by James Greer
The coincidence of our decision to quit Whiskey Ships and the arrival of a documentary crew in Dayton whose purpose was to film the story of Whiskey Ships—more accurately, the story of Henry Radio, our wise and powerful and unfailingly quotable leader—was not a happy one. But we had delayed matters too long already, and were preparing for a long tour. We were convinced we would not survive the tour, and we further realized that Henry needed time to find and rehearse a new guitar player. The crew’s presence, at first intrusive—to the extent that we were occasionally awoken by a knock on the door and a camera in our hungover face—after a few days by the magic of familiarity became invisible, which we gather is the working method of documentary film crews, and so by the time we mustered the courage to let Henry know our decision, we had become so accustomed to the film crew sitting in the backseat of our beaten-up old Utero that we forgot that everything we said was being recorded. (By luck, or perhaps some other word, the segment containing our resignation was left out of the final product, entitled Hunting Accidents: A Brief History of Whiskey Ships, a brisk seller among our fanbase.)
[Trip Ryvvers and Henry Radio driving through the streets of Dayton, both drinking from cans of beer. The car stereo blasts Whiskey Ships music. Trip pulls up at a red light. The light turns green. He doesn’t move.]
HENRY RADIO
[re the traffic light] Ain’t gonna get no greener.
[Trip comes out of his reverie, continues driving. The song comes to an end.]
TRIP
Cool.
HENRY RADIO
We should put it on the B-side to “Tin Can Girl.” That’s just the demo.
TRIP
Maybe we shouldn’t rerecord it. I don’t know how you’re gonna fit that vocal around the whole band …
HENRY RADIO
My guitar playing’s pretty messed up.
TRIP
But it’s the good kind of messed up.
HENRY RADIO
Maybe … Hey, pull over, okay? I gotta piss.
TRIP
What, here?
HENRY RADIO
Right over there, by the curb.
[Trip pulls the car over. Henry opens the car door but remains seated. He swings his legs out over the pavement. We hear him unzip his pants.]
HENRY RADIO
The secret to pissing like this? You have to relax your asshole.
TRIP
Relaxation of the asshole. Right.
HENRY RADIO
That should be my solo album! The Relaxation of the Asshole!
[Trip laughs appreciatively. We hear the sound of Henry peeing on the pavement.]
HENRY RADIO
The cover could be a picture of me sitting on the couch holding a beer. Relaxation of the Asshole.
TRIP
Henry, I have to quit the band. I’m sorry, but I have to.
[Henry zips up, swings his legs back in the car, closes the door.]
HENRY RADIO
I know. You’re not into it anymore.
TRIP
It’s nothing to do with you, or the music. Whiskey Ships is my favorite band.
HENRY RADIO
Don’t worry about it. One thing about my songs, it doesn’t take a genius to play ’em. We’ll find somebody.
[Trip starts driving again.]
TRIP
I always thought music was the most important thing in life. I don’t know, maybe I’m just getting old.
HENRY RADIO
There’s getting old, and there’s growing up. If I ever get too old to do leg kicks and jump around on stage like an idiot, I’ll move on to the porch-rock phase. Sitting in a rocking chair on my porch singing songs. But I ain’t ever growing up, man. In here … [He points to his chest] … I’m thirteen years old. That’s all I’ll ever be. When I die, stick a bone up my ass and let the dogs drag me away.
[He punches a button on Trip’s car stereo. Music blares.]
HENRY RADIO
[over the music] I belong to the Church of Rock & Roll & Beer. That’s my faith.
We’re sorry, we don’t think we can keep doing this. Whatever motor drove us this far, even after Kurt’s suicide and Michael’s death and Gail’s disappearance, and the cancellation of our book contract, has run out of gas. Time to finish up.
