by Dylan Hicks
BOARDED WINDOWS
Boarded
Windows
A NOVEL
Dylan Hicks
COFFEE HOUSE PRESS
MINNEAPOLIS
2012
COPYRIGHT © 2012 by Dylan Hicks
COVER AND BOOK DESIGN by Linda Koutsky
COVER PHOTOGRAPH © Frank Gaglione, Getty Images
AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPH © Sean Smuda
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CIP INFORMATION
Hicks, Dylan.
Boarded windows / Dylan Hicks.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-56689-297-1 (alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-56689-308-4 (ebook)
I. Title.
PS3608.I2785B63 2012
813′.6—DC23
2011029253
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Samantha Gillison, Nor Hall, J. C. Hallman, and Brad Zellar for their generous advice and assistance. Thanks to Chris, Anitra, Jessica, Tricia, Linda, Andrea, and all at Coffee House. My parents have always been wonderful and supportive: in alphabetical order, they are Don and Elaine Hicks, Robert and Terry Roos, and Margaret Stewart. Jackson Hicks’s talent, wit, and kindness is a constant inspiration to me. Above all I want to thank Nina Hale, who’s even more impossibly great than John Coltrane’s solo on our apt wedding song, “My One and Only Love.”
CREDITS
Let the Wind Carry Me. Words and Music by JONI MITCHELL. Copyright © 1972 (Renewed) CRAZY CROW MUSIC. All Rights Administered by SONY/ATV MUSIC PUBLISHING, 8 Music Square West, Nashville, TN 37203. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission.
For Nina
Blue
THE LAST TIME I SAW WADE SALEM WAS THE MORNING of December 21, 1991, through the window of a green-and-white taxi. I stood on the sidewalk’s lumpy mattress of snow and watched him toss a backpack to the other side of the seat, and pull off his pomponed Washington Redskins cap with a nod toward urgency. The taxi was overheated, it’s safe to imagine. I had recently turned twenty-one. I had even more recently lent Wade the backpack, in the way one lends out a quarter or a piece of gum. In the trunk was my former guitar, a midpriced acoustic on which three or four nights earlier Wade had played “Gentle on My Mind” and “The Poor Orphan Child.”
Something—my sticky-zippered backpack, or, more likely, the Redskins cap—must have slid off the backseat’s slippery vinyl, because just as the taxi was about to pull out into the lane, its wheels creaking the snow, Wade leaned over (to pick up the cap, I’m speculating), erasing himself from the rear passenger-side window, like I and millions of others had slide-erased stale sketches from our magnetic drawing toys, such as the one Wade long ago brought home to me, unwrapped, as an ingratiating gift. His head reemerged as the taxi made its first turn toward the airport. For a moment I lingered on the sidewalk, across the busy westward one-way from a pretentiously named Nixon-era apartment building, its mansard roof covering most of its face like the Fat Albert character’s nonpomponed cap. The bare trees and dirty boulevard snow were aptly gloomy, but the sky was blue, seemed too blue for the nostril-stinging cold. I felt tired and brittle, wished my feelings of good riddance weren’t so mixed with longing.
Man with a Pipe
HE HAD CALLED ME IN EARLY OCTOBER. HE SAID HE’D heard through one of my erstwhile Enswell “playmates” that I was living with a woman, “an older woman,” he added, belaboring the jokey condescension. He asked a few questions about Wanda (only five years older than I). He asked about my mother. He said he was moving to Berlin, after a final tour of the States. He said something about Hank Snow and the incantatory power of American town and city names, and that he’d be in Minneapolis soon. It was probably six days later, around midnight, when he called. Wanda was already in bed. “I’m at a pay phone on Lake Street,” he said. “Looks like I’m sharing the corner with some working girls.” At most he was ten minutes away, but an hour passed before he buzzed. He smiled broadly when he saw me coming down the stairs; the immoderate width of his mouth made it hard for him to smile narrowly. We pumped hands in the vestibule, somewhat awkwardly, either for emotional reasons or because, having left my keys upstairs, I at the last second remembered to stop the fast-closing door with my left foot (resting demi-pointe, it might have looked to a fanciful observer), and as a result was slightly off balance. “I’m still taller,” he said. He was holding a yellowed pillowcase, presumably containing clothes and toiletries.
