by Lewis Shiner
“You can’t talk, right?”
“Of course not.” She’d put on an artificial, cheerful tone.
“First I have to know if you’re okay. He didn’t hurt you, did he? Because you stayed out all night with me?”
“I’m fine,” she said. “Really.”
I let out a long sigh. I hated the sound of myself, knew I was on the verge of being a fool. “I just wanted to tell you. Elizabeth and I split up.” I told her about it as simply as I could, wishing I could gauge my words by her eyes.
“So what happens now?” she said.
“I don’t know. I’m just taking it like an hour at a time.”
“Same here.”
“I really miss you.”
“Me too. Big-time.”
There was a long silence. “I guess I should go.”
“That would be a good idea.”
“You have my number here, right?”
“Right.”
“I love you,” I said.
There was another silence, and she said, “Take care of yourself.”
“You too.”
“Okay,” she said, and there was a click as she hung up.
I sat there for a long time and replayed what we’d said, trying to read in different meanings. None of them stuck. I counted the number of beers in the refrigerator, which was still ten, and went to bed.
I dreamed about Hendrix. I’m playing with the Duotones at the DKE house at Vanderbilt. We’re playing “Fire” from Hendrix’s first album when I see that Jimi is in the audience. With no transition we’re not playing the song anymore and Scott is out in the audience, trying to get Jimi to come up on stage with us. Scott offers his Les Paul like a squire offering a sword to a knight. Jimi shakes his head and waves his big hands, saying, maybe later. We start some other song, which doesn’t come together. Jimi seems to be having a good time, but no matter how much everybody in the band begs him, he won’t come up and play, and I’m left with this powerful longing.
When I woke up it was still there.
Thursday night Graham called. I hadn’t done much except sit in my workshop all day. I only had a couple of simple jobs left, and I couldn’t get involved. I didn’t have the energy to get up and change the stereo either, so most of the day went by in silence. It’s like surgery. Even if what they cut out was killing you, it was still a part of you. You’re in shock. You have to lie quietly for a while and figure out what’s left, what you can do and what you can’t. The hardest thing is to imagine the future, to think any further ahead than dinner. Dinner is hard enough.
Graham wanted me to meet him in Seattle. “It’s a consulting gig,” he said. “I’ll pay you a thousand bucks, plus all expenses.”
“What for?”
“Research. I need somebody to help me get around and take notes and pictures and all like that.”
“Bullshit. You don’t need anybody to help you get around. What are you researching?”
“Well, it’s, uh, kind of a private deal…”
“Is this the Hendrix business again?”
“Look, Ray, what’s the point in sitting around the house feeling sorry for yourself? That’s no way to be. What harm would it do you to come to Seattle, which is beautiful this time of year, for a few days’ vacation?”
“Graham, I don’t want to do the record.”
“I’m not pressuring you to do the record. There’s no strings attached, I swear. I lined up an interview with Jimi’s dad, and I thought you’d like to come along. I mean, how often do you get a chance like that?”
“Let me think about it.”
“The interview is Sunday. So I need to know pretty soon.”
“I’ll let you know, okay? I just have to think about it.”
I went to the white room and stretched out on the bedspread, careful not to wrinkle it. I’ve never been to Seattle. I can’t picture it. Somebody told me once they have the highest suicide rate in the country because of all the rain. That’s all I know. Except that Jimi grew up there and is buried there.
My clothes were barely unpacked and washed from Cozumel and now Graham wanted me to leave again. Of course the only reason to stay was in case Lori called.
I didn’t think Lori was going to call.
I woke up in the middle of the night, still lying on top of the covers. It seemed ridiculous to fight it any longer. I got undressed and folded my clothes up and put them on the floor of the closet. Then I got under the sheets, smelling the fresh paint and seeing the white walls in the moonlight. I was asleep again in seconds.
