by Dean Kuipers
But then there they were, he and Mike, in the visiting room with Joe. He looked pale and had fresh scars on his arm but was otherwise the same as ever.
“What’s up, dude?” Brett asked, sitting down as he fished out a pack of Camel Lights.
“Nothing much, just hanging out,” Joe said, already smoking.
All three of them were serious smokers and they had smokes, so they focused on really, really smoking. They smoked indoors because Michigan was one of those indoor-smoking places, like Murmansk. There were other people in the room, including a woman they all noticed who was Joe’s age and who was in the back talking to someone else.
“You guys ever seen that new show, Northern Exposure?” Joe asked. He had begun watching that show during his free time, to give some focus to the obsessive, circular thoughts that otherwise ran round and round his head. The staff had already established that Joe had a high IQ and an outrageous memory: a clinician kept giving him longer and longer sequences of ordered numbers, saying them out loud, and even when they got very long Joe could repeat them back no sweat. He discovered in this task that he used music as his mnemonic strategy. Music happens in a temporal line; it unrolls sequentially, and Joe found he associated numbers with notes in a song. And then when he wasn’t talking with a therapist or being tested or probed, he watched TV, and this show Northern Exposure was about a doctor from New York City practicing in a small town in Alaska. Neither Brett nor Mike had seen it.
“Anyway, you should check it out,” said Joe. “I’ve watched a couple episodes now, and I was sitting here and I thought: I could just go there. Alaska looks fantastic. Big flat rivers full of salmon. Eagles. Bears. People are fishing and splitting wood. Sitting in here is so depressing.”
“This is what I’ve been saying,” said Brett. “You can make that happen yourself, without any of this getting in the way. It’s your life.”
They only stayed about fifteen minutes and Brett and Mike asked about the program in the joint, but Joe didn’t really go into it too much.
“I just do whatever they tell me to do until I can get out of here,” he said.
Then he leaned in and quietly added, “You see that girl over there? We were out in the sunroom and she seduced me. We had sex in the sunroom in the middle of the day. That was awesome.”
“Okay, well, cool. Hope you’re okay,” Brett said, getting up to go.
Anne and I got to Dad’s house with the moving truck at night, and he was full of nervous energy. “Captain Midnight!” he shouted as he greeted us on the cement apron in front of his garage. Sitting in the kitchen, he told us Joe was getting out for the weekend. “But when he gets here, don’t ask about the hospital or any of that,” Dad said.
“What? Of course I’m going to ask him about it. That’s why I just drove seven hundred miles,” I said.
“Nope, nope, see—we have to keep this whole thing quiet, because Joe will be so embarrassed. We don’t want anybody to know about this,” said Dad. He stooped his shoulders to emphasize the weight of this burden.
“Every single person in Kalamazoo already knows. Joe is like a party celebrity.”
“Well, it will be harder for him if everybody starts to look at him funny,” said Dad. “So let’s just not talk about it.”
“You can’t treat Joe like he has to keep a terrible secret, or you’re just going to make him worse. You’ll kill him,” I said.
“No, it’s the stigma that will kill him,” he said, shaking his head.
“Look, you sent him to a psych hospital that’s run by your church and Dutch people who are all related to one another. Within the space of an hour I’m sure every one of our thirty-four first cousins already knew he was in there. A couple of them probably work there. Joe doesn’t care about that.”
Bruce looked at the floor and sighed. I knew the place was expensive, and he was thinking that money bought him some secrecy. He was pissed off at the idea that Joe and I might mess that up.
“We’re going to give him a chance to get better,” Dad said finally.
“And talking is what’s going to do it,” I said.
Joe was pale when he got out of Dad’s truck, pale and puffy and unshaven and furtive like a guy with a world-record hangover. He stood in the driveway at Dad’s house in the hickories and smoked. The scars on his arm were still white and pink.
“Hello, brother,” I said.
“Hello,” he replied with a show of teeth.
His mullet was long. I hugged him and his body felt powerful; it was like hugging a black bear. His face was soft but he could snap me in two.
“Are you okay?” I whispered.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said.
“Is the lockup all right?”
