The Essential W. P. Kinsella

by W. P. Kinsella

  She has infinite patience with drunks. She’ll listen to their stupid convoluted ramblings as they whine about how badly the world has treated them.

  “I’ve been there. I’d be there now if I hadn’t met you.”

  Janis, when she was drunk, had her own sad story. “The Famous Story of the Saturday Night Swindle,” she called it, and depending upon her mood the story could take up to an hour to tell. Condensed, it was simply that all our lives we are conditioned to expect a good time Saturday night, we look forward to it and plan for it. And almost always we are disappointed. Yet we keep on trying for there will always be another Saturday night.

  In the winter, her freckles become pale, seem to sink just below the surface of her skin like trout in a shallow stream. In summer they multiply: dandelions on a spring lawn. “Fuck, look at me; I look like I’ve been dipped in Rice Krispies.”

  “I love your freckles,” I say. “Each and every one of them. I am turned on by freckles,” and I hold her, kissing slowly across her cheeks and nose.

  I love to watch the light in the eyes of little girls as they retrieve their dolls from me. In my workroom I have a row of shoe-box hospital beds. I have painted brown bed-ends on the apple-green wall above each box. On the front of each box is a make-believe medical chart. The wall glows with flowered decals and sunny happy-faces. Sometimes, if I have to order parts all the way from Baltimore, I let the children visit their dolls for a while on Saturday afternoons.

  My own children are like dolls, girls, all angel eyes and soft little kisses. Cory, my wife, makes their clothes. We walk to church each Sunday down the heavily treed streets of white houses. Our home is surrounded and overpowered by lilacs. There is a groaning porch swing where we sit in the liquid summer dusk. Even in the humid summers Cory always wears a sweater, usually a pale pink or blue, pulled tight across her shoulders as if it were a shield that might protect her.

  “What’ll it be?” the bartender asked as we settled on the stools.

  “Kentucky Red,” said Janis.

  “The same,” I shrugged. I had no idea what I was ordering. The bartender had a flat face with a permanent case of razor burn, and short hair that he might have cut himself with a bowl and a mirror.

  “I’m afraid I’m gonna turn out like that,” Janis said, inching closer to me by shifting her weight on the bar stool. She nodded toward the shaggy old woman sitting alone and hostile, a cigarette burning toward her fingers. “I’m afraid I’m gonna be one of them loud old women who wear heavy stockings all year and slop from bar to bar getting drunker and more cantankerous by the minute. I don’t want to, but the writing’s on the fucking wall,” she said, hefting her glass.

  I moved myself closer to her. I have an abiding fear of old men who sit in bars and hotel lobbies, brittle and dry as insects mounted under glass. I thought of my hotel, decaying on a sidehill, an ancient facade decorated like a fancy wedding cake, a brown linoleum floor in a lobby full of old men and dying ferns.

  Janis tossed back her second drink. I pushed mine toward her, barely touched.

  “You ain’t a juicer?” she said and grinned.

  “Should we go look for the hotel?” I said. I was feeling edgy. Perhaps she only wanted a mark to buy her drinks and cigarettes.

  “You mean you still want to?” she said, surprised. She eyed me warily, like a dog that had been kicked too many times. “I mean, man, you seen me in some light, and you’ve been with me long enough to make up your mind . . .”

  “I still want to.”

  Deep in the night I turned over, away from Janis, but with no intention of leaving the bed. She grasped at my arm, much the same as she had grasped at my sleeve earlier in the evening.

  “Don’t fucking leave me, man.” I moved back closer to her. “You any idea what it’s like to wake up in the middle of the night alone and know that there ain’t a person in the whole fucking world who cares if you live or die? You feel so useless. . . .” And she held me fiercely, crying, kissing, trying to pull me close enough to heal her wounds—fuse me to her—store my presence for the lonely nights she anticipated.

  Years later, Janis at Woodstock, blue her favourite colour, blue her chosen mood—anxiety nibbling at her like rats before she went on stage. But the magical change in her as she did: like throwing an electric switch in her back; she pranced on stage stoned in mind and body by whatever evil she could stab into her veins or gulp into her stomach. Footwork like a boxer, waving the microphone phallicly in front of her mouth—blue shades, blue jacket, blue toreador pants, sweating booze, blind, barefoot, she spun like an airplane. She made history on stage. She collapsed into my arms as she came off.

