by Lewis Shiner
I used a couple of sessions with Georgene to talk about my mother. She listened to the story of my first months and said, “If I were into body work—which I’m not, especially—I would find your mother’s asthma pretty significant. The inability to breathe as the inability to feel secure, to feel supported. Having a child is exhausting, but in a good marriage, if one partner has a hard time the other partner is there to pick up the slack.”
“And you don’t think my parents’ marriage was like that.”
“What do you think it was like?”
“Yeah, okay, probably not real supportive. And I could have picked that up?”
“You tell me.”
“And this business of the asthma killing her?”
“It must have felt that way to her.”
“But would a doctor tell her that?”
“People with asthma have babies every day.”
“And what about being a bottle baby, and being left with the neighbor, what would that do to me?”
“The question is not what it could do to you, but what it did do to you. And you have to tell me that.”
“Isn’t that first six or eight months when the child is supposed to bond with the mother?”
“Generally, yes.”
When I didn’t say anything she asked, as she usually does, “What are you feeling?”
I said, “Like she’s not my mother at all. Like she’s some stranger that I’m supposed to feel something for and I can’t.”
August turned into September and we finally got some rain. Tuesdays and Thursdays I had therapy with Georgene. Friday afternoons I would go for a movie and a pizza with one of my customers, a woman named Joan. She was in the middle of a separation too, but she was still in love with her husband and not looking for anyone else. We found each other easy to talk to and it was nice not to have to go to the movies alone. Saturdays I would see one or another of my friends, maybe go to Sixth Street and hear a band.
An impulse took me into Strait Music one afternoon and I fell in love with a guitar. It was a beautiful left-handed Strat, maple neck, black body, white pick guard. It seemed to me as I held it that if I’d always wanted to play guitar, then that was what I should do. I had the money and the time to learn, so I bought it on the spot, and some books and a Princeton practice amp to go with it. I took them home and set them up in the white room.
Inside two weeks I could work my way through a few simple songs. It was a feeling of power, not the drunken kind of power I’d felt going after Hendrix, but like the power I felt when I put an amp back together on my workbench and music came out of it. Music out of nothing at all—it was the same small miracle. I got out the songs I’d found in the garage and decided I could live with about half of them. I worked on the chords, wrote some new lyrics.
I had the TV on for company every once in a while, mostly MTV or music shows like Austin City Limits. Still I couldn’t miss the fact that as I was changing, so was the world around me. The twentieth anniversary of Woodstock came and went virtually unnoticed. If the sixties were finally dead, the nineties had begun. In Poland, Lech Walesa’s Solidarity Party legally and quietly took over. Gorbachev pushed harder for reform in the Soviet Union and suddenly everybody talked about Eastern Europe in a way they hadn’t since the Prague spring of 1968.
By the end of September I was bored and restless and my days had blurred together. I let Graham talk me into a trip to L.A. We did a couple of days at the beach and a day of crawling through record stores all over the city. On Friday he told me he had a surprise. He took me to a warehouse in West L.A. with a sign over the door that said BRAINS AND GENIUS. For some reason I twigged immediately that it’s a near anagram for “Brian’s and Eugene’s.” As in Wilson and Landy.
A guy in a pink tank top and white shorts answered the door. He had blond hair in a surfer cut and a slight sunburn. “Hey, Graham,” he said.
“Mike, this is Ray.”
He crushed my hand briefly. “Come on back and meet Brian.”
Brian was restlessly pacing a carpeted office with lots of windows. He looked trim and fit, his hair nearly blond and cut conservatively, his face more lined than I’d imagined it. Landy, in a black silk shirt and jeans, shook my hand and said, “We can only spare you a few minutes.” In the corner another surfer type recorded us on videotape.
Landy introduced me to Brian, who said, “Ray Shackleford. I feel like I know you. Why is that?” His voice was slurred and the right side of his face seemed numb, as if he’d had a stroke. He was visibly nervous, turning his head constantly, even while he talked.