His American hatchback, also yellow and about a decade old, was filled, to an extent that would have frustrated visibility and fuel economy, with about a dozen square cardboard boxes filled with LPs. Loose LPs had been stuffed like Styrofoam sea horses in the car’s few unfilled spaces. Quite a few discs had slid out of their jackets—Wade always threw away the inner sleeves (the bunchy plastic ones he threw away with particular contempt)—and I mentally cringed at how roughly he stacked and fingered the unclothed vinyl, and how some of the discs had picked up flakes of peanut skin and other car-floor garbage. “These are just my country records,” he said. “I sold everything else—everything, barring the car and the contents of its glove box, and the road atlas and the clothes off my back, as well as the clothes off my feet, legs, groin, and head, and a sleeping bag that I intend to keep rolled up and stashed behind your couch indefinitely.” I nodded. “And the few items in this pillowcase,” he said, swinging the half-empty pillowcase till it wrapped one and a half times around his index finger.
Having forgotten to prop open the door, we had to buzz Wanda several times to let us in. She was a heavy sleeper like me. (These days I have trouble sleeping and suffer from nocturnal polyuria.) I staggered two or three ineffectual buzzes, then Wade stepped in to accelerate things. “She’s probably incorporating the sound into her dreams,” he said, buzzing with the resoluteness, I thought at the time (now I dislike the analogy), of a lab rat attempting to self-administer a drug, the supply of which has been depleted or removed. “Right now she’s dreaming of a reversing forklift,” he said. I caught a whiff of the sweat-abused sheepskin lining of my calfskin slippers, my mother’s last gift to me, it turned out, or last antemortem gift, since I did, only a few months later, begin to inherit some of her things. Wanda finally came down, squinted irritably through a quick introduction, and trudged back up to bed. “She’s exactly my height,” Wade said, palming the top of his head, extending his arm as if Wanda were still there to vindicate his estimate, then retracting his arm to scratch his head, whose hair, excepting one handsome gray cataract, was still shiny and black, as black as an Ad Reinhardt canvas in an attic at night, as black as the vision of the painted red door, the black of the blackest stereo component, the black that, like the song by Los Bravos, is black, with the same shoulder terminus I remembered, the same way of falling over his cheeks yet leaving most of his forehead rampart exposed, the same slicing part down the middle, like Geronimo, or Neil Young circa After the Gold Rush, James Taylor circa Sweet Baby James and Two-Lane Blacktop. (Although I see now from a photograph that Taylor’s part was softer than Wade’s.) “Exactly” went too far, but later I confirmed that Wanda’s and Wade’s driver’
s licenses each read “6-2.” Of course, such numbers are self-reported, and my sense is that DMV agents challenge only the most outlandish misrepresentations.
“We’ve got a little storage locker in the basement,” I said, pointing to the record boxes. “About this time last year, I was living in a storage locker,” Wade said. “Just me and my sleeping bag, my books, my records, a few minor works of regional art—solitary refinement, you might say, a condition the NoDak aesthete grows accustomed to. Has the basement ever flooded?”
I didn’t know that history, so we humped the heavy boxes up to the one-bedroom apartment. Once inside he pulled a bootjack from his pillowcase and took off his orange-brown cowboy boots, then his fringed suede coat and flannel shirt. Underneath those layers he wore a faded blue bandanna and a black T-shirt that read, “Here comes one good-looking Indian!” a feather serving as the capital I in the word Indian. And he was, no question, exceptionally good-looking. I’d heard my mother say some bitter things about him. “A dirtbag,” for instance, and more colorfully, “the scum lurking under the ridge of a penis acorn.” But usually at the same time she’d recall his looks. “God, he was good-looking,” she’d say. He was macrocephalic, as movie stars are said to be. His jaw was almost squared, with a mild cleft. He had glassy, orangy skin, an aquiline nose, brown eyes under heavy lids. If one were to draw a circle between his arching eyebrows, one would have the simplest frontal rendering of a midsized bird in flight. I motioned to a seat on the couch, but he sat gingerly on one of the box towers, drinking tap water out of a filmy tumbler while I found him some couch-clothes, a pillow, and a scratchy, football-themed comforter mottled in ways redolent of male adolescence. (He didn’t bring his sleeping bag in the house till a few days later, and never used it.) I offered him the polenta Wanda had brought home a few nights earlier, and he ate from the glossy to-go box without complete decorum. He took out a lighter and an ornate metal pipe from his jeans. “There’s only one hit left in here, but I’ll pack more if you want,” he said. Uncharacteristically, I declined. He’d driven that day from Columbus, he said. “You must’ve left early,” I said. “I left late,” he said, “late last night. I have to stop all the time to piss, so I like to give myself a nice time-cushion. I almost hit a fawn outside Tomah. You’re not supposed to swerve, but I did, and it worked.” When he got up for more water, I read the back of his T-shirt (“There goes one good-looking Indian!”), and noted the saggy seat of his dull dark jeans, epigones of the faded and close-fitting yet not teasingly feminine Erizeins he had worn when I was a kid.
That’s more than I remember from that night. It was nearly twenty years ago. What was it Wade said? It was something like: “I’ve done a shitload of skinny-dipping in the River Lethe, taken in many mouthfuls.” He liked to blend the demotic and the fancy, liked to be imagined naked. In any case, I’ve done some embroidering, intentionally and unwittingly, and will continue to flesh things out with invented details and almost wholly reconstructed dialogue. My story is in part drawn from other stories, from the colored and conflicting stories that Wade and my mother told me, so in spots this book will be embroidered embroidery, in service, I hope, to some fundamental emotional truth, even if at times I fear that such foundations elude me. I’ve been said to be cold, passive, and evasive; a nonprofessional once spittingly diagnosed me with borderline adult autism, and while I trust she overstated the case, it does often seem as if I’m experiencing things at one remove, that my feelings, like an elusive sneeze, vex and tingle but don’t really come. The problem has worsened over the years; I haven’t cried in a decade; I don’t hear music in the same flooding way I used to. For a long time I blamed this growing coolness on everything that happened and all that I learned in late ’91, defined myself through those events and their numbing, sometimes twisting effects. I’m not sure yet whether writing this book will combat or continue this pattern, but I suspect it will only further blur and tangle my legitimate, fabricated, and passed-down memories, and I suppose that’s what I want. “Why are you people so [the exact adverb escapes me] obsessed with the limitations of memory?” someone once asked me. I didn’t pursue whom she meant by “you people,” didn’t come up with an incisive rebuttal. It was she who was really on the defensive. I had challenged one of her stories, a rather too psychologically pat story, or a story imputing dubious and convenient motives to some ex-boyfriend or relative, a story from her deep, amnestic childhood, a story for which she seemed an unlikely primary source, a story derived from photo-album captions (“into dolls”), photo-album commentaries (“you loved that doll”), from movies or books, an epistemologically untenable (I argued) story of some type, patched together in some way, I can’t be more specific, in part because I can’t remember the story, only that I couldn’t accept it. Had it been cooked differently or with less certainty, I might have hidden my skepticism. “It’s my story!” she said, more than once, but that was precisely what I was trying to question.
Embourgeoisement Looms
I WAS DUE AT WORK BY NINE THE MORNING AFTER Wade’s arrival, but if I was following my normal schedule for days on which I worked the nine-to-six shift, I got out of bed about twenty minutes after eight. I wasn’t so much lazy as efficient: my showering and tooth-brushing were nearly symbolic; I hadn’t yet taken up coffee; and I wasn’t delayed by vestiary decisions, since I only had one pair of work pants (cavalry twills in Lake Michigan blue; at the time I thought they were called “Calvary twills”), one pair of work shoes (pastiche-cordovan loafers aged to a clownish red at the toes and heels), and four or five billowy button-downs, white or pastel and always dirt-checkered on the inside cuffs. Most days I made it to the corner—often with wet, sometimes freezing hair and an ersatz bagel in my hand or mouth, some crumbs dangling below my lