Mourning Wood

by Daniel Paisner

  His plan works smoothly enough, except that the next stall turns up as empty as the one just abandoned, at least as far as coarse toilet paper squares are concerned. Pimletz, realizing, slams at the metal half-wall in frustration.

  Stymied, he cranes his neck to the room’s up-high windows, on the sills of which he seems to recall there sometimes being toilet paper packages, stacked. Today, though, there is nothing. He leans his head out the stall door and reminds himself there has been no overnight paper towel delivery, no storage area he might have overlooked, no sudden shift in bathroom maintenance strategy, nothing to magically replace the ridiculous hot-air dryers he has suffered for the almost-twenty years the newspaper has suffered him. The only paper product in Pimletz’s limited view is yesterday’s Record-Transcript, which rests haphazardly, and perhaps also magically, around this third toilet’s stained porcelain base, most of it soaking in a sister to the clear puddle which had moments earlier claimed the back of his left pant thigh.

  Pimletz stoops for the day-old paper—his salvation!—and it comes up heavier than he’s used to, weighted by the water. Some of the paper is dry enough toward its middle, and Pimletz fumbles through the center tabloid pages as he drops his pants and backs himself onto the toilet. He’s deep into the Classifieds (“Deep into Classified,” now there’s a song title), past Real Estate, approaching Weather. He’s going by feel here, and not by content; he doesn’t notice Weather turn to Around Town, doesn’t realize he’s torn a dry enough page from Obituaries and squared it to withstand a poke from his finger. It’s not until he turns back and sees a picture of the bicycling Roxbury teenager, Allison Detcliff, sent off by Pimletz’s own wooden prose after she was hit by an appliance store delivery truck driven by a guy blew two-point-something on his breathalizer, that he realizes what he’s done, what he’s doing: adding insult to insult, wiping himself not close to clean with what he does for a living.

  Finished, he lets his mind return to its earlier wanderings. He doesn’t know what he’s got to think about, wonders where people come up with things to occupy their attentions. With Pimletz, it’s like he has to be entertained, distracted, coaxed. He needs an agenda. He needs the diversion from the radio or television, something to read or to look at, else he just lapses into a dead zone.

  Axel Pimletz—forty-three, never married, freshly bathed—is the kind of guy who reads the fine print on the backs of ticket stubs and the suggested “other uses” recipes on the sides of cereal boxes. Books you can pretty much forget; he’s a whatever-is-lying-around kind of reader, whatever’s on top. He’s got no hobbies, no interests, no outside talents. His days are stuffed with too many minutes and not enough to fill the time. His mind, on its own, simply idles.

  Squatting, Pimletz jump-starts himself with suggested topics. There’s the upcoming presidential election to figure, but Pimletz does not know what to make of that whole business. His own paper says Bush should stand up for what he believes, whatever he believes, instead of treating the nomination like an entitlement, but it seems to Pimletz a man should do whatever he can to get whatever he wants. He believes this rule applies to the general human condition, as well as to politics. There’s the economy, but that’s a little too much for him. There’s yesterday’s terrorist bombing of that U.S. base in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, but he hasn’t yet read the still-warm newspaper left behind on a corner of his messed desk in the newsroom, so he doesn’t know what to think about this, either.

  His mother. There’s always his mother. He’s supposed to help rearrange her furniture one night this week. Thursday, he thinks. She’s always rearranging her furniture. She doesn’t have the patience or the resources to move, so she just moves things around. It’s the very apartment Pimletz grew up in, and it hasn’t ever looked the same more than three months running. His mother has a word for what she’s got: schpilkas, which she tells her Axel is Yiddish for ants in her pants. Pimletz wonders what the Yiddish is for the opposite. Ants not in his pants.

  From his mother, he somehow shifts onto the printer from Everett, the stamp collector from Beacon Hill, the Somerville lady known throughout her neighborhood for the elaborate Halloween decorations and spook effects she pulled every year. Ah. This is what Pimletz can think about, his fallen subjects. Morrison Gelb. Natick. Colon cancer. Eighty-six years old. (Song title: “Eighty-sixed at Eighty-Six!”) Leaves eleven grandchildren and a third-generation doll wig business. It never would have occurred to Pimletz that three generations of the same family could pulse to the making of Barbie’s hair, but to Morrison Gelb it was everything.