“I can’t say. But I do know you. Through your music, I mean.” I tried to project calmness. “That’s all I wanted to say, really. To thank you for letting me get to know you that way.”
“Hey. That’s really nice. Thanks.”
To be honest I don’t remember a lot of the conversation. There were long, awkward pauses. I told him how much I loved his solo record, especially “Love and Mercy.” Brian reminded me that Landy had co-written the song, which made Landy smile like a proud father. He told me that he and Landy were hard at work on a follow-up. Nobody mentioned Smile. After a few minutes we shook hands all around and Mike walked us back outside.
I sat in the car while Graham got himself in and the wheelchair stowed. He started the engine and said, “Sorry.”
“For what?”
“I wanted it to be a nice surprise.”
“No, man, it was great. I mean, this is the real world, the world I have to live in. To know him here, to have really—”
“It was a disappointment.”
“No, it was…yeah, okay, it was a bit of a letdown. I mean, I smoked hash with the guy. We were friends. But that all happened, I don’t know, somewhere else. Still. You can see it in him. All those songs, that fragility.”
“Yeah. Let’s get a beer.”
If Graham had cut down, I hadn’t noticed. He drank half a case a day. He stopped at a 7-Eleven and bought a case of Bud, then took the Santa Monica Freeway to the beach. He parked on the street where he could see the waves come in and reached for a can. Instead of opening it he set it up on the dashboard and looked at it. “Shit, Ray,” he said. “You quit this stuff cold. How did you do that?”
“I don’t know. The going up wasn’t worth the coming down anymore. Then there was a while there in Mexico where I was really happy.”
“Lori.”
“Yeah.”
“Whatever happened to her?”
“She wouldn’t leave her boyfriend. I guess it’s just one of those fucked-up dependency things.” I leaned out the window and breathed the ocean air for a while. The smell reminded me of Lori too. Finally I settled back in the car and said, “I miss her.”
“But you didn’t start drinking again.”
“After I’d been sober a week things looked different. I hated to lose whatever it was I had. Momentum, maybe.”
Graham was still looking at that beer can. “The docs want me to quit. They want it pretty bad.”
“Come to Austin with me. We’ll get on a plane tomorrow. You can see my house, see my shop. The change’ll do you good.”
“No way,” Graham said. “I couldn’t do that to you.”
“I’m asking you. It’s a big house. It’s been empty for a long time now.” I took the can of beer off the dash and put it back in the box. “Don’t think about it. Just say you’ll come.”
“What about all this beer?”
“It’ll keep,” I said.
The stairs were a problem. I pulled his chair up once, so he could see where I work. He went through my tapes and records and CDs and didn’t find anything he didn’t already have, of course. So we went back down and that was where we stayed.
Graham wheeled along with me on my morning walks. I put a basketball hoop over the garage door and we shot baskets in the afternoons. At night we rented movies or watched MTV or sat around and read. Graham worked his way through my stack of old guita
r magazines and I tried to read Proust. It wasn’t so bad, really. On Fridays he went to the movies with Joan and me, and Saturdays to Sixth Street.
We talked a lot. I told him what I’d learned about my mother. We traded drinking stories and band stories. And one night, finally, I said, “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to. But we’ve never really talked about sex. I mean there’s times I don’t know what to say to you, because I don’t know what your situation is, I mean, what you’re able to do, you know…” I let it trail off because I saw I’d made him uncomfortable.
“Look,” I said, “I’m sorry. It’s not really any of my business. Can we forget I said anything?”
“No, no, man, it’s okay. I mean, it’s okay for you to ask, you just have to understand that I don’t have to answer. The thing is that I never talk with anybody except my doctor about sexual things. Other than women, of course, that I’m in bed with. The reason is that I want to be as near normal as I can be. So everything about me that is different I have to play down. Do you understand what I’m saying here?”
“Sure, of course.”
“For one thing, spinal cord injuries are not just one way or another. You might say the spinal cord is like a telephone cable. If somebody comes along near New York and partially cuts the cable, it may knock out Pittsburgh, and it may knock out Austin, but the rest of the places aren’t affected. And that’s what happened with me. Now, obviously, if the entire cable is cut through, then everybody’s cut off. And a lot of times that happens. So people—even doctors—tend to stereotype people that way. If they hear something about one person in a wheelchair, then everybody is that way. So when you try to date somebody, you have to fight all these stereotypes. I mean, if a woman just assumes that the whole country is not getting phone service, so to speak, then you’re not going to have a chance. The pool of people that you’re able to approach is already pretty small, because they have to accept the fact that you can’t walk.
“People can be so fucking thoughtless, you just wouldn’t believe it. Okay, I will tell you this one story. I have to wear a catheter to take care of my urinary functions. I’ve never told anybody else that, any other nonmedical person. So I was in the hospital one time and there was a close friend of mine and his wife in the room visiting me. This nurse walks in and says, ‘Hey, we’re going to have to change your catheter.’ Right there in front of them. I told her later, I said, ‘I was so shocked when you did that, I didn’t know whether I wanted to shoot you, or my friends, or myself.’ I said, ‘You just don’t realize, you’re around these things so much it becomes second nature to you. You don’t realize that people have a life outside the hospital.’”
“I feel like a real jerk now,” I said.
“Don’t. You wanted an honest answer, right? So I gave you one. This is just my attitude, remember. I’ve known a lot of other disabled veterans who were totally open. And I tried to stay away from them because I always thought—whether it was true or not—that one of the reasons they were so open was because they wanted pity. And that’s the last thing I want. I want to be totally normal. Except for the fact that I’m sitting in a wheelchair.
“My doctor, she’s always saying, ‘You’re just too damned independent.’ And I say, ‘I know, I know I am.’ But the only thing bad I can see about it is how it’s going to affect me in the future, when I can’t be independent anymore, when my health starts failing and I’m not strong enough to do it.”
We sat quietly for a long time. Finally Graham said, “Man. I thought you were supposed to be helping me through this shit. Here you’re making me want a drink something awful.”
“Look on the bright side,” I said. “If you can get through this without drinking, you got it made.”
He stayed three weeks, through most of October. It was cold and raining when I put him on the plane. By that time we both knew he was going to make it.
I came home and tried to work for a while. The house was too quiet but there was nothing I wanted to listen to. What I heard in my head was Benny Goodman’s “Let’s Dance” and Glenn Miller’s “Moonlight Serenade.” I could have gone out and gotten them on newly remastered CDs, but that wasn’t what I wanted. I called my mother and told her I was coming up for my father’s albums.
“They’re not in very good shape, you know.”
“I don’t care. I just want them. I think he would have wanted me to have them.”
“Well, I guess it’s all right. I don’t listen to them all that often.”
“You never listen to the actual records. You’ve got them all on tape. I’ll be up sometime tomorrow afternoon.”
“Well, that will be fine. I’ll look forward to seeing you.”
I took her out to a Mexican restaurant the next night. When we got back to the house I said, “What did you do with Dad’s ashes?”
She looked at me like I’d cracked up. “They’re in my bedroom. They’re on top of the dresser, in a sandalwood box that your father brought back from Burma.”
“I want to take some home with me.”
“Well, yes, of course, dear, I always meant for you to have some, when you were ready.”
“I think I’m ready now.”
She bustled around, finding a small bottle for me to put them in. Then she got very ill at ease. “Would you…I mean, I don’t think I could actually…Can you do it without my being there?”
“Sure.”
I went into the bedroom and there it was, a foot long and five inches wide and maybe three inches deep, with carvings of plants and animals all around the sides. I sat on the bed and opened it up. The ashes were inside, in a round bottle nested in tissue paper. I took the lid off and spilled a few of them into my hand. They aren’t ground up nice and fine like an American crematorium would do them. There are a few black cinders, and some little chunks of bone, oddly shaped, a lighter shade of gray against the fine dark gray powder. They left a stain on my palm. They are my father.
I put them in my bottle, along with another small handful. Then I closed up both bottles and put the box back on the dresser. I packed my bottle in my overnight bag and went into the living room.
“I’ve never seen you cry for him,” my mother said. It sounded like an accusation.
Maybe you would have, I thought, if you’d come in there with me. But I saw then that her suffering was private, not something she knew how to share with me, that she would always be alone. The way my father was alone when he went over the edge in Cozumel. What I had to do was fight with all my strength and all my heart to make sure that I didn’t end up the same way.
“Not yet,” I said. “Soon.”
I drove back to Austin the next day. I have a wooden box that my parents brought me from Europe years ago, and I set the bottle of my father’s ashes inside it and put it on top of the bookshelves in the white room.
My life reverted to routine. It was hard to get up a lot of mornings. If I went back to sleep there was nobody to notice except me, and what I noticed was a headache and grogginess for the rest of the day. I would schedule customer pickups at ten in the morning to give me a reason to get up and get my walk and shower and breakfast over with.
The house was especially empty at night. I would lie in bed and idly hold my penis as I thought about Lori or Erika or Alex, remembering women I’d slept with before I was married, women I’d lusted after since. Half the time I didn’t manage enough enthusiasm to get erect, let alone to masturbate.
It was the loneliness as much as the lack of sex. I wanted somebody to wake up next to. Somebody to say, “I love you” to, somebody to say it back. I felt winter coming on, and with it the urge to curl up in front of the fireplace in a pile of blankets. But not alone. Fall is everything dying and it triggers a longing in me, not the romantic, expansive lust of spring but something more primal and intense, the need to fuck death away.
That was when Annette Shipley called, the last Saturday in October. I hadn’t seen her since my senior year of high school
, when she was in Dallas briefly, ejected from VISTA and recuperating from an abortion. I’d heard about her occasionally from mutual friends, same as with Alex. I knew she’d worked as a stripper at the Yellow Rose here in Austin, and more than once I’d thought about going down to see if she was there.
“I saw your ad in the Chronicle,” she said. “Do you make house calls?”
She had a small, run-down house off Airport and Fifty-first, and a Panasonic all-in-one stereo that just needed some cleanup and a new fuse. She worked at Penney’s in Highland Mall, her dancing days long over because of arthritis in her back. She looks good, better than I’d imagined, her hair still long and blonde, her body in great shape. What I’d forgotten was the downward twist to her mouth and her sardonic amusement with the world. “Not bad” is her favorite expression. It was what she said after our failed sex more than twenty years ago.
It was also what she said when, after a few tentative and somewhat brusque dates, we went to bed together. It wasn’t exactly like making love. She was very businesslike, with her own condoms in a drawer by the bed, her clothes neatly folded over a chair as she took them off. At that point I was just grateful. My presexual jitters passed pretty quickly and when I came it seemed to take an enormous pressure off my chest.
We lasted two weeks. Some desperate part of me wanted to fall in love and wasn’t succeeding. Some desperate part of her knew I wasn’t able to give her what she wanted: romance, tenderness, some kind of hedge against a long, solitary old age. It made her quarrelsome and me sullen. She kept asking me, “What the hell is it you want?” I couldn’t tell her.
One morning I woke up and realized the answer was Lori, or if it wasn’t Lori it was somebody who could make me forget her. I had a date that night with Annette and I spent all day trying to think of a way out of it. I showed up late and Annette let me in with a perfunctory kiss, then headed to the refrigerator for a glass of wine. I followed her into the kitchen and said, “I was thinking we could go on to dinner or whatever, but maybe I shouldn’t spend the night.”
