The Metaphysical Ukulele

by Sean Carswell

On the way down the mountain, Jack found the dharma in charity by giving his ukulele to a wild, beatific Oregon wrestler with shoulders so much like Gary’s sculpted out of logging and trail adventures in the rainforest west of the Cascades. The wrestler drove Jack as far south as Grants Pass. Jack said goodbye to both wrestler and ukulele with a “Blah” that he understood to say it all.

  Back in San Francisco, without the spontaneous uke to keep him rooted, Jack fell into wine and howling poets. His old pal Greg Corso had migrated west to join the madness. Corso spent most days chafing the patience of Allen and Peter and especially Kenneth Rexroth for whom Kerouac was all too happy to chafe. Neal Cassady had moved back in with wife Carolyn and two kids, back to working for the railroad and embracing the work/produce/consume ideology of Ike Eisenhower and William Levitt and even aspiring to shortcut his way in like a Midnight Ghost funded on winnings at the horse track. Allen’s “Howl” was finally being heard and not only heard but (could they know then?) hunted down by Captain Hanrahan of the San Francisco PD in hopes of saving the children of SF from the greatest minds of a generation who blew and were blown by ecstatic bikers. The machinery was too much for Jack.

  When Locke finally met a woebegone Jack on the North Shore, Locke seeking a pre-workday meal and Jack ending a wild night in search of eggs enough to soak up a belly full of Tokay, Jack nearly burst into tears (Catholic guilt). Locke took Jack to a nearby diner and purchased two plates of ham and eggs. Locke shoveled eggs potatoes ham into his hungry mouth. Jack used fork to push his eggs around the porcelain, crashing from ham to hash brown. Locke wouldn’t speak of the ukulele. Truth be told he was disappointed. Sure the ukulele was Jack’s to keep or give away as he saw fit but really for the forty hours Locke spent milling and carving and sanding and gluing and rubbing oil into the wood and the twenty-seven hours Locke’s wife spent cutting and padding and sewing the case, the ukulele was Jack’s to keep only. Locke held his disappointment inside and smiled his beatific Buddha grin and said, “You have no idea how good these hams and eggs is. If you had any idea whatsoever how good these hams and eggs is, you’d quit your sulking and dig in.”

  Jack mumbled, “These hams and these eggs, them hams and them them eggs.”

  It was the eternal suppertime in Park Avenue penthouse apartments. With On the Road a bestseller and Subterraneans and Dharma Bums hot on its heels and every TV talk show host hungry to drag a drunken Jean-Louis Kerouac in front of a camera as a spark to the Society of the Spectacle, Ti Jean wore his forty-dollar sport coat and headed into Manhattan to dine with Steve Allen. Steve played his piano like an old American patriarch in his Upper East Side loft apartment with direct elevator access while his wife Jayne cooked dinner. Jack refused to read poems to Steve’s accompaniment, though they’d recorded together and performed live on television together already. Jack had time to feel ashamed and to feel the pain of his failed rucksack revolution straying far from its prophecy. Instead, he had drifted in front of the eyes of thousands of Americans staring at the same thing and on some nights that same thing was him and not his thoughts or his poetry but his drunken disheveled look in his forty-dollar sport coat clashing with barbershop haircut and slacks bought three-for-a-dollar at the local Goodwill. Jack relented not to perform his poetry but to play Steve’s ukulele. It was not a taro-patch, straight from Hawaii and played in the fields to songs sung in pidgin accents nor the holy ancient redwood myrtle handmade by ancient bhikkhus but a mass-produced, Arthur Godfrey model ukulele made in Chicago for people to purchase and never play after watching Godfrey’s music hour. They ate fine pork chops with green bean accompaniment. They played songs and told stories. Steve offered Jack a bottle of brandy as sacrament. After many glasses, Jack got drink drunk he got. He came to like old Steve a little better. Holy Steve, forever flawed, forever seeking enlightenment. For Steve alone Jack twisted his face and pointed finger to the sky in honor of the bodhisattva comedian Dayton Allen and recited the mantra, “Whyyyyyy not?”

