Not Fade Away

by Jim Dodge

  It was about six months later, Christmas of ’64, that things really started falling apart. I remember walking over to Sharon’s on Christmas morning and taking a detour past City Lights. There he was, yo-yo blurring in the winter light, reciting his poem with a beatific fervor that brought tears to my eyes. I blurted the question I’d been burning to ask him: ‘What was the Fourth Wiseman’s gift?’

  The yo-yo spun in suspension. When he finally spoke, he said, ‘The Fourth Wiseman delivered his gift and slipped away.’

  My impulse, hardly Christian on that most Christian of days, was to strangle him, to take him down on the sidewalk and choke the answer out of him, to hiss in his ear, ‘Tell me. Tell me anything, any truth or lie, that the gift was love or a steaming goat turd or sunlight on our bodies: tell me anything: but fucker, you better tell me something!’

  Maybe he sensed I was about to flip, because when he repeated it again it seemed slightly altered, a shadow change, a glancing inflection: ‘The Fourth Wiseman delivered his gift and slipped away.’

  I walked away, confounded by the slight shift in emphasis, saying to myself, ‘His gift. Delivered his gift. His.’ Confused because I still didn’t know what his gift was, or mine, nor, if I even had one, whether I could deliver it or not.

  Then came some hard losses. The first was Bottom, the bass player who’d sat beside me on my birthday when Big Red had played ‘Mercury Falling,’ whose arm had been around my shoulder the moment I first saw Kacy walking naked toward the door. Bottom was a long-time junkie, so his overdose was less a surprise than a raw sadness. They found him in his one-room apartment on New Year’s Eve. He’d been dead five days. That we were playing for keepsies was a hard recognition, another rank whiff of the cold mortal facts. Big Red took it particularly hard. When asked to play at the funeral, he simply said, ‘I can’t.’ By then he wasn’t playing at all, and after Bottom’s death he damn near didn’t talk for a month. I sensed that silence, once his element, was beginning to corrode him, and felt helpless to watch.

  About a month later, a week or so after my birthday, Sharon and I had a bitter fight about music. About the Beatles, of all people, who were just getting hot. Sharon loved them. I thought it was just bubblegum bullshit, yeah yeah yeah. This was their early stuff we were arguing about, which to my ear was weak. I thought they were a cultural phenomenon, not so much for their music as their long hair and brash cuteness, an exotic British import. As far as I understood it (not very), rock-and-roll had ended in ’59. Not just the death of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper in that plane crash on my birthday, but also Chuck Berry getting busted on a trumped-up Mann Act violation, and the payola scandals, and good ol’ Jerry Lee Lewis marrying his thirteen-year-old cousin. Little Richard had returned to the Church, but because he was wearing lipstick and eye shadow the Church wasn’t sure what to do with him. Rock-and-roll had gotten too weird, nasty, and corrupt for the four-square American sensibilities of the early 60’s. Besides, the King had abdicated: Elvis came out of the Army and turned his back on rock-and-roll; went in a shit-kicker and came out with schlock. An entertainer. The King made about twenty movies; the first two or three were outright stupid, and after that they rapidly declined. The way I saw it, rock had been taken over by white teen idols, the guys you’d feel safe letting your daughter date – Fabian, Frankie Avalon, Ricky Nelson. But that’s marketing, not music. They were the last sanitized gasp of the 50’s, and after they vanished into their own vacuity came the Twist and other dance crazes, denatured ‘pop,’ and then folk music. I figured the Beatles were just a new wrinkle on the old teen-idol number, packaged as a group and imported as an invasion. The odd thing was, due to cultural lag, the Beatles’ musical roots were in 50’s rock-and-roll.

  Anyway, this argument with Sharon was as pointless as most, but that didn’t keep it from turning nasty, too bitterly revealing for comfort, and afterwards Sharon and I sort of cooled the relationship. We still saw each other occasionally and even less occasionally slept together, but our fading trust could bear no more permissions.