  Pimletz sits in this way for a long time, wondering at other people’s choices, other people’s lives. He sits in this way long enough for his feet to turn to pins and needles. The dead numbness he likes—he even encourages it sometimes, with his not moving—but the pins and needles he can do without. They’re like a test, he thinks, a summons. He wills himself still, afraid to move, waiting for the pins and needles to disappear. When they pass, finally, he stands to leave. He looks at his hands, his fingertips rubbed black with yesterday’s wet newsprint. He reaches them to his nose, smells nothing but his primary hand smells.

  Next he looks down at his shorts, which he is about to restore to their on position, and he notices his Groucho Marx impression was not nearly as successful as he had hoped. The pitiful ordeal of these last moments has left its mark, and still another last thing Pimletz wants is to sit around for the rest of the day in a pair of streaked underpants. He tugs at the already-started hole underneath the fraying label and rips at the fabric, which comes loose like he is tearing at an individually wrapped slice of cheese. This is the connection he makes. He’s ripping at his shorts, thinking of processed cheese. He pulls the material from its elastic band and lets it drop to the floor beneath his legs. Then he steps through the left-behind waistband, which he stretches over his pants and shoes, and stuffs what remains of his sorry-smelling garment into the already-crowded waste bin fitted into the green tile wall. He does this without a thought.

  Wood moves slowly—thirty, thirty-five, nothing crazy. He’s trying to figure where he is, doesn’t recognize the dark landscape in his headlights. Visibility basically sucks, plus he can’t get his wipers going fast enough to do anything worthwhile with the hard rain, and his defroster hasn’t managed much more than a few clear portholes. He pinches some cuff from his sweater into his right palm and wipes at the window with the trapped piece at the wrist. He steers with his left. He wishes he were home, dry, in bed, unconscious.

  Here’s what Vince Lombardi would do, now, driving: crack his window, let the cool, wet air help with the defrosting, slap himself awake. What would Lombardi care if he gets a little wet? Probably, he’d mutter something inspirational (“a quitter never wins, a winner never quits”) and, inspired, plod on. Probably, he’d switch his wipers to intermittent to make the game more exciting, maybe even step down a touch on the gas, see what this baby can do in the slick.

  Here’s what Terence Wood does: he puddles his car into another one of these scenic lookout tumors, switches off the ignition, and leans back against his driver seat until it’s in full recline. Then he looks up at his felted roof and wonders at the other side. Not the rain, but everything else. He wonders what buttons are being pushed on his behalf, what decisions are being made for him. He wonders at the disasters combusting at the other end of his car phone, plugged in. He wonders what he is doing, where he is going, why he bothers. Now that he gets his mind on it, there is nothing left for him to do, see, no more places to go, movies to make, substances to abuse. Consider: he’s met everyone there is to meet—princes, Lakers, artists, first ladies, short track speed skaters, moguls. Models. Too many models. Lately, he meets a model and it doesn’t even occur to him to take her home. This is true. It simply doesn’t strike him. How can this be? When did this happen? Plumbing still works, it’s not that, but it rarely dawns on him to open the spigots.

  Now there’s a solid blue-collar metaphor. He�
�s got metaphors on the brain. Transitions. Symbolism. Some nit convinced Wood he could make some quick cash scribbling his life story—all of “veteran” Hollywood trades in this particular commodity—only now that he’s pledged to do so, he can’t quite get to it. His loose pages are like overworked writing class assignments. He doesn’t know that he has anything to say. Publisher wants a laundry list of his conquests with locker room commentary, and, for this piece of gutless chauvinism, Wood will collect just over three million dollars, plus paperback and foreign. He’s already spent the million he received on signing, so there is some incentive for him to get it over with, but even this inducement hasn’t been enough to see him through. Either there’s too much to tell, or not enough, or maybe Wood just doesn’t have the stomach for the ordeal. True, there are enough compelling reasons to keep him from the writing, not the least of which is how dispiriting it has been to look over his shoulder at the life he has led, or is still attempting. He tries to remember when it was, precisely, he worked his way through all the people there were to fuck, where it was he lost his interest. He hasn’t lost his appreciation for women, just his appetite, but this is bad enough.

