soldier” and “Waiting for the Sun.” Taking off from the line “Now that spring has come,” they go into “Summer’s Almost Gone” and “Wintertime Love,” all three cut tightly together to make a kind of Three Seasons Suite. Then, like we figured, they close with “My Wild Love” and “Five To One.” It was too late to keep “Hello, I Love You”/“Love Street” from being released as a single, but Morrison insisted neither of them belonged on the album and Rothchild backed him up.

  The tighter, shorter “Celebration of the Lizard” left room for two additional songs to start side two. First a blues, like Graham predicted, a hard-rocking version of “Crawling King Snake.” Then “L’America,” which Morrison pulled out of one of his notebooks. It has the same basic melody as the version that appeared on L.A. Woman, only tighter, with a different bridge.

  If the work tape I started with was somehow in touch with the absolute, then this was another order of perfection. It’s the Doors’ best album. It breathes fire and blood and semen. It scares the living shit out of me.

  Graham brought me straight to his house from the airport. I put Celebration on and we sat and listened in silence. At the end of side one he was in tears. At the end of side two he was speechless.

  I went into the kitchen and got some beers. I hadn’t even thought about drinking while the tape was on. I’d been totally caught up in the moment, hearing new things in the mix. When I came back into the living room, Graham had the tape in his hands, just holding on to it. When I was a kid and got a new comic, after I’d read it once and paged through it again to set the pictures in my mind, then I’d sit and hold it that same way.

  “I guess I didn’t really believe you could do it,” he said. “I guess I thought it was too much to ask.”

  “Well, I did,” I said, “and it wasn’t. Wait till we get it on a digital master.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t care.” I felt electrified. “Right now if you want.”

  So we did. I got the finished mix of “Celebration” that afternoon, while I was fresh. At the end we were both pretty wrung out. He offered to put me up, but I wanted to stay at the Alta Cienega.

  It was after dark when we drove out to West Hollywood. The night was so incredibly warm that it felt like spring to me. Even stranger is this conviction that L.A. is home. The palm trees and seedy stucco motels, everybody in shorts with their overbred, highly strung animals, all of it is just right. These are the very things I want to see when I look around.

  “This is on the company, you know,” Graham said. “The motel, your food and beer, a rent car if you want it.”

  “How are you going to swing that?”

  Graham looked over at me. “Hey, man, don’t you know?”

  “Know what?”

  “Did you think I was just the engineer or something? I own Carnival Dog Records. The U.S. Government bought it for me out of my disability checks.”

  I should have guessed. The phrase “carnival dog” comes out of a Doors song, “My Eyes Have Seen You,” on Strange Days. And here I thought all this time they picked it because it had the same initials as “compact disc.” “No,” I said. “I didn’t know.”

  “I write you off as development. If I have to, I can pump some of the profits back in as seed money. But I shouldn’t have to.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m impressed.”

  We stopped for a case of Coors and then drove to the motel. I left Graham in the car and went to check in. The office was tiny, cramped, and deserted. After a few seconds a door opened behind the counter and I saw another, smaller room, barely the size of a closet. A Vietnamese woman in her fifties was angrily washing dishes. “What?” she said.

  “Do you have any rooms?”

  She turned off the water and grudgingly moved behind the counter. “Jus’ you?” She handed me a registration card.

  “That’s right.”

  She looked out the glass door at Graham’s car, saw Graham, and said, “Dirty dick.”

  “What?”

  She sighed, jerked the card out of my hand, and wrote “36” in the little box for the nightly rate. I gave her two twenties and said, “Can I, uh, have room thirty-two? Is it available?”

  She looked at me and shook her head and banged around under the counter for a key. I felt like a total asshole. How many people must come in here, bugging her for that room? She slapped the key on the counter. Room 32.

  I carried the beer in, then came back to help Graham up the stairs. Tired as I was, I couldn’t sit do
wn. From the window I could see the cars crawl past on La Cienega, see the girls in neon halter tops and short skirts. I wanted to put my head on their naked stomachs and listen to their hearts beat.

  “What’s eating you, man?” Graham asked.

  “Restless,” I said. “Horny. Insufficiently drunk.” I’d chugged the first beer and was most of the way through the second. I used to drink a lot, but never like this. It’s like there’s a hole inside that I’m trying to fill with beer. Beer is supposed to be a depressant, only it cheers me up, makes the world seem rich and full of possibilities. The ones that interested me most had to do with my getting laid.

  Right then I could see leaving Elizabeth. Nothing to it. My own apartment, just the basic tools to do my work. A portable CD player, a refrigerator full of Coors, and a long parade of wanton, willing women.

  “It’s Morrison,” Graham said. “He’s got inside you.”

  “Maybe. Maybe he has.” I belched and cracked another Coors. “How’d you end up owning a record company?”

  “It was the best I could do. As close to music as I could get. I wanted to be a guitar player but it wasn’t in the cards. When I was first in the hospital they had a guitar there, some twelve-dollar Harmony piece of shit. They kept it with the wallet-making stuff, the crafts, you know. I started playing again, and when I got out I got myself a Gretsch Country Gentleman, the Chet Atkins model, hollow body with the Bigsby bar. Same as George Harrison used. Nobody plays them anymore, of course, but that was the guitar back then. I got in a band called Burger and the Buns. The lead singer’s nickname was Burger, don’t you see. We did fifty percent British invasion, fifty percent Ray Charles/James Brown kind of thing.”

  “My college band was called the Duotones. We had a black lead singer, a black sax player, a black guy on bass. The rest of us were just honkey college boys. Keyboard player had his own Hammond B-3, pain in the ass to move, but boy did it sound sweet. We did all that Motown and Stax/Volt stuff.”

  “Oh yeah,” Graham said. “Oh yeah. The problem was I wasn’t any good.” He held up his hand. “Those are butcher’s fingers. Short and thick. I’ve got a good ear, but the hands are just meat. So I took the hint, eventually. Went to school on the GI bill, learned electronics and recording and production. I bought and sold records out of my house, dealing in cash whenever I could, socking away the disability checks, not paying any more tax than I had to. Started Carnival Dog with Howard Kaylan of the Turtles, then bought him out bit by bit over the years, God bless him. Now I own it free and clear.”