  Sharon left abruptly in the early summer of ’65. She came by to tell me she’d decided to take her music to Mississippi and help register Negro voters (they were still Negroes then, though you could tell that shit was about to hit the fan). I thought she was doing the right thing for herself and told her I admired her conviction and courage. I didn’t tell her I felt a crass glee that her innocence was about to get rolled in some reality, but despite that spot of malice I truly wished her well.

  After she left, I drooped around for about a month with a hollow melancholy composed of a self-canceling combination of genuine sadness and deep relief. Women couldn’t leave me fast enough, it seemed, sailing off on their spiritual adventures while I stayed behind to move the wreckage around.

  Then Big Red left for India. If I hadn’t been so wrapped up in my own blues I might’ve seen he was hurting worse than me. He tried to explain it to John and me our last night together. I mean, Big Red talked: a speech, given his usual brevity; a virtual filibuster to forestall his demons. Ironically, he could have said it in four words: the gift was gone. Lost. And for no reason he could understand. It had been given him to hear life’s music, to reshape it with his breath, to blow it through our hearts renewed and thereby keep it real. Keep it, he insisted, not make it. ‘You can’t create what’s already there,’ was how he put it, but that, I thought, was picking the artistic fly shit out of the aesthetic pepper, because it didn’t change the pain of his loss. From that vision when he was seven, Big Red had understood his gift and had worked hard to sustain it, to deserve it, practiced till his lips were numb and his lungs ached, listened, listened as deeply as he could, listened and connected and listened again, and never dishonored it with frivolity, ego, or greed. And now he couldn’t bear the taste of the mouthpiece; it tasted like rancid milk. And all he could hear was noise.

  So he was leaving for India. Why India, he wasn’t sure, but it felt right. You had to step over corpses on the way to the temples. A beggar’s face clotted with flies. Shiva, who created and destroyed. Buddha, who sowed his breath for the harvest of wind. India for no particular reason or belief, except that people he knew who’d been there just shook their heads, and Big Red felt like he needed his head shaken.

  John and I drove him to the airport the next morning. I gave Big Red a $1000 severance bonus for years of faithful and felonious service in the auto-dismantling business and John gave him what he called ‘a small grant for musical research’ as well as a letter-perfect passport, a sheaf of references, and other papers designed to facilitate travel abroad. As we parted at the boarding gate, Red bent to embrace each of us. Direct and simple, that was Big Red’s way. No mawkish sentiment about the past, no false and hearty promises to the future. Goodbye and gone.

  I’d already decided to take the rest of the day off, so when John suggested we stop by Gino and Carlo’s on our way back from the airport, have a drink to honor our departed friend, I was ready. We started drinking around noon and finished a couple of days later when John collapsed in the men’s room in some bar. I’d discovered early on in the binge that John had lost his grip on the wagon a week before and was still rolling from the fall. His new work, a long serial poem about the shapes of water and air, was, he claimed, ‘an utter piece of shit,’ and he’d taken a serene pleasure in composting it along with ‘the rest of the offal, refuse, and garbage I seem doomed to produce.’ That night, after I’d taken John to the emergency ward, I was lying in bed too exhausted to sleep and no longer drunk enough to pass out when it came to me that the whole problem was with gifts. Big Red had lost his. John couldn’t deliver his. And me, I didn’t seem to have one at all, no gift to deliver. With that recognition things turned to shit, pure and simple.

  After considering this a few days in the grey light of recovered sobriety, I decided I needed a heart-to-heart with the Fourth Wiseman. Since I hadn’t been able to crack his mania on the job, I thought
I’d follow him home, buttonhole him off-duty as it were, and ask him politely how you could deliver a gift if you didn’t have one, or at least didn’t know what it was. If he wouldn’t talk, I’d cajole, angle, reason, bribe, beg, and, if all else failed, follow my impulse of the previous Christmas and strangle it out of him. But I’d taken too long to gather my resolve into action. July 4, 1965, one year to the tock after he’d first appeared, the Fourth Wiseman vanished – how or where or why, nobody had a clue. I was a day late and a whole lot short.