  Another new thing, also unsettling, is what’s happened to his career, past four or five years, longer if he can be completely honest about it. Nothing, that’s what’s happened. Used to be he saw every script in town. Used to be he was right for everything, and if he wasn’t right it didn’t matter. They’d convince themselves he was right for it, or they’d make it right for him. Now all he’s right for is dead football coaches. Once in a while, his agent entertains an idea for a sitcom, usually as somebody’s grandfather, swaddled in domestic bliss and canned laughter, but these entertainments rarely live beyond a couple meetings and never beyond a development deal. Lately, he’s even done voice-overs (he’s the voice of the villain in an upcoming Disney project), and a Pizza Hut commercial.

  When he really works, it’s usually for the money, just. Like with this latest piece of shit, this live-action Archie comic book movie. Everything’s Archie. What fuck talked him into that? Five million, plus points, to play Mr. Weatherbee, a fucking high school principal. Three scenes, three weeks, five million. The thing with Terence Wood is he’s tied up in divorce nonsense with wife number three, and her lawyers are looking to skin him. Even without the ugliness of this latest divorce, he burns money like fuel, so he let his agent and the money convince him this Archie role would be like Brando’s cameo in Superman or Nicholson’s turn in Batman, even though it played out to be neither and, in some ways, a parody of each. Producers had him wearing this ridiculous monocle, said to look at the comic book, the guy always wore a monocle. Plus, they had him on crutches the entire time on the set because it was decided this Weatherbee character would be suffering from gout, which Wood has since learned is common only to high school principals of the comic book variety. In two of the three scenes, the writers had it fixed where he had his crutches kicked out from under him and was made to spin on his good heel and shake his sticks at the movie’s madcap teens like an irascible codger, his monocle dangling from a cord around his neck like Harold Lloyd. Why, you crazy kids. . . .

  The movie disappeared like something with Don Knotts in it, which Wood and the producers might have seen coming because, in fact, he was, in a small bit as the father of one of the story’s principal teens, Jughead Jones. The preproduction hype was giant, but the finished product was a load. The critics who even bothered with the movie were all over it, and mostly what they were all over was Wood, mostly for just taking part. The fat guy with the thumbs up and down in Chicago said that for the first time in Terence Wood’s fabled and sometimes brilliant career, the actor appeared irreversibly lost and without tether. His words. It has only been a few months, and Wood is not entirely sure what the words mean in this context, but he guesses they will stay with him, always. He makes noise about not reading his notices, good or bad, but this one caught up with him on the car radio, where in addition to confirming Wood’s own low opinion of himself and his life and his latest exertion, he also learned that the fat guy with the thumbs up and down seems to have found yet another outlet for his commentary, and that the only way he, Wood, will ever see his points is in video.

  Wood, irreversibly lost and without tether, turns the key onto battery and reaches for the volume on the radio. He wants to distract himself from himself. He’s lost a half-dozen stations since he started out, partly to the weather, but mostly to the long drive, in and out of range. He’s anxious for some noise to clear his head. Anything. He hits the scan button and pulls the nearest signals through the other side of the Pathfinder’s felted roof. Michael Bolton. The 1910 Fruitgum Company. Weather. Rog’ at Large, with concert happenings. Dionne Warwick. Talk radio: a listener wanting to know if it’s safe to travel to Israel, you know, after what just happened in Saudi Arabia, if there’s any way to really know what’s going on in the Middle East. Garth Brooks. Wagner. The Doors. Up-to-the-minute stock reports. Hendrix. Some caller wanting to know about replacing radiator fluid. June Carter Cash. Clapton singing about his kid. Garth Brooks again, or still.

  He locks back onto Hendrix—“Purple Haze”—and, right away, he is transported to 1967, summer, around Monterey. Before or after, he can’t remember, but the same time, place. The memories are like one long day. He sees himself sitting with Hendrix at the Mamas and the Papas’ place in Bel-Air, this kick-ass mansion, and Brian Jones is there, Sharon Tate, Steve McQueen, some guy from the Monkees, and they’re passing around a couple joints, dipping sliced apples into a shared jar of peanut butter, tabbing at some concoction called Owsley Purple, listening, probably, to the Beach Boys. Maybe Sgt. Pepper’s, although maybe it was too soon for Sgt. Pepper’s. Everyone is on the floor. (Fuck the furniture: everyone was always on the floor.) There’s a pool out back, but it’s limned with algae and no one’s in it. Peter Lawford is droning on about RFK, Mama Cass is splayed beneath a length of couch like a big-game throw rug, and John Phillips is nursing a bottle of Crown Royal. Someone’s watching the television news with the sound turned off.

  The scene unfolds for Wood like he is still in its middle. He is trying to convince Brian Jones that the monsoon season in Vietnam is like a symbol for America’s involvement in the war. It is all so amazingly clear to him, he doesn’t get why no one sees it this way. “We’re like a fucking storm, man,” is how he puts things, “but all we do is water damage.” He remembers this like it was on video.

  “Yeah,” a convinced Brian Jones manages. “Absolutely. A fucking storm.”

  Hendrix, here, on the radio, brings it all back—“’s’cuse me, while I kiss the sky”—and it doesn’t take Wood more than a couple riffs to realize he has peopled his flashback with the dead and gone. More, the dead are still relevant, now that he thinks about it. Well, maybe not relevant, he weighs, underneath a mounting haze of his own, but at least they’re not redundant. They still matter, somewhere, to someone. Most of them, anyway. Sharon Tate. Peter Lawford. McQueen. Every one of them dead except for Papa John, and that guy from the Monkees, and me, maybe Glen Campbell was there too, and we might as well have checked out with the rest of them. No tether to those who haven’t mattered since.

  The images resonate, and Wood gets to wondering what Hendrix’s life would have been like had he lived, and he pictures a sixty-year-old guy with a gut (and, perhaps, a still-wide bandanna), guesting on Will and Grace, running the Chicago Marathon with Oprah, picking up his guitar for the first time in fifteen years. Or, he’s got Hendrix sitting across the desk from Larry King on CNN, plugging a boxed CD retrospective, which includes, inexplicably, a medley of Cole Porter songs. Maybe he’s playing Atlantic City, or campaigning for Bill Bradley, or hawking Pepsi (“you’ve got the right one baby, uh-huh”), or laughing it up with Jay Leno. Maybe he’s writing his memoirs.

  Wood steps out of the car. It is still raining, hard, but the air inside the Pathfinder has become oppressive. He needs to escape it before it choke
s him. Standing, he rolls his neck to the dark clouds, and the rain hits him full and cold. He drinks it in. He is out of the car only a few beats before he is soaked through his clothes, his long mane of thinning gray hair pressed slick against his round head. “Excuse me,” he says, loud, nearly chanting, “while I kiss the sky.” It doesn’t sound at all like singing.

  He struggles onto the hood of the car and manages to stand. The thin metal pops and sags with his weight, and when he is sure enough of his footing, he reaches out with both arms. He means to take it all in: the heavens, the rain, the choppy waters below. It’s a fucking monsoon, he thinks, but he defies it. He’s taken Hendrix at his word, he wants to embrace whatever epiphany he’s made for himself, hug it close enough so that it will never slip away again, not ever. He wants to defy Petra and her lawyers by not being on the other end of their phone calls. He wants to kiss the sky. He’s left the radio on and his nearly chanting nearly coincides with Hendrix’s. He reaches back to the vinyl roof and is surprised to feel the vibrations through his hand. The music pulses through him. It is as if in reaching back to the roof of the car, he is also reaching back over a quarter of a century to touch whatever it was he once had, whatever it was could still touch him. Or has. Or will.

  “Hey, Axel,” Hamlin tries, hounding, “how’d’ja like my new headband?”

  Pimletz is at his desk, leaned close enough to his display terminal for the receding hairs on his head to nearly respond to the static. He is lost in a game he sometimes plays to fill the time. About the only thing he is good at is finding ways to fill the time. He inches closer to the screen to determine the precise point of static exchange, and he tries to imagine his hairs responding to the pull. He’s worked on this. When he does it with his forearms, he can actually see his hairs start to rise, and he is sometimes able to lock the exchange in mid-motion, in a static-electric freeze-frame.