There was an Avis rental car in my name at the Seattle airport. It was four in the afternoon and raining. It occurred to me as I drove into town that I was a free man, with no marriage to protect any longer. A small universe of possibility opened up before me. My heart belongs to Lori, but Lori may not be one of those possibilities, not any time soon. And Lori, as my phone call made so very clear, has her own relationship to protect, her own agenda and timetable. I am, essentially, available. I noticed on Wednesday that Elizabeth had taken her wedding ring off. Mine is still on, though I’m not sure why.
Maybe I’m scared that the separation will blow over, like so many other crises. Or maybe as a reminder that I haven’t behaved very well lately. That I waited around until Elizabeth forced me into a decision that I should have made on my own, long ago. That I live in a house that she helped pay for, with furniture she helped pick out, while she is in a strange apartment. That Lori is in Mexico and I’m half a continent away from her and I don’t know how I let that happen.
I was so distracted that I took the wrong exit off I-5 and ended up in a district of gray warehouses and torn-up streets. It took me ten minutes to get turned around and by that point the gloom had seeped into me.
I finally got to the Hilton, downtown on Sixth Avenue, and parked in their garage. Graham had booked us adjoining rooms with a view of Elliott Bay. The bay is gray and cold, even in summer, with low clouds hanging over it. There are mysterious green islands in the distance. Seattle Center and the Space Needle were off to my right, the Kingdome to my left. All the hills give the city a powerful presence. You can’t ignore your physical surroundings when you feel them in your legs.
Graham was into his second six-pack of some darkish beer I didn’t recognize. “I love this town,” he said. “It’s like the sixties died everywhere else, or went into hiding. Here they evolved. You been on the street yet? You need to go up on Capitol Hill, where the community college is. You’ll see everything from pink hair to long hair to skinheads, skateboards and punks and hippies. And the bands. The scene here is unbelievable. Maybe we can catch Soundgarden or Green River some night while we’re here. Have some of this beer.”
“Not right now.”
“They’ve got all these microbreweries here, it’s fantastic.” He saw something in my face and said, “Jesus Christ, you haven’t quit drinking, have you?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? What the hell kind of answer is that? Have you gone crazy, man? What’s life without beer?”
“Different.”
“And not a lot of fun, from the sound of you.”
“Give me a break, okay? I just split up a ten-year marriage.”
Graham turned his chair around and looked at the clouds over the bay. His voice dropped to a whisper. “Hell, man, you think I don’t know that? I just want to cheer you up a little. And you won’t give me a chance.”
I walked up behind him and put my hands on his shoulders. “Sorry,” I said. “My mom, my friends, they’ve all been trying. I guess I’m not ready to cheer up yet. So everybody gets pissed off at me and I feel guilty for not cooperating.”
“You’ve got to remember you’re not the Lone Ranger. We’ve been through a lot together, you and me. At first I thought you were one of the easiest people to get to know that I ever met. But there’s a part of you that’s closed off and nobody can get to it.”
I sat down on the bed.
It felt like Pick On Ray Day. As if I hadn’t given myself enough grief, now Graham had to join in. I’d told my mother where I was going, maybe she’d call up and take a few shots herself.
I said, “Closed off how? What do you mean?”
“You talk about your old man and you talk about your marriage and you never get mad. Not at them or me or anybody. Not even just now, when you told me to go to hell. You didn’t get mad, you just showed me how hurt you were so that I would back off. Is that what happened with Elizabeth? Did you just keep backing her off until you backed her out the door?”
I wondered how he could say I didn’t get mad. I hated his guts at the moment. At the same time I knew what he meant by the closed-off place. There was a wall there, and behind that wall I was still a cowboy, like the ones I watched on TV as a kid. I kept to myself and didn’t talk much. I knew I was right and anybody who said different was wrong. At the end of the day I would ride off into the sunset. Alone.
If we were cowboys I would have called him out and we would have settled it in the street. But cowboys don’t stay in high-rise hotels and drive in freeway traffic and live in neighborhoods where little kids play on the sidewalk. Cowboys don’t have wives and they don’t have mothers who call them two or three times a week, they don’t have jobs and they don’t have people trying to pick their brains apart.
