“Just forget it,” she said stiffly. “Pretend I didn’t even ask.”
FIVE
Chase hadn’t been in the hospital very long before I began to think about Zip, as if I could raise from his memory some clue that would help Chase. In retrospect, things that appeared to have one meaning in the moment took on new meanings in the remembering. We fell in love in New York City and we stayed in love during the years the Strangers played roadhouses strung out on the web of country highways around Syracuse, Rochester, and Ithaca. This was in the early eighties, when Zip’s band looked like it was going to break out and be successful. When the van pulled up at Sam’s or the Tom Jones or the Penny Arcade, the roadies wheeled blocky amplifiers into the club, carried lights latched to long poles and tripods of steel on their shoulders, walked with coils of black cable slung over their chests like bandoliers. The band carried their instruments and when the amps and monitors were in place, they lifted their guitars out and slid the cases behind the stage, which was usually nothing more than a raised plywood platform and sometimes wasn’t even that, and plugged in.
When we got to the club, I’d pick up my notebook and jump down from the van and walk through the fading late afternoon light across a gravel parking lot and into the bar, where the barman set me up while the band did the sound check. I wrote stories in clubs all over upstate New York in those days, wrote in dim light leaning over the bar, the sound of the band banging things together for their show beside me, behind me, around me. In between sentences, I watched the bartender wash glasses, dipping them into a basin of sudsy water and then wiping them down with a towel. When the glasses were done, he’d take the towel and wipe the bar, moving in a slow, languorous way, watching the band set up, asking me to lift my notebook and my glass so he could make a pass over the bar in front of me.
I stopped writing just before the show started and would always walk back to the van and slide my notebook under the front seat. When I came back in, Zip had already changed into his stage clothes: black jeans and a black shirt. He had a rock-and-roll body, tight and wiry, and the strong hands of a bass player. Mickey, the lead guitar player, favored bottle-green velvet trousers on stage, with a white jacket, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows. The whole band wore skinny ties but Mickey wore his pulled askew, over an open collar, as if he would otherwise suffocate.
Zip was not someone who dreamed of being in a rock-and-roll band and thought the gods had selected him. He worked and worked and worked, writing songs and practicing. The Strangers rehearsed whenever they weren’t playing a show. Pretty soon, the shows were the rehearsals, because they’d been booked into so many places, they spent all of their time on the road. They had an old orange van and they stashed their gear in the back and hired a couple of teenage boys from town to serve as roadies. When the shows started, Bert’s girlfriend Lainey and I got up and danced, which was our job as band girls. The idea was we’d get people out of their seats and on their feet and it always worked. Men came up to us and asked for dances but I would always retreat and say, “I’m with the bass player.”
Zip’s songs were popular, especially a song protesting war and a love song he wrote for me. People bought the 45s the band cut of his songs, and his songs got picked up by the Rochester radio stations. At shows, fans stood down in front and waved their arms and screamed for the song about war until Ed started the telling opening drum part, a series of soft staccato beats on the high hat and then Zip struck the first power chord and Mickey, who played lead, looked across at him with a wry smile and stepped back so Zip could stand in the lights alone during the first verse. By the time Mickey played the whining riff that sounded like bombs whistling toward the distant ground, it was time for the chorus and the lights came up on the whole band and flashed and strobed and smoke poured from the smoke machine and the crowd screamed the words that Zip sang.
I always wondered if anyone actually listened to the lyrics. Zip wrote the song in an effort to understand his father’s Second World War life on a B-52 in the Pacific Theater. Zip grew up with the consequences of that war all around him, his father haunted by the burning of rice-paper cities, a cipher of a man, drunk, unemployed, who spent most of his waking hours in the basement, where he tried to put out a magazine for the lighting industry, where he stayed for hours on end, where he kept the phone that he used to call me one night when years had passed since Zip left home to tell me to tell Zip that he loved him, to tell me that he wanted me to know that he loved his son, and maybe things hadn’t gone the way anyone expected, but he loved him, he loved him, he loved him. I gave the message to Zip when he came in and his face darkened and he turned away. And then he wrote the song and the song was like a prayer for understanding. They didn’t speak that night and I don’t think they ever spoke again.
NOT LONG BEFORE ZIP and I got married, he got a call from a big and well-respected record label. Their A & R guy had heard the Strangers’ demo and said he liked the songs—especially the war song and the love song—and they’d be interested if the Strangers would be willing to find a new lead singer. They did not mean Zip. They meant Bert, whose reedy voice had a tendency to slide off pitch. When Zip gave Bert and Ed and Mickey the news, no one said anything for a few minutes. Sunlight sparkled on Ed’s Pearl drum set and Mickey crossed his leg, right over left, and then shifted and crossed his leg left over right.
Then Bert said, “We’re not going to do that.” He looked from face to face. “We’re not fucking going to do that. Are we?”
And everyone was quick to reassure him. Of course they wouldn’t do that. Of course they’d go on as before. Mickey stood up and stretched and said, “Fuck’em if they can’t take a joke. Let’s just try another label.”
I stopped holding my breath.
When we got home, I asked Zip if the decision was final and he said, “We’re not going to get rid of Bert. It wouldn’t be ethical to kick him out now.” He spoke fiercely, so I knew how much it hurt him to do what he thought was the right thing.
That summer, while the band was playing an outdoor gig, Zip stopped in the middle of a song and lifted his bass from his shoulders and over his head and walked over to an oak and held the bass by the neck and swung the bass against the tree again and again and again, the way you swing a bat at a ball. He hadn’t unplugged the bass before he began to flail the tree, so the first chords were of a strange, strangled, roaring chord and the audience thought this was a cool new part of the show. But then they realized their mistake and a dismal silence fell as Zip slammed his guitar against the tree until the strings popped and the terrible roaring chord ceased and then there was just the whacking sound of the instrument on the tree and then the neck came off and he sent it sailing away, end over end, spinning like the single spoke of a wheel. Then Zip walked off the stage. Mickey and Bert and Ed stood with their arms hanging limply at their sides. Kevin, the sound guy, was the only one to go after him.
BUT IT WASN’T QUITE OVER. To pay off the bank loan for the sound system, the band had to keep working. This became complicated for several reasons: not long after Zip put down his guitar, Mickey decided that the time was right to try to drown Zip by holding him face down in a sink full of water. After Bert and Ed pulled him off, Mickey went home to his apartment and tried to open his wrists with a pair of kitchen scissors. Then he called Bert to tell him what he’d done. The wounds were superficial but he spent a night in the hospital and showed up the next day with his forearms wrapped in white bandages to tell everyone that he needed alcohol treatment. He was leaving the band.
After that, Bert and Ed began to attend Bible study meetings held at the home of the minister of a cultish Christian group called the Way International and Bert’s regular expression was replaced with a strange glittery look around his eyes and a mirthless smile. He began to walk the way crazy people walk, as if he weren’t fully anchored to himself or the ground. He received Christ, married Lainey, his long-time girlfriend, and proselytized about our immortal souls and
our heathenish behavior, which included indulging in Christmas lights during the holidays. Ed, too, found his way to the Lord, and Zip and I began to joke uncomfortably that the town had been subjected to the Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
Bert and Ed and Zip put together a working three-piece called the Trapdoors, strictly cover tunes, and played parties and weddings and little bars during happy hour. Then they resurrected the Strangers and replaced Mickey with a keyboardist and made a new demo tape, with Bert’s screechy voice still warbling over half of the songs, but this incarnation of the band rarely played anywhere. Zip went to work in a music store and Strangers’ fans came in to see him as if they couldn’t believe their eyes. Mostly they wanted to shake his hand but sometimes they said things like, “When are you guys going to play out again, man?” Or, “What was the deal at that show?” Eventually, however, they stopped thinking of Zip as Zip of the Strangers and he became Zip who ran the instrument department at a local music store and rang up sales at the cash register.
In the early evening, before Zip had to go to a Trapdoors gig, he’d refuse to eat and then would lie doubled up on the bathroom floor, the side of his face pressed against the cool tile, his knees against his chest. He told me that he felt dizzy and faint before he had to play and he said this was a sign of how much he hated doing what he had to do. I suggested a doctor. He said no. He drank. I thought he was starting down his father’s road and I took all of the beer in the house and poured it down the drain. Still, even when the alcohol was gone, he’d fall. Around this same time, he began to faint. I’d hear him in the bathroom, a soft full sound as he hit the floor. I’d find him lying next to the bathtub with his eyes still rolling and I’d help him up when he was ready. He was always disoriented afterward. Most of the time, he’d whisper, “Just let me lie here for a minute. I’m okay.”
I grew irritated with his falls because I believed they were part of his drinking, something he chose, something of his own volition, something he was doing on purpose, something he was doing to me, something he was doing to us. It never occurred to me to call an ambulance; I was too angry for that. Years later, I described these episodes to one of Chase’s doctors and he nodded and said, “All kinds of things can cause syncope but from what you describe, it sounds like a seizure.”
There was money from the band and money from Zip’s job at the music store, but there wasn’t really enough and I never planned to be a woman who owed a man anything for her support so I worked off and on at odd jobs: I sold ad space in a TV guide put out by the local cable company, I proctored civil service examinations, I taught a creative writing class at a local art school. I kept writing. I had the idea that I would sell something I wrote, something that would make me famous, so I wrote another extraordinarily bad novel. This one was taken up by an agent, a halfhearted gesture by a friend of a friend, who sent the manuscript back after a year with a dreary gray Post-it note stuck to the front and one word scrawled over the agent’s name and return address: Sorry. I heard from another writer that the local community college would hire just about anyone to teach freshman comp and before I knew it, I was responsible for teaching twenty adult Licensed Practical Nursing students expository writing. I surprised myself by liking this job. They hired me again for the next semester but the chair of the English department told me that if I wanted to continue teaching at the community college after that, I was going to have to get a master’s degree.
In the afternoons, after my class was over, I sometimes visited Zip at the music store. One day, a jazz guitarist named Roy came in to pick up his guitar, which Zip had laid out before him on the work bench. Roy waited while Zip slowly spooled strings on the instrument; when he was finished, Zip looked up at me and said, “This is the guy I wanted you to meet.”
Roy was handsome and he smiled and shook my hand and then said, “Is there some reason in particular Zip wanted us to meet?”
I’d begun to write short stories in which my life with Zip was pointedly not the subject so I looked away from Roy and said, in a very soft voice, that I had heard he’d published his stories in the New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly and that Zip knew that I wrote stories and Zip thought that I should talk to him. About writing stories.
He nodded briskly and said, “We can do that.” Roy told me later that all he knew about me when he started reading my writing was that I was this mysterious woman who knew that guy at the record store and lived in a small town and wrote stories. He was intrigued.
ROY TALKED ME THROUGH the whole application process. I applied to Syracuse University because I told myself I could commute and get my degree without having to leave Zip. Once I finished, I reasoned, I could keep teaching the occasional course at the Finger Lakes Community College to earn some money. I mailed the application the day before the deadline and when I dropped it in the mailbox in front of the post office, I told myself to forget about it, that this was a wish that was not going to come true, just like the bad novels had been wishes that I wrote for the wrong reasons and sent out with immature bravado.
A month later, I drove to the state park across the lake. Our town sat on the north edge of the same lake and wine country spread out to the south. The Senecas, who first lived on that land, said the Creator had reached down to the soft earth and, pleased with it, had pressed his palm flat into the hillside and then touched the earth deeply. He left the imprint of his fingers in long swaths that filled with rain from above and with water from below until the handprint was gone and in its place shimmered five brilliant dark lakes. On the eastern side of the lake lay the remains of the old Sampson naval training grounds, where sailors were schooled during the Second World War and train cars bearing German POWs rolled up to the barracks. By the time I lived there, most of Sampson was in ruins and had become a state park still laced with crumbling roads bearing names like Liberator Avenue or Stratojet Way.
I slowed down past the entrance and drove past the ruined hospital, with its half-demolished frame and its spigots and sinks and half-hijacked pipes hanging over green tile floors, and past the old prison, which was a hulk of brick with a rotting roof. I cut the engine at the spot where I could look out over the lake, over the moving water and out to the high sky and pretend to myself that I could see the street we lived on as it ran straight up the hill under old maples planted in perfect lines on either side, pretend that if I could see the street, I could see what was going to become of us. I got out of the car and walked down to the water and watched a hawk riding the air currents above the lake. I couldn’t see our street. I could barely see our town. The Navy sonar station was a blocky blur in the middle of moving water, and clouds that were neither rain clouds nor snow clouds rolled up from the horizon.
“I have to get out of this town,” I said. I hadn’t expected to say anything out loud and when I heard the words, I shuddered. They were true. I let them hang in the air and then looked around to see if anyone might have heard. The place was deserted save for the hawk that was turning farther and farther away from me on each new up draught of air, so I said them out loud again, and then again, as if these words were a secret I could keep no longer.
WHEN I PULLED INTO the driveway, Zip was sitting on the steps leading to our front door, smoking with his cigarette held between his thumb and his forefinger. He stood up and walked toward me as I stepped from the car.
“Did Roy reach you?” he said.
I shook my head.
“He’s been calling here all afternoon. You’d better call him. He said he had something to tell you and he has to talk to you right away.”
SO I WENT TO graduate school and they gave me a creative writing fellowship and then they asked me to stay and do the PhD program and they gave me fellowships for that, too. I no longer taught at the community college but set my sights on a faculty position at a four-year school. But in March, before I finished my master’s, I sat on the edge of the bathtub and waited for the stick to stay the same or change color. Outside, the sun was coming u
p and the plum tree rattled in an early morning wind and scraped against the house. When I figured enough time had passed, I turned around and looked and it was blue. I read the back of the box. Blue was positive. Blue was yes. Blue was Chase, already beginning to shape the world.
SIX
November finished and we passed into December. There came afternoons defined by a sinking of the light, by blue hooded twilights where the horizon was a mere memory of daylight. Chase didn’t leave the hospital. One afternoon, he was asleep when I arrived, lying on his side with his back turned to the wall. I put my hand on his shoulder and said “Chase,” but he didn’t respond. His face was slack and pale. I picked up the fleece blanket that my mother had given him for his fifteenth birthday and covered him with it and then sat down on the desk and listened to him breathe. His hair was greasy and lank and he wore the same pants he’d been wearing all week, stained, torn out at the hems. It was obvious that no one was helping him stay clean.
I was glad to see him lying still. He hadn’t been sleeping at night. The nurses were concerned about exhaustion. His weight had begun to slip, partly because he believed the food that was sent up from the hospital kitchen had been poisoned and he refused to eat it, partly from his relentless pacing. He also believed that the helicopters that landed on the roof were giant insects, the unit was a jail, he’d been sentenced to death, upstairs was a concentration camp, the dresser in his room was a control device for a nuclear bomb, and he was Zack de la Rocha.
Someone had taken a felt-tip marker and scribbled something that looked like an anarchy sign in the corner of the room where the bed had been shoved against the beige wall. It looked like Chase’s handwriting. The spring before he’d been obsessed with the idea of anarchy, although I didn’t think he had a clear idea what it meant. He and Melissa made a black flag painted with the anarchy symbol in white to hang in the corner of his room, like a banner, over his bed. I felt hollow when I saw the scribble on the wall, as if he’d tried to make his bare little hospital room seem more like home.
The Boy Who Loved Tornadoes Page 8