“Nah, it’s a fucking nightmare. But I’m going to get out of there pretty soon.”
We sat in the screened porch, drinking iced tea to the pulsing electric howl and fiddle of cicadas and spring peepers breaking in waves across the trees. Brett came to the house for a little while. He wasn’t much interested in why Anne and I were moving to San Francisco. “Well, you’re just moving far away again, and all this shit is going on here and all of us have to deal with it when you’re gone,” he said. We sat gulping at the scintillating, overwhelming roar of the forest until deep in the night.
In the morning, Joe and I sat on the floor of Dad’s pole barn working on Joe’s motorcycle, a corroded old Yamaha that wasn’t running. We really needed Brett and his mechanical genius, but while Joe and I tried to figure it out, Joe talked. Anne sat with us and took photos.
“Dean told me you don’t like the rehab,” Anne said.
“Oh, the regular staff are okay, they really try to help you. But the doctors are such arrogant cocks.”
“Doesn’t that defeat the whole purpose?”
“Well, I think so,” he said. “Their basic assumption doesn’t work for someone like me. I tell them I feel ill or depressed, and then these cocks, they don’t ask me much about why I feel that way, because they already know. They tell me, right to my face, that I feel that way because I don’t have a relationship to Jesus Christ, and if I did, then I would feel good.
“Pain is supposed to be the body’s way of telling you something is really wrong. So I go in there thinking, ‘Shit, I’m a real flesh-and-blood person with real feelings and real problems,’ and they say, ‘No, you’re just an ungrateful dick who rejects Christ so fuck off.’ They assume it’s my fault I feel bad. But it’s not my fault; I just feel bad. Every day in this place I’m told, ‘All the feelings you have are wrong.’”
Somewhere during that explanation I realized that Dad and Mom had taken me to see a counselor once who was affiliated with the same place they had taken Joe. I had had questions born of the chaos of their shattered relationship, but the very first words out of that guy’s mouth were: “Let’s get on our knees and pray for forgiveness for your arrogance and your disrespect to your parents.” I had left them on their knees and walked out, but I had had more ego left than Joe did.
“If I can’t be a real person, they don’t understand that they’re leaving me no choice but to kill myself,” Joe said.
I sat there on the cool concrete floor of Dad’s barn with my hands caked with grease.
“Well, then we’re going to get you out of there,” I said to Joe.
“Oh, whatever. Dad feels good about the place.”
“I’ll talk to him.”
“Don’t. It’s fine. Seriously. It’s a pretty expensive place. I give them files full of stories so they feel like they really cracked me. I just talk and talk. But I know it’s wasted breath because in the end they cannot care about anything except my salvation.”
“What I care about is that you just said you had to kill yourself.”
“But see, if I choose to live, despite all their bullshit and lies, then I win,” Joe said, smiling.
“Right, but they’re not helping you live. They’re convincing you to go the other way.”
“So what’s new? Nobody helps me. Now when I get time to myself I sit there listening to that Jane’s Addiction tape you sent me. That’s about all I do but at least that music is real.”
Ritual de lo Habitual hadn’t been released yet and Joe was one of its first devoted listeners. He lay in his room with a Walkman and let his head fill with the soaring bass-driven suite of songs that constitute the second half of the recording: “Three Days,” “Then She Did …,” “Of Course,” and “Classic Girl.” Lots of stuff that is pretty about this album was born in pain and awareness, like the song “Then She Did …,” which is about Perry Farrell’s mother, who committed suicide when he was only three years old. In the song, she meets in the afterlife with Perry’s girlfriend, who died of an overdose. Joe figured if someone could live through that kind of double loss and make something out of it that was not only beautiful but also reverent and even celebratory, a paean to life itself, then there was hope for him, too.
“That album saved my life,” Joe said. “That’s not an exaggeration.”
I’ll have to tell Perry that one day. We cranked over the Yamaha for a bit and it ran.
“Hey!” said Dad as Joe buzzed it up and down the driveway. “It runs!”
“We want to go to a river,” I told him.
“Let’s go see the new cabin,” said Dad.