There’s a misprint in our edition of Madame Bovary, on page 113 (translation by Alan Russell). The misprint reads “life a leaf” instead of “like a leaf.” Outside our apartment, right now, a summer storm is bundling through the night sky like a woman late for her date with anyone but us. The wind in the ash tree by our bedroom window makes the reticulate shadows of the leaves on the streetlit carpet, on the mussed sheets of our empty bed, quiver with regret. The rain that beat for a few minutes with martial severity on our tin porch has retreated, victorious. The wind and the rain together have pasted ash leaves on the cobblestoned street, and the tin porch, and even our grime-streaked windows, leaves torn from the tree before their season for dying, still green.
Henry Radio’s right: The circumscribed borders of this town—the mythological land of Dayton, Ohio—are enough, should be enough, for anyone. Everything outside here is a dream of flight, and we’ve gone to great lengths to prove to ourself that the dream of flight is always better than the thing itself.
This close to the horizon we feel hollow and pure, renewed, ready for anything. Even if, as we suspect, there’s nothing. Maybe we’ll return to Orville. Maybe we’ll abandon him the way everything we’ve ever loved has abandoned us, which is our fault because we let them down in the first place. We let everyone down, we let ourself down, we let you down. We did, too, we let you down, didn’t we? Sorry. And now you’ll leave us, you’ll take your things, pack them in that little cloth bag you always carry around, containing who knows what, the mysteries of the universe probably, and clear out. You won’t even say goodbye, because to say something destroys the thing you say, which is the whole reason for this book in the first place, even though no one will ever read these words, even though we write simply for ourself, which is never enough, never enough, never enough.
We never wanted the world in the first place, you know. We only wanted to play a part, and for a while we did. For a while that part stood for the whole—a glorious, if brief, synechdochic moment. All these years later, we’re drunk on cheap wine, looking out our screen door at the water sluicing from our eaves into the privet hedge guarding our porch. The rain’s mostly stopped, but there’s a lot of gathered water, still, pooling in the street and in bright puddles at the foot of the ash tree and streaming down the storm drain across Hickory. Tangerine streetlight dusts the bricks of our apartment’s outside, and we walk out onto the tin porch in our bare feet to touch the bricks with our palm. Despite the cooling rain, the bricks feel warm, still exhaling the sun’s heat all these dark hours later. Moths beat time against a buzzing streetlight, stippling the light’s halo with black flecks. A musk of ozone and azalea (two bushes under our living room windows, under the clouds punctuated with stars) perfumes the air—there’s a drugged quality to the silence, underlined by stridulating crickets and an early-riser mockingbird, who runs through his repertoire of birdcalls, which sound in sum like a conversation we’re not invited to join.
Against terror, against malice, against ignorance, against the composite horrors of war and peace wheeling in cycles that gash the earth—spinning, itself, in a void as empty as the gesture of a preacher invoking Heaven, or a conductor marking time, or a writer proofreading galleys, and as beautifully potent as the sum of these things, freed of their temporal chains—we can muster only love. Love’s a thing we can let go but will not let us go. Love’s life’s lone reward.
Notebook Nineteen
8.
• Do you remember, Orville, Orv, Mr. Wright, you prig, the hallogallo when Lindbergh came to town? Oh, you were embarrassed then. What moved you to invite him? Admiration, I suppose. You were young, still, and easily impressed. Less than a month after his cros
s-Atlantic flight, you invited him to stop over in Dayton. He flew into Wright Field in the Spirit of St. Louis, the same plane in which he’d braved the transcontinental flight, alone, and you met him with General Gilmore, ready to take him on a parade route through downtown. Thousands had gathered in anticipation of seeing a true hero, a man of real daring. But Lindbergh explained that he had promised his moneymen that he would make no public appearances until he returned home, so we had no choice but to drive straight here, to Albion, bypassing the parade route. I was mortified that I had put him in such an awkward position, but Lindbergh, as was his nature, responded graciously that I had no way of knowing, and thanked me (as was his nature).
• He was a supernally handsome man; you could not take your eyes off him. I do not know whether I was struck more by his looks or his achievements, but in either case I was struck, even to the point of awe, and found myself in difficulty with regards to casual conversation, as was often the case, especially in those days, in the presence of young women. But, it seems to me, for different reasons. When I found myself alone with a young woman I was more often than not overcome with a fear that she would find me companionable, and used every means to dissuade her of such an impression; whereas with Lindbergh my fear was that he would not find me companionable, that he would not, in the most vulgar sense, like me. To cover my fear I began to babble the most fearsomely dull technical talk, and though he responded, as ever, with equipoise, I thought I could detect a note of weariness in Lindbergh, as though he would rather speak about anything but the mechanics of flight. But that may have been a trick of my imagination.
• Though twenty-eight years ago, the memory of that night remains fresh. We had an excellent dinner, organized by Miss Beck. Somehow word had spread through town that Lindbergh had come to Albion, so that before dark a crowd of perhaps more than a thousand Dayton residents had gathered on the lawn. At first just the front lawn, then the side lawns, and finally the back, where people had to climb through the woods and brush and up the hillside. At length a few bold souls even ventured onto our front porch, so that we had to retreat to the second floor. Still the mob would not give up clamoring for a glimpse of their man. I began to fear for the safety of the house—and so prevailed on the good grace of Lindbergh to appease his public by means of a brief appearance on the balcony. As I stood beside him in the twilight and savored the warmth of the town’s affection for him, I not only tasted that unqualified admiration and goodwill that was denied Will and me for so long but fell myself under the magnetic charm of the man’s presence. Here was a man of courage and far greater resources of character than I could ever dream to possess. He waved to the crowd, which responded with a hearty roar, and as he turned to go back in, his left hand brushed against mine and I felt a thrill of excitement that I can only ascribe to the electricity of Lindbergh himself, the electricity that must course along the skin of all great men. I lingered at the balcony a moment after he went inside, and watched the throng slowly disperse, sated by this glimpse of all that is potential in mankind made manifest. I have never wanted public acclaim, never aspired to public honors; so my feeling at that moment cannot be called jealousy. It was more like love.
9.
• Will’s first letter to Chanute began, “For some years I have been afflicted with the belief that flight is possible to man.” He was a more eloquent writer than I, in any case, but his choice of words in that preamble was as prescient as anything ever written concerning the long and toilsome history of flight. Solving the problem of manned flight was, certainly, an affliction—an affliction its aftereffects, an affliction the lifelong burden of responsibility and the empty hours following success. So easy it seemed once found, which, yet unfound, most would have thought impossible. And most unwilling to believe had been found: The first real notice of our achievements appeared in a journal called Gleanings in Bee Culture, written by a Medina apiarist named Amos Root. We had to persuade poor Amos not to publish his article until we had assured ourselves that we had ironed out most of the kinks in our regular excursions over Huffman Prairie. Amos had to hold his tongue, or rather his pen, for over three months, from late September 1904 to the beginning of the next year. Naturally no one paid any attention to Mr. Root’s announcement (he had a somewhat discursive prose style, as I recall), and the story of our trials in getting anyone at all to take seriously our invention, not least the United States government, has been told and told so often that I am too bored by it to provide even a synopsis. But it seems to me that this is always the case: that the man most willing to believe in the works of Man is the one who has followed most keenly the works of Nature, that is to say of God. How could it be otherwise: We learned much of what we needed to know to solve the problem of wing curvature by observing a flock of buzzards gliding on currents of air—the story of the cardboard box that Will idly bent in his hands and inspired our wing-warping technique is true, but can any accident put to use be considered accidental? No. We were guided, Will and I, by a succession of intimations from a source that can only have come from outside us: in the first place, by the bold experiments of those who had gone before us, like Lilienthal; in the second, by assiduous study of those creatures to whom God had already granted the gift of flight; and in the third, by application of such rare thunderbolts as punctuated our long, wearisome days and nights of fruitless labor.