  “Sweet Jesus, but I was awful.”

  “You were a wonder.”

  “I’ll never be able to appear in public again.” She holds me like the end of the world. She is wet with sweat and pants into my shoulder while I tell her again and again how great she was. Finally she relaxes. I have done my job.

  “Yeah? You really want to? How about that,” and she smiled like a kid. “Harry?” she said to the bartender. “Is it okay?” and she nodded toward the tiny, dark stage.

  “Sure, Janis,” he replied. “You know you’re welcome any time.”

  Her music: like a woman making a declaration of love with a fishbone caught in her throat. All the eerie beauty and loneliness of the Northern Lights. Like getting laid, lovingly and well. That is what the critics said about her.

  How to explain her success? Voyeurism? Vicarious living? The world likes to watch people bleed, suffer and die. Janis stands up on stage and metaphorically slits her wrists while the audience says, “Yeah! Man, that’s the way I feel. That’s what I want to do, but don’t have the nerve.”

  She opens her chest and exposes her heartbeat like a bloody strobe light, and they watch and they scream and they stomp and have wet dreams and climax as they stand on their chairs and say, “Man, that was wonderful. But I’m glad it’s her and not me.”

  “Why on earth do you want to go to San Francisco?” my mother said to me when I told her of my decision to holiday on the west coast. “Why go way out there? California is full of strange people.” She was wearing a grey-hen-coloured housedress, a kerchief on her hair, her gold-rimmed glasses sparking in the bright kitchen light.

  “I’d like to see some strange people.”

  “Well, your daddy and I went to St. Louis on our honeymoon. Saw the site of the World’s Fair and your daddy went to see the St. Louis Browns play baseball, though I’ll never understand why. Goodness knows that team never won a game to my recollection.”

  In the bar again the next evening, Janis a little drunk. “Jesus, don’t keep looking at me like that.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re a gawker. They’re the worst kind. You must spend your life looking over fences and through windows. What’s the matter with me? You look like the creeps I went to school with. What the fuck are you doing with a sleazy chick like me?”

  “I like you,” I said lamely.

  “Cheap thrills . . . you can go back to . . . wherever, and tell your fucking dolls about the weird chick you balled in San Francisco. Everybody who looks weird gets fucked over . . . did you know that? I been fucked over so many times. Mostly by guys I don’t want. But by the ones I want to. Shit, I been turned down more times than the bedspread in a short-time room.”

  And on and on, and I listen and shrug it off, for I understand her, and I sense that when she goes after me with words sharp as a gutting knife, that she is really slashing at herself. If she can make me hate her, then I’ll leave her and she’ll be alone, the way she feels she deserves to be.

  She is so unlike Cory. Janis protects herself with loud words, loud music, loud colours, clouds of feathers and jangling bracelets, but they could be twins; each of their bodies is riddled with fear.

  Cory: tiny and gentle. Afraid of the world. Cory loves me. I love her as carefully as if she were flower petals or fine china. O
ur loving is silent, unlike with Janis who screams and moans and thrashes and tries to absorb my very body into hers. Cory is a broken doll, an abused child, battered, raped, bartered, reviled. She clings to me in her silence. Her climax is barely a shiver. That first night in the hotel Janis shrieked as if she were on stage, a note, clear and sharp as a tuning fork, hung in the air of that sad hotel room as her body fairly exploded beneath me.

  The only place Janis is not afraid is on the stage. Bracelets splashing lights like diamonds, she high-steps to the microphone and begins her cooing, growling, guttural delivery. She is the spirit of Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, and every gritty, gutsy blues singer who ever wailed. There is a sensuality, a sexuality, in the primeval sounds she emits. There is terror, love, sex, passion, pain, but mainly sex.

  “I sound like I’m in heat,” she said to an interviewer once, “and baby, I am. Sometimes I go right from the stage and I pick up my honey here,” she said, referring to me, “and we go right to the hotel and ball, and ball, and ball.”

  “I sing right from my pussy,” she said another time, then pulled her blue sunglasses down on her nose so she could peek over them to get the full shocked reaction.

  “Why did you choose to sing?” an interviewer once asked her.