  Jayne asked Jack about recording with jazz saxophonists Zoot Sims and Al Cohn and Jack told her of carrying his great holy suitcase full of handwritten haikus to the recording studio where Zoot tooted and Cohn blown and that bebop tick tock jazz filtered through. Only Zoot and Al didn’t stick around for the playback and Ti Jean huddled in a corner and cried. When he retold the story, he left out the crying. He held his Arthur Godfrey ukulele close and plucked a perfect note to salve the seething wound that the brandy could no longer sooth. That moment coincided with holy American patriarch Steve Allen and his long-suffering Jayne thanking Jack for a wonderful night as a way of saying, “Jack, it’s time to go now.” But Jack undaunted borrowed black telephone and rang an army of beatniks to roam Manhattan streets forever in a southerly direction.

  Three years Jack spent holed up with his mother on Long Island and fame surrounding him and television appearances and penthouse patriarchs and beatniks hanging on to a phony lifestyle that was honest in books but lost in translation to action when actions became repetitions instead of spontaneous. Finally, he heard that engine calling all cars back to the end of the land sadness, end of the earth gladness. He used his mother’s phone to ring Lawrence Ferlinghetti over at the now-canonized City Lights Bookstore where they hatched a plan for Ti Jean’s surreptitious slide through San Francisco and down to Big Sur where the real writing, the poetry of “Sea,” could commence. He was to arrive by cross country train with a ticket this time, indoors with no flapping arms or beatific bums saying prayers to Saint Theresa, and call the saintly City Lights using an alias. Lawrence would shuttle Jack disguised in fishing hat and slickers down to the cabin near Bixby Bridge where they would dine with Henry Miller. No wine but intoxicating conversation. Only Jack didn’t call first but stumbled into City Lights where the fishing hat and slicker proved no disguise and a three-day bender commenced. First drunk, best drunk.

  One fast move took him by bus to Monterey and cab to Bixby Creek where he passed out in a field with an ornery old mule licking his face. Henry Miller had given up on Jack four days earlier. He needed no other introduction. Lawrence Ferlinghetti was done waiting. Saintly City Lights called. He gathered Ti Jean up and took him to the grocery store to amass dry goods and perishables and escorted Jack to the cabin before heading north up the Pacific Coast Highway. Jack was left alone in the cabin. He wandered the fields. He listened to the sea. He practiced haikus written to the ornery mule:

  Pacific patriarch

  reincarnated from Manhattan penthouse

  lick my face—sploosh!

  He also found Ferlinghetti’s perfect heavenly ukulele carried back from days of a Pacific theater that performed a new tragedy and endowed the survivors with ennui and existential void. For three weeks, Jack played his spontaneous uke. He carried it down Bixby Creek to a cave overlooking the ocean roaring with choruses of waves fifteen feet high. The sea air and hours of spontaneous strumming took its toll. Iodine crept into the glue holding the blesséd ukulele together. It choked Jack’s deep breath. He felt his own glue returning to liquid form. One fast move and he was gone.

  What remained was not, was never the air Ti Jean vibrated on his own.

  The Song at the Bottom of a Rabbit Hole

  The Five of Swords continues to haunt Patricia Geary. He shows up daily. She sits at her kitchen table with its view of bougainvillea creeping along a shadowbox fence. Hummingbirds suck from the pink flowers. Pat pushes aside wayward student manuscripts and the crusty oatmeal bowl that her husband neglected to remainder in the sink. She lays down three cards. The Five of Swords emerges as one. He is a warning or a reminder of ego struggles and pyrrhic victories. Every morning.

  He’s a mysterious character this number Five, standing alone with two swords stacked in his arms and three swords scattered about his feet. Two vanquished fighters wander away.

  Of course, Pat knows how to read the card. She knows what it means and how to apply it to her life, but it’s the artwork on this particular deck that sends
her down a rabbit hole.

  The victor who has gathered the swords looks off. Presumably, he’d be a warrior. Who but a warrior would want five swords? But this victor looks more artist than warrior. His shirt is tattered, frayed at the edges, falling apart not with the slashes of enemy swords or the outstretched fabric of a tussle, but threadbare from too many wearings, too many washings. There isn’t a bloodstain to be found on the blouse. Even if there were, Pat is certain she’d read it as red acrylic paint. Or maybe catsup.

  And the victor’s countenance in three-quarter profile, facing the edge of the card while his round, soft eyes glance back at the vanquished: he has the beautiful and innocent façade of a seducer, of a man who tenderly fills his wife’s pipe with opium. Pat knows that face. It originally belonged to Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

  Regardless what the card means, Rossetti’s face is the real ghost, the real haunting.

  At moments like this, Pat seeks solace in her ukulele.

  Times haven’t called for this consolation in so long that she isn’t sure exactly where she can find the ukulele. Somewhere in her home office. Somewhere buried deep in the geologic layers, in a strata she dates as 1987. The excavation will take the better part of an afternoon. Just the barrier of dolls, stacked like Day-Glo cannonballs and keeping vigil with their huge eyes, will take a few hours of gentle movement.

  With brown paper bags from Trader Joe’s substituting for a fossil hammer, Pat begins digging.

  Many hours later, around midnight, Pat sits in her office chair and scans the room. Heaped in brown grocery bags are the archives of a writer’s life, which, so far, seems to have been dedicated to the accumulation of worldly goods.

  Pat knows what the average mystic has to say about worldly goods: clutter is evil; simplicity is good. But somewhere inside her Pat wonders if this dichotomy itself isn’t a little too much simplicity.

  Regardless, the brown paper bags sit full of snapshots of loved ones, school pennants, stories written by aspiring undergraduates, and a variety of once-meaningful effluvia: a first-place certificate, neatly folded, along with the blue ribbon, for the Vista Junior Talent Contest; a yarn voodoo doll; a turtle-shaped pincushion; a ballerina jewelry box; a Ginny doll missing half a leg; imitations of reproduction Blythe dolls; a toy poodle with its fur darkened from the oil and dirt of a younger Pat’s fingers; a mysterious piece of brick with the single letter P; old issues of Marie Claire and Vogue; entire series of mystery novels dedicated to knitting, antiquing, and psychics; acrylic yarn in colors that went out of style a decade ago; single knitting needles missing their partner. Bag after bag after bag.

  Atop the bag nearest her, Pat glimpses again a letter from the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society, the overseers of the Philip K. Dick Award, inviting her to Norwescon in lovely Tacoma, Washington for the award ceremony. Pat and four other finalists would read from their work. One finalist would win. Pat, of course, won. That was a Five of Swords memory.

  Unlike most people, Pat was absent when her life changed irrevocably. The gears that would control the machinations of her future turned in Manhattan while Pat vacationed in Lake City, Florida. It was the holiday season, 1986.

  Pat took a stroll through the woods near her mother’s home. She wore a cape—always a risky fashion choice. The key, Pat knew, was to wear the cape rather than letting the cape wear you. Superheroes: they let the cape wear them. The cape wore Superman so strongly it carried him into the air, forcing him into a perpetual plank pose. Batman tried to use his cape to tuck his love for a Boy Wonder under while Robin’s love for Batman was broadcast in the fluttering red cloth flowing behind him. Pat draped her cape over her shoulders, keeping her warm on a cool Florida morning. Confidence was key. Pat pulled it off while roaming across campus in Baton Rouge, but here in Florida, with her sister picking at every random hair on Pat’s skin, the cape was a more nebulous proposition.

  It followed Pat into the woods.

  The conifers of Northern Florida stretched, long and lean, into the gray sky. A young boy scaled the thin trunk of a nearby pine. Pat sat to watch his progress. He shuttled up the tree with a competence familiar to all primates but the human kind. The tree buckled under the boy’s weight. It bowed, impossibly, to the ground. For a tense second, Pat watched as the tree formed a pine archway and set the boy down on the carpet of needles at the forest floor. The boy climbed off. The tree whipped back into place.

  Snap!

  The boy raced off for another tree. Before he would’ve had time to climb it, Pat heard another snap. A cursory inspection of the forest unearthed a group of boys, all climbing the thin, flexible pines until the trees touched their tops to the forest floor. Pat settled in for the spectacle.

  Through the fog of the waxing day, another figure walked toward Pat. Pat drank him in. Where had he found this gorgeous ensemble? His indigo tuxedo contrasted smartly with a billowing white silk shirt and charcoal brocade jodhpurs. Neat gray suede boots peeked out from beneath the cuffs and long, slender fingers were covered with lambskin gloves.

  Pat had never met this gentleman in a nonfictional world, but she knew him.

  Sammy.

  Sammy sat next to Pat. Pat shivered, though the cool Florida woods were not cold enough to elicit a shiver, though her cape wrapped around to keep her snug. She had the impulse to be nice, to set this conversation on friendly terms despite Sammy’s ominous aura. She said, “I like your suit.”