  Scumball’s return was another loss in what was quickly becoming a streak, one bad beat after another. He was waiting for me in Cravetti’s office. A year and a half in the slammer hadn’t changed him much, except the mumble was lower and a little more slurred and his get-out suit hadn’t had time to properly scuz. The smile was still an immaculate dazzle and the proposition hadn’t substantially changed: ‘Georgie, you ready to go for some rides?’

  ‘Scumball,’ I sighed. ‘You hitting the ground running?’

  The mention of his name elicited the full display of teeth. ‘Well, Georgie my boy, there’s a lot of ground to cover, know what I mean? I’m sort of an independent contractor, like you, and like you I’m a stand-up guy. I go down, nobody goes down with me; people like that. I paid my debt to society, now you might say I have a little credit, maybe run up a tab. Did some thinking in slam, and some people I work with like the new wrinkles. For you it’s still basically the same number, but the bread, the bread, Georgie, is lots better. Say five hundred in front, ditto on delivery. There’ll be keys and cover, same as before.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said, ‘why not?’ My incentive wasn’t the money, though a grand was a hell of a payday. I suppose it was the promise of action, something to snatch me from the morass, a change that might ring more changes – for the better, I hoped, because if I got much lower I’d be under the bottom.

  I didn’t notice anything special about the ’63 Vette till I cranked it over. The engine had belly, and it was dialed to the dot. This was obviously a street racer, stock to the eye but pure blur under the hood, with a drive-train and suspension beefed to take the load. You just couldn’t help yourself. I made another entry in the loss column: I lost my mind.

  It was 3:00 A.M. and Army Street was straight and empty as far as the eye could see. However, it couldn’t see up the side alleys, and that’s where the black-and-white was idling, waiting for an idiot just like me. He must’ve heard me, because I was going too fast to clock. Whoever had put that Vette together understood in his fingertips the balance between power and stability. The cop’s red light started as a pulsing speck in the rearview mirror, but about two seconds after I hit high gear and tromped it on down, the light had disappeared. From the mirror, you understand, not my spine.

  I had a lot of things going for me, even if brains wasn’t one of them. I had a good jump, haul-ass wheels, an equal or better knowledge of the streets, and a raging desire to keep my sweet self out of jail. What pulled me through, though, was luck – but it was ably assisted, I was pleased to note, by a show of excellent instincts and, believe it or not, enough common sense to understand that while it was indeed exhilarating to be sitting in a machine that could blow the doors off anything the cops had on the street, it couldn’t outrun their radios.

  To know what to do without hesitation carries a bottomless sense of serenity, and I got a nice taste of it as I braked and geared down, gauging beyond conscious thought the variables of speed, distance, angle, force, stress, car-body composition, and the survival possibilities of my own mortal, maimable flesh. I took it sideways in a rubber-shredding, scrotum-cinching arc, hit the concrete streetlight stanchion dead center on the right headlight, simultaneously cramping the wheel to whip the rear end around to crash into the side of the bank on the corner. In one fluid movement I yanked the key and hit the concrete running, first down Mission a block, then sprinting up a side street and then cutting down an alley and then, slowing, a plan taking shape as I got my bearings and breath, over to Dolores. The old oak I’d remembered admiring on one of my walks hadn’t moved. I celebrated the steadfastness of trees as I went up it. Some neighborhood kids had lashed a few planks together for a low-rent treehouse high in the boughs. By leaning back against a limb I was able to stretch out. I made myself comfortable while I slowly ate the cover note. It was signed ‘Jason Browne,’ and while chewing I wondered why Jason Browne would wreck such a beautiful machine. I wondered if he was more desperate than me, then decided it was impossible to know anything like that. I flexed my throbbing left elbow; I must’ve whacked it in the wreck, but it seemed to work. Everything still functioned, more or less. There was grace in the world. A couple of cop cars cruised by slow, their spotlights stabbing between buildings, but they weren’t looking very hard. I waited till dawn collecting such small consolations, then returned to earth.

  I called Scumball from a pay phone on 24th and gave him the chrome-on-the-road riff. When he replied, ‘Who is this?’ he sounded truly indignant, so maybe he’d already heard I’d cut it close. Nothing I could do about that. I used another dime to call in sick at Cravetti’s, then caught a bus home to North Beach. After a long, hot bath I opened a bottle of brandy and stretched out on the bed and had a long talk with myself.