  “It was a way out,” she replied. “Where I come from a girl works at catching a man—then has a lot of kids and keeps her mouth shut. I’m hyper . . . I’ve always been like a pan of boiling water.”

  “Do you know what the difference is?” I asked Janis as she clung to me after a concert, sobbing, repeating over and over how awful she had been . . . awful, after 15,000 people had danced in the aisles and screamed out their love for her. “The difference between what you do and what I used to do is that mine, and almost everyone else’s work, is tangible. I’d build a house or a garage, or even repair a doll and when I was finished I could say, ‘There is the house I built or the doll I’ve repainted.’ You have to wait to be evaluated. You sing a song or record an album but it means nothing until the fans buy or the critics say, ‘Yes, this is good.’”

  It takes very special people to bare their souls for mere humans to evaluate. Not many can stand up to it. I have always tried to remember that when I find Janis drunk or stoned—when she rages and accuses and smashes, and vomits, and lies in a fitful sleep, sweat on her upper lip and forehead, her mouth agape.

  My assignment, as I sometimes look upon it, has been to protect Janis from herself and from people: those who would tap her veins and draw the life from her like so many vampires with straws. I am known as the most protective manager in the business. We hardly ever tour anymore. There are the albums and Janis plays Vegas for twelve weeks a year.

  Has it been worth it? Has what I’ve gone through been worth it to prolong a career for a few more years? In just a month or two it’s going to happen. I will go home to Iowa, alone, “for a holiday,” I’ll say. But I’ll know differently. Janis will be left alone in the house near Las Vegas: that desert house, arid and dry as Janis’ hands the night we met. A $20,000 boat stands, like the mythical, mystical ark, on a trailer in the back driveway. The nearest lake is 60 miles away and artificially created. Janis bought the boat like anyone else would buy a Tonka toy as a gift for a child. We have never used it. I stare at it and shudder.

  While I am away, the mouse will play, and play, and play. And she will finish doing what I interrupted in San Francisco, what she has been trying to do all her life, not maliciously, or viciously, or violently, but with that lack of care, of restraint, that has always characterized her.

  Fog is heavy in my life, dimensions of time telescope—I have been called. I have given nearly twenty years of my life for ten of hers. But no one knows. Really knows. There are other dimensions where Janis no longer exists, where I never left Iowa, where I sit tonight on a white front porch in the humid dusk and string my dolls.

  “Nobody ever stays with me,” Janis said in the grey morning light of my creaking hotel room.

  “I’ll stay as long as I can,” I said.

  “How long is that?” And I couldn’t bring myself to answer. My flight home was booked for the next afternoon.

  “You know, just the sound of your voice, even if you’re talking about dolls, is more to me than solid food. I just get so fucking lonely.”

  “Nobody likes to be alone.”

  “Was I crying last night?”

  “A little.”

  “More than that wasn’t it? I do that when I get drunk. I cried on your shoulder, right?”

  “You weren’t any trouble.”

  “Thanks for staying with me. I mean, really.”

  We walked the warm morning streets for a while, small clouds were low enough to touch, still as the foggy gulls perched on posts along the piers. We breakfasted at a squalid café. Again we sat on stools at the counter. An oriental, wrapped tight as a mummy in a filthy white apron, was cook and waiter. I ordered bacon and eggs. Good, solid, nutritious North American food. Janis had pecan pie, ice cream and a Coke. Junkie food I was to learn later as my education progressed. She grinned at me through the widening haze of her Marlboro.

  “I’m sorry you’re not staying.”

  “So am I.”

  “Well, I’ll move on,” she said, sliding off the stool. “Maybe I’ll see you around . . .”

  “You’re not going to leave,” I said. “I don’t have to go until tomorrow.”

  “You mean you want to stay with me? I’m grateful you stayed last night . . . you don’t have to put yourself out.”

  “I want to stay with you.”

  “But you have to go back to . . . Iowa.”

  “I have a job to get back to . . . and my dolls.”

  “F’chrissakes.”

  “I have to . . . I’m sorry.”

  “Still, it’s weird though, a big man like you messing with dolls.”