  The statement dropped like a nickel falling on a hardwood desk, rattling in its understatement.

  “There are laws,” Sammy said.

  Pat felt something like a shot put drop to the bottom of her stomach.

  The group of boys continued to climb on and climb off the pines. Snaps echoed throughout the woods. Pine tops wobbled.

  “There are laws for everything. Thieving, for instance.” He leaned closer, his ice-chip eyes glittering in the faint traces of morning sun.

  “My book.” The words came out before Pat considered them. She wasn’t sure which book she referred to. A few years earlier, her novel Living in Ether had come out. Perhaps she’d leaned a bit too much on the works of Yukio Mishima, but that was an influence, not a theft. And what about Strange Toys, sitting on a desk at Bantam in Manhattan. Too much Angela Carter? Too much Lewis Carroll? Could a writer steal one novel from two people?

  Who was the real thief here, and what were they stealing?

  Sammy said, “Writers steal things. Writers don’t know what to do with them.”

  “Who are you?” Pat asked.

  “You know my name,” Sammy said. “And I have something you need.”

  “Me?”

  “There is danger ahead for your novel. But there is always a way around every law. Each law with the penalty attached, each system connected to another system. Because you have something I want, I’m prepared to…”

  One of the tree-climbers ran toward Pat and Sammy, not as if he were running to them, but as if they didn’t exist, and he could run through the space occupied by them. The boy paused and met Pat’s glance.

  Pat knew what the boy saw, what everyone saw looking into Pat’s face: that expression yearning toward some other world. That expression which seemed to piss people off and make them suspicious. The boy was no exception. He snarled at Pat. His twisted lips stretched the freckles on his face. His blond crew-cut glistened with dew slicked onto him from the pines he climbed. At that moment, he looked like every cocky boy who pursued Pat in high school and turned his failure to capture Pat into a hatred for her.

  The boy said, “Nice cape, lady.”

  More than anything, Pat was surprised that Sammy, with his indigo tux and jodhpurs, got a free pass while Pat’s cape was the object of backwoods scorn. She turned to see Sammy’s reaction, but Sammy was gone.

  The boy, too, scurried off for another flexible pine.

  Pat gathered herself to return to her mother’s. She stood and brushed the needles off her slacks. Tracing the path of a pine needl
e on its way to the forest floor, Pat saw at her feet a ukulele. The instrument either came from Sammy or came from nowhere. Pat was half-convinced that Sammy had only been metaphysical. Thus, the ukulele would have to be metaphysical.

  It sat on the carpet of pine needles, cute as a pug. Even the grains of dark wood reminded Pat of a pug’s short hairs.

  If the ukulele had had a tail, it would’ve wagged at Pat.

  Pat reached down and rubbed the ukulele’s neck. The ukulele jumped into her arms. She stroked the strings and heard the familiar tune: My Dog Has Fleas.

  She started walking back to her mother’s house, her cape fluttering in the wind and the ukulele trotting along in step with her.

  Somehow, she knew her novel was doomed.

  The evening after Pat’s stroll among the arching pines in the forests of North Florida, Sammy struck. Pat’s writing career careened down the one-way path of entropy; she’d no more be able to recreate the past of it than she could turn a sapling back into an acorn or shrapnel back into a grenade.

  The moment of the Five of Swords cut in Pat’s absence. While she celebrated the growing Christmas season in Florida, her editor accepted that one drink too many at a holiday party in the Bantam offices.

  In Pat’s editor’s defense, the waning 1986 was a troubling time for publishing. Federal laws had changed. Any media company with enough money could buy any other media company. Monopolies could form. The Germans had gotten into the game, buying, among other things, Bantam. Bantam was both Pat’s publisher and Pat’s editor’s employer. Now, they were all owned by Bertlesmann, a company also known for being the largest publisher of Nazi propaganda during the Third Reich.

  In the true top-down fashion that had characterized generations of Bertlesmann companies, Bantam hired a new executive to clean things up. He often slammed his fist against the table at editorial meetings. His arms flailed when he spoke passionately. His long bangs were known to come loose amidst marketing rants. Only after all his sweat and spit had been expunged would he comb the long bangs back into a neat, pomaded center part.