• All that is so long ago now. Battles lost, battles won, the field of flight strewn with wrecked ideals and bitter feuding. I will have no more of this. I have convinced my doctor, a wise and understanding man, to give me an extra month’s supply of morphine for my sciatica under the pretext of traveling to Georgian Bay. I think he knows I have no plans to travel to Georgian Bay. I have made all other preparations: My will was updated some time ago, and I have this very night drafted a letter consigning the original Flyer to the Smithsonian, ending its long exile in London. My health has declined greatly in the last few months, and though the strictures of my religion—of all religions, most likely—forbid taking one’s own life, I must trust that my Savior’s grace in this matter will forestall the consequences of my decision, though even were I convinced that the result would be eternal damnation, I would still proceed with my plan. Eternity stands outside time, and time is the thing that I daily curse, that afflicts me, to use Will’s word, and that I can no longer abide. Therefore I hated life; because the work that is wrought under the sun—whose power we have now harnessed to a terrible end, because it is only a facsimile of that true power, just as manned flight is only a facsimile of the graceful maneuvers of natural creatures; and artifice, the basis of any human action, can do no better, can only mimic, can never create—is grievous unto me; for all is vanity and vexation of the spirit. Tonight, for me at least, that vexation ends, even if my spirit does not. God help whoever comes to reside here at Albion after me, for I fear I have imposed my own affliction upon its very foundation, and through its roots, and veins, and in its blasphemous heart. Or perhaps I have it wrong; it’s possible that a spirit resides in these walls that has over-manned me, and waits for someone with a more appropriate or receptive makeup. These thoughts swept me back again into the gulf where I was being stifled. But I did not sink as far as that hell of error where no one confesses to you his own guilt, choosing to believe that you suffer evil rather than that man. So much wasted effort. We spend our lives striving to become little creators—what else is an inventor? a solver of puzzles he himself has designed—rather than to understand the nature of our own soul. I cannot tell you how I know the things that I know. I can only say that none of it has any use. So full of artless jealousy is guilt, it spills itself in fearing to be spilt. Ah, Will. Forgive me, brother. What I do now, I do for us both. There is no other way.
10.
• In 1921, the writer Rafael Sabatini published a wildly successful swashbuckling novel, Scaramouche, later adapted with equal success as a film. Scaramouche was a romance of the French Revolution, whose main character, named
Andre-Louis Moreau, is inspired to join the Revolution in part because of the example of a young seminarist, Philippe de Vilmorin, described by Sabatini as “young, ardent, enthusiastic, and inspired by Utopian ideals.” It seems quite clear that Andre-Louis is in love with Vilmorin, and when the latter falls in an unjustly provoked duel, in Chapter 3, the fate of the impressionable Moreau is set. Sabatini was born April 29, 1875, in what is now a suburb of Ancona, in Italy. His parents were well-known opera singers, and traveled extensively around the world. The renowned Irish tenor, John McCormack, studied under Sabatini’s father. Upon reaching the age of majority, his family sent Rafael to Liverpool, where his youthful travels had prepared him well for a career as a translator to the many shipping companies that then had offices in the largest port city in Great Britain. As a boy Sabatini had read Dumas, Jules Verne, Walter Scott, and chose for his own endeavors to write in English. His productivity was admirable. He wrote a book every year even after the accidental death of his son Binkie, from an unhappy first marriage, by an automobile accident that Sabatini happened on only minutes afterwards. The wealth provided by his books enabled Sabatini to buy a home near Hay-on-Wye, a town that since has acquired fame for its preponderance of antiquarian bookstores. The home he called Clock Mill. He has lived there almost twenty years. Another son, by his second wife, trained to become an aviator for the RAF. He’d just received his certification as a pilot, when on a celebratory flight over Clock Mill he tipped his wings in salute, lost control of the plane, and crashed in a nearby field in sight of his horrified parents. For many years afterwards, Sabatini’s second wife Christine had nightmares about the event, until on a trip to Switzerland she came upon a yellow mountain flower, unidentified in any recorded source. She took some samples back to Clock Mill and planted them, in the shape of a plane, in the garden. The nightmares retreated.