  An eight-inch steel implement that looks like a large crochet hook is the main tool of my trade; accessories consist of a supply of sturdy elastics, glue, a tea kettle, a set of pastel paints. Exposure to a steaming tea kettle allows me to soften joints and remove arms, legs, and heads. Like Dr. Christiaan Barnard I perform transplants. Like the good Dr. Frankenstein, I have a box of leftover parts from which I often extract a leg or an eye to make a broken doll good as new.

  When we reached the room, we were both perilously shy, Janis even slightly reluctant. The exchange of money was forgotten. “Are you sure?” Janis asked several times, still expecting to be rejected.

  “I am,” I reassured, though I wondered why. She was so opposite to the girls I knew at home. I couldn’t explain my excitement, my desire for this plain, shoddily dressed, rather vulgar girl. Perhaps even then I felt the charisma. I never confused her with her singing. I wanted her before she ever sang to me. But there was that power about her. She has the ability to stand on stage and hold the audience as if she were whispering in the ear of a lover, or lead them to dance in the aisles, or stand on the tables and stomp out her rhythms like a biker putting boots to a cop.

  “You know what they did to me? At the university I was voted ‘Ugliest Man on Campus.’ You any idea what that did to me? Those straight chicks in angora sweaters and skirts, lipstick, and about a ton of hairspray, and the guys in cords and sweaters, or even shirts and ties . . . and just because I was different . . .”

  I had asked about her former life. Sometimes I try to learn the why of her, but gently, like unwinding gauze from a wound. Years have passed and she trusts me now, as much as she ever trusts anyone. I never made my flight back to Iowa. Have never left her. I paid for my parents to visit us once. Only once.

  “Your workshop’s just as you left it,” my mother said. “I just closed up the door. Had to take the sign down eventually . . . Little girls kept coming to the house.”

  “Oh, they thought they were so fucking righteous. But I’ll show them. I can buy and sell them all now. I showed them once. I’m gonna show them for the rest of my life. The
y all married each other and live in the city and have split-level plastic houses, and plastic kids, and cars, and cocks, and cunts . . .” and she broke off amid a mixture of laughter and tears. “I suppose I should be happy just not to be part of them anymore . . . be happy being different . . . shit, it was only fifteen miles to Louisiana, and that was where the real people were, and real music. That was where I did my first gigs, and learned how to drink, and yeah, that too. God, did I ever tell you about high school? What they did to me? You don’t want to hear, Sugar. It was too awful to even talk about.”

  “Are you sorry?” Janis once asked me, in a strange, soft voice, as if she had suddenly had a glimpse through the veil at what could have been: at what life would have been like if we hadn’t met.

  “I miss handling nails in the sunshine—the raw strength in my arms. My hands would blister now if I really worked.”

  “And your dolls.”

  “I miss them too.”

  “You know, I’ve never seen you fix a doll. I bet you were good. I’ve told you you could . . .”

  “It wouldn’t be the same.”

  “Maybe when we’re old?”

  “Maybe.”

  The third morning. The same café. Our going there a fragile attempt at ritual.

  “Do you need anything?” I was reaching for my wallet.

  “Hell, no. I’ll get by. I always do. I’m just as tough as I look. Tougher.” We walked out of the café hand in hand.

  She turned to me then to be kissed. A shy, hurried brushing of lips, our bodies barely touching. About us, the beautiful scent of peaches.

  “Be cool. Maybe I’ll see you around,” and she gave me the peace sign, something I’d never seen before, and shambled away among the moving crowd.

  Here, on the lazy verandah in the Iowa dusk, as my children sleep, as my dolls sleep, as my wife waits with her delicate love, I dream. Am haunted by the spirit of a dead girl. A dead singer who died a broken doll, pitched face-first onto a blond wood night table in a Los Angeles motel. Nose broken, spewing blood, she wedged between the table and the bed, her life ebbing while the needle grinned silver in the darkness. I remember her in my arms in that sad hotel in San Francisco, wild, enveloping, raucous as her songs, her tongue like a wet, sweet butterfly in my mouth. I am haunted by her death and by what might have been. And what I might have done to prevent her rendezvous with the needle: surrogate cock. Evil little silver dildo. A sexual partner she didn’t have to fear. The needle never left her alone in the middle of the night. I sometimes look at my hands, marvelling that there are no wounds, so many times have I pushed the needle away.