I didn’t want to go to the cabin because I was afraid of the disappointment. It couldn’t be what we wanted, so why subject ourselves to the misery? I had come here to see Joe, not indulge Dad’s happy-family fantasy. But Joe was only out of rehab for the weekend, and Dad was so excited about the cabin he had just built on the deer camp. In fact, he had stopped referring to it as “the deer camp” and started calling it “the cabin.” Joe didn’t really want to go there, either, but he told me, “Oh, what the fuck. At least it’s outdoors,” and then off we went.
Dad was forty-six and divorced and starting to make real money with Delta Design so of course he bought a Harley. We gave him no end of shit about it. He tried to hide his distress at the way it messed up his pretty black hair. We teased him: “Gonna get the outlaw gang back together and open a hair salon?”
“Screw you guys; I was riding before you were born,” he replied, looking hurt. That was true; I have an old black-and-white picture of me astride his Honda 90 while I was still in diapers.
Anne rode with Dad and Joe rode with me on my BMW. His old Yamaha wasn’t running well enough to take it that far. It was good to have a direction shaped only by hot August wind. Vectors and curls of air hurrying eastward rushed at us from across the bright Concord vineyards and the backs of Holsteins. Beyond every fencerow rose more sizzling hay and corn. We stopped to run our hands through the yellow water of the Rabbit River where it tumbled over the short millpond dam at Hamilton.
Joe told me not to expect too much from the deer camp. It had twenty acres of popple that had been logged for pulp and pallets about five or more years earlier, a good bit of forested swamp, and then a lot of sand up front along the road.
“Ike said he never put any hogs or anything on that seventy-five because it was all sand,” Dad said. “His boy, Iran, saw a lot of deer in there, though.”
I had reread Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac during the conflict over Tompkins Square Park, and I thought there might be some parallels with Bruce’s place. As far as I could tell, they seemed similar in their soil and their history, and the reasons they came into the lives of our respective families. Leopold was looking for a hunting camp in 1934 when he bought a ruined farm along the Wisconsin River for eight bucks an acre, a lot of blow-sand cut over during the big timber boom and then put to corn that had quickly exhausted the thin humus. His place in “Sand County,” which was a made-up name, had a tiny old outbuilding on it that he rebuilt as a cabin and that his five kids called “the shack.” The spring geese and woodcock he observed so beautifully in that book came around as he and his wife and kids all dug in to replant the native pines. But then he saw more.
Leopold was no mystic, but rather a scientist largely regarded as the father of modern wild game management, and he came to see the moral purpose and even the fate of humankind as intertwined with the land. This revelation came from observing his family’s engagement with the worn-out cornfields: the more time Leopold’s family spent at the shack, the more the place called to them, and they started restoring it to native plants. The more the place responded to their restoration work, the more they all loved it. It wasn’t an economic transaction; it was a love relationship. It was relatedness. The love they felt for each other came partly from the land, and Leopold saw he needed to extend ethical consideration to it. His subsequent essay, “The Land Ethic,” stated that the biotic community that included the land deserved more than just an economic value, but actual moral or ethical protection.
“We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in,” he wrote in that essay.
Maybe we had that kind of sand farm, I didn’t know. The only hunting cabin I had ever known was Mr. Card’s, which was a square box of peeled pine logs with two small bedrooms and a bathroom behind a large room with a fieldstone fireplace and an open kitchen. He ran a generator for electricity and water. I figured Dad was building a cabin like that.
But I was afraid to expect anything from it. I wasn’t about to plant a berry bush and then get criticized if it grew thorns or died. I was desperate to get my hands in that dirt, but everything I’d ever known about Dad said it was a setup for judgment and failure. He was too rigid and controlling to let this be a place of freedom. Leopold’s family was probably close-knit long before they started restoring their land, and both their feelings and their place only got better as they worked. I believed, sadly, that Dad had some idea like that in his own head, but we weren’t close.
Joe seemed happy to be out on the road, so I decided to simply enjoy a nice ride together. We were on our way to a green spot on the map.