I felt the tears start.
“Goddamnit, Ray, I love you, man. You can cry all you want and I’m not going to lay off. Talk to me, goddamnit. I want to know what’s behind that wall.”
My throat was so swollen it was hard to talk. “I don’t know. It’s safe in there. Nobody can hurt me.”
“Hurt you how?”
“I don’t know!”
I went to the bathroom and got a handful of Kleenex. I came out and sat on the bed and blew my nose. “By leaving me.”
“Who left you?”
“Everybody.” Then I said, “No. They didn’t leave me, my parents took me away from them. Over and over.
“I used to have this doll when I was three. It was this ugly plastic boy doll. My parents hated it because they didn’t think it was right for a boy to play with dolls. I called it Boy Baby. When we moved from Tucson to Virginia I threw it out the window of the car and then I screamed until my father went back for it. They told me if I did it again they wouldn’t stop. So of course I did it again, and they didn’t stop. They just kept going. It was supposed to be a lesson. My mother brought this up over Christmas and I couldn’t figure out why.”
“You were trying to stop them. It was like you were yelling ‘Stop!’ and they wouldn’t listen.”
Tears burned my cheeks and I couldn’t talk for the ugly noises that came out of my chest. I kept thinking about that doll lying abandoned on the side of the road, waiting, like it had feelings. Like it was me. It was the saddest thing in the world.
Graham rolled his chair over next to the bed. I put my arms around his neck and he hugged me. He smelled like beer and sweat. I could feel the stubble on the underside of his chin. After a while I was able to let go and we sat there for a while, both of us a little embarrassed, I think.
Eventually I said, “Thanks.”
“It’s okay. Really.”
I made one last pass with the Kleenex. It seemed to be over for the time being. “Are you at all hungry?” I said.
“Pretty much. Are you up to going out? We could do room service or something.”
“No,” I said. “Out is good. Just give me a minute.”
The rain had let up. We went down to the waterfront, me on foot, Graham having to slow his wheels more than push because of the angle of the streets. We ended up at the takeout window of Captain Ivar’s Acres of Clams fish bar. The place is decorated with pictures of the Captain and dumb jokes like “Keep Clam.”
I felt washed-out, tender around the edges. I didn’t feel like I had to say anything more to Graham. I’d never felt as intimate with anyone I’d never had sex with. We both got deep-fried baby prawns and sat along the edge of the water, watching sea gulls hustle french fries. It was chilly and grim with the gray water lapping endlessly against the pier.
When we got back to the hotel I told Graham I was ready to turn in. I was asleep in seconds.
I dreamed about my father. He’s reading a newspaper and there is some review in there of a Jimi Hendrix album. “Would I like this, you think?” he asks me.
I mull it over for a second, then I say, “No. You’re dead.”
In the morning we went to Greenwood Memorial Park, southwest of the city. The office looks like a tract house, except for the hearse in the carport. A guy in the office gave us a map where he’d circled Hendrix’s grave.
It’s a perpetual-care cemetery, with the headstones laid flat into the ground for the convenience of the lawnmowers. A sign warned us that no artificial flowers were allowed during mowing season. We had to go past a gazebo surrounded by immense pines into a flat, treeless area with a marble sundial in the middle. The headstone is the size of a suitcase, carved from gray marble. There is a right-handed Strat on it, and the words “Forever in Our Hearts/James M./“Jimi” Hendrix/1942——1970.” Somebody had left a red guitar pick there.
The Duotones did a couple of Hendrix numbers, the R&B tunes like “Fire” and “Come On (Part 1).” There was a guy who used to come to all our gigs and yell “Hendrix is God.” He would have driven across the country to leave his guitar pick on Hendrix’s grave. I guess a lot of people would.
“Hey,” Graham said. “Check this out.” He was sitting by the sundial. “Jimi’s grave is the third stone from the sundial.” There’s a Hendrix song, see, called “Third Stone from the Sun.” What do you call a coincidence that seems to mean something?
I used Graham’s camera to take pictures of him by the grave, and he took a couple of me. I tore a piece off the map and wrote a line from a Brian Wilson song: “Love and mercy to you and your friends tonight.” It was all I could think of. I folded the paper very small and dropped it into a pot of flowers sitting on the next grave over, Jimi’s grandmother Nora.
From there we went to see Al, Jimi’s father. His house is in the Skyway neighborhood, just south of the actual Seattle city limits. We stopped at a grocery to buy a six-pack of Michelob and a six of 7-Up so we wouldn’t arrive empty-handed. It was after noon when we got there, and a crew was putting new shingles on his roof.
We knocked on the front door and a minute later a carpenter came out and saw us. “Hey, Al,” he yelled. “Somebody here to see you.” He was young, maybe twenty-five, and he gave us a smile that said he knew why we were there.
Al came to the door. He’s barely five feet tall, shy, with fringes of iron-gray hair on both sides of his head. His forehead is smooth but there are a lot of deep smile lines around his mouth. He had on a blue knit shirt and white pants. We introduced ourselves and he shook our hands. His hands are amazing, the hands of a man twice his size, soft and enveloping and powerful. I got the strongest feeling then of warmth and spirituality, a sense of Jimi I’d never had before. It was like touching Jimi’s hands.
The house is a shrine to Jimi. There’s a formal living room inside the front door with a couple of desks and a set of shelves, all of them covered with photos and trophies. A staircase leads from the den to the back yard, and all the way down are more framed paintings and photographs, and five gold records from Reprise. Al didn’t want anything to drink. Graham took a beer and I took a 7-Up and we sat on the couch in the den.
Graham asked a lot of questions that I knew he already knew the answers to, about how Jimi, who was then Jimmy, used to play a broom until he got a guitar, how Al bought “an ordinary acoustic guitar” from one of his friends for five dollars and gave it to Jimmy. About how Jimmy used to play along to B.B. King and Muddy Waters on Al’s record player. It wasn’t what I wanted to hear.
“How did you guys get along?” I asked when Graham slowed down. “I mean, my parents always hated me being a musician. They said i
t was a terrible life.”
Al said, “We had a good relationship. I liked to see him play, on account of at least I knew where he was at. I mean, it kept him out of trouble, being interested in something like that. I didn’t have to force him into it or anything. He just took up on it himself. I was glad that he did.”
I wonder how many times he’s told the story, to how many hundreds of people. I wonder how much real feeling there is left in it for him. He didn’t seem to mind, though, and there was something I wanted from him if I could only figure it out.
“Did he keep in touch? After he got famous and everything?”
“When he come out of the service, well, he told me there wasn’t no use in coming back this way, there was nothing here. He just traveled around and met a lot of different musicians, played different places. He always kept in touch though, he’d send postcards or phone. I remember he called me from England. I knew he’d been playing down there in New York, you know, when he was discovered by Charles Chandler. And then I got this call from him in London. I was surprised, ’cause I didn’t know anybody over there. He told me at that time, he said, ‘I think I’m on my way to the big time.’ He said he was going to name the group the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and he told me how he was going to spell his name, Jimi. I thought it was a strange name, but there’s so many of these groups got strange names.” He laughed then, and for a second his voice sounded enough like Jimi’s to be genuinely spooky. “The Who, the Beatles, and what have you. I told him, ‘Well, you take care of yourself. Keep your nose clean.’”
“What did you think of that first record?” I asked. Graham watched me, thinking he had me hooked.
“I always told him, ‘When you go into it, do your own thing, whatever it is.’ The first time I heard his record, some people next door happened to have it. I hadn’t heard him play as the Experience or anything. They’d just bought the record that day. They came over and gave the record to me. I thought, Oh no! I listened to it, I thought, well, I told him to do his own thing, and he sure did.” Al shook his head and we all laughed. “He sure did.”