  You might’ve wondered where my back-up was. For that matter, why hadn’t I pulled over at the first pulse of the cop’s light, produced the cover letter, and taken the ticket and ton of horseshit you buy when the heat nabs you clocking double the posted limit and still in second gear? Why indeed, except for the natural aversion to scrutiny in such a vulnerable situation. Was I begging for a fall? Provocative question. Did I want to live? Jeez, I thought so, but my behavior wasn’t reassuring. I was beginning to doubt myself, that terrible doubt that’s like an obsession without an object. Fact was, though, I’d pulled it off, and I was sure that counted for something; but exactly what, I didn’t know. I’d been lucky, I supposed, but despite the gambler’s truth that it’s always better to be lucky than good, luck is subject to sudden change, and I realized that in my condition I couldn’t afford even a drop of bad luck. In retrospect it was a poignantly worthless realization, because I was about to drown in it.

  But first, to encourage it, I got roaring drunk. That was a week later, during one of those rare September heat waves when the fog doesn’t form on the bay and the city stifles. I must say I was hugely and happily drunk, a welcome change from melancholia-in-the-cups. The happiness was born of some spontaneous eruption without discernible cause, a raw, joyous overflow from the fountain within, a definite sign of life. I decided that rather than swelter in my room I’d sleep out in nature. I considered one of the nearby parks, but there were too many people hanging out on the edges who’d turn you into junk sculpture for your loose change. Then I had a great, happy, drunken idea – that old tree-fort oak over on Dolores, my sanctuary from hot pursuit. I hoofed it on over and climbed into its open arms. It was lovely stretched out on the planks, the stars blurring with heat shimmers as the city cooled.

  I slept so well I didn’t twitch till the morning traffic began to thicken. I checked for approaching pedestrians through the leaves and shinnied down. As soon as my feet hit the ground, I was dizzy. I leaned against the rough, heavy trunk, waiting a few minutes for my head to clear, and a few more to make sure it would stay that way. When I felt stable and lucid, or as much as my hangover allowed, I headed toward the bus stop over on Mission. I was due at Cravetti’s by 8:00.

  There is no sanctuary. Down the block I saw a woman starting down her front stairs with a large bag in her arms and a heavy purse swinging from her shoulder. I didn’t pay any particular attention till she stopped halfway down and yelled something back toward the house. I couldn’t make out the words, but her tone was pissed off. A lovers’ quarrel, maybe; back to the world. When she yelled again, her voice strident, I was close enough to make it out: ‘The kitchen table, Eddie. Kitchen table! Now goddamn it, would you please hurry? We’re go
ing to be late.’ She shook her head angrily.

  I was about forty yards from the steps when she shrieked, ‘Close the door, Eddie!’ A door banged shut and a small brown-haired boy about five years old came bounding down the steps, his arms cradled under a bright yellow lunchpail on top of which were a couple of books and some big sheets of paper; he had his head scrunched down so his chin held the papers in place. He went right through his mother’s grasp, giggling, mimicking, ‘Come on, we’re late.’ His mother, haggard, started after him.

  I was about thirty feet away when he tripped near the bottom stair. I thought he was going to fall but somehow he kept his balance. In doing so, however, he lifted his chin from the papers, and an errant breeze lifted off the one on top, which fluttered toward the curb. He almost snagged it, but just as his small hand reached out the paper skirred again, skittered sideways up the block, then, lifting, sailed waist-high toward the street.

  I saw it coming and dove for him as he dashed intently between two parked cars and his mother screamed his name. The fingertips of my left hand brushed the leg of his brown corduroy pants. It was that close.

  The old guy driving the blue ’59 Merc didn’t have a chance. The kid was dead before he hit the brakes. When I heard the sound of the car hitting that little boy, a wet smack like a side of beef thrown from the back of a semi onto a loading dock, it was like something reached down into my chest and ripped out my heart. The street was a chaos of brakes and screams. I lay there on the sidewalk, numb except for the burning in my fingertips where they’d grazed his trousers.