After about three hours of riding, we got into a remote area near the White River, and Dad slowed down on a piece of humpy two-lane where the swamp and winter frost had heaved the road up in spots. We plowed through thick clouds of gnats and turned onto a two-track entering the camp. You could barely see the entrance in the tall grass along the road, and that’s how the uncles liked it. The heavy bikes slowly bounced along the two-track with a blackwater forest of red maple and aspen to the left; on the right shimmered acre after acre of lichen-covered yellow sand. Joe wasn’t kidding when he said the front seventy-five was mostly sand. South of this big field stood a five-acre plantation of orange, wind-gnarled Scots pines and then more exposed sand with the occasional tree stuck in it. The sun was intense when the wind dropped. White cumulous clouds blotted the blue sky. A long train of deerflies formed behind us as we rolled up the sandy tractor path to a thin stand of forty-foot red pines and a spanking new cabin beneath them sided in blood-brown cedar, where we stopped.
I pulled off my helmet and the place rushed at me. A stand of aspen along the swamp shimmered and hurrahed. The flies looped in comet-like trajectories. Slow-building gusts of hot west wind puffed out the cheeks of the red pines above us, blown out in long, satisfied exhalations, shwaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh. The absence of human sounds was tremendous. The shade falling on the cabin smelled of pine and the root-beer odor of sassafras roots pulled from disturbed sand and reindeer lichen and black swamp muck and a long emptiness.
As green spots on the map go, it was everything that I ever wanted in this world. Dad knew us so well. I knew he honestly wanted all of us to love it. I did love it, instantly.
Dad combed his hair and moved us into the cabin, which was a small, pine-smelling house with a walkout basement. It had a good-sized living room and three teeny bedrooms upstairs for the uncles and aunts and then three bunkrooms downstairs and double doors to the outside wide enough to drive a tractor into the basement. He had begun construction in May and now it was
the end of August and it was pretty much done. Brett was the only one who had seen it under construction, as he had used the wheezy old Delta Design truck to deliver the pine siding that made up the interior walls. The curtains were hung. It was full of a mishmash of furnishings and appliances from the houses of my uncles and aunts. I pushed the curtains back and stared out the windows.
“No, hey, we keep the curtains shut so the deer don’t see us,” said Dad.
I looked at him. “It’s the middle of summer.”
“We just don’t want to spook them,” he said. “Let’s leave them closed.”
This didn’t bode well. I jerked the slider open and went out on the sand where the porch would be. If I was going to spook the deer, I was going to spook them all the way. It was searing hot in the sun. Out in front of the cabin lay a two-acre field of sand with a couple of immature oaks. I needed to feel that field under my feet, so I walked out there. Dad came out and draped a white handkerchief on his coif to keep the bugs off, then pointed out the lay of the place: the 75-acre front piece ran parallel to the road, and then the 20-acre woodlot came off it to the south like the stem of a T. He had showed us on the plat map how, south of that stand of pulpwood, lay a 120-acre beaver bog marked “USA,” which meant it was federal land.
“I need to see that bog,” I said, suddenly feeling like a man set before a gigantic feast. The bog lay in the center of the mile-square section, far from the road no matter which side you came in on. “Let’s go back there.”
Dad said he didn’t want to disturb the place by walking through it, but he could see I was excited, and after a minute he relented. The two-track leading through the south twenty was pocked everywhere with hoofprints large and small; deer were thick in there. Turkeys had kicked up the leaves and we found marks in the sand where a grouse had dusted its feathers against ticks. We spent some time by the bog examining a great old hollow yellow birch full of porcupines and ringed with an avalanche of porcupine poo. But you wouldn’t say the place was pretty. It was a wreck. The openings on the front seventy-five were like the pictures of Leopold’s sand farm before he started to plant, when it was just a few trees sticking out of thin grass and weeds. In contrast with the dense third-growth oak forests, cedar swamps, and lush farm fields that lay all around it, this deer camp was caught between phases: it wasn’t a forest or a swamp or a farm. As we kicked through it, our bootlaces and pant legs were bejeweled with burdock and sand bur. The twenty-acre popple woodlot was thick with head-high suckers, and beyond that was the bog where loons and geese were screaming. The front acreage seemed starved for shade. It was like a beggar with her hand out on the side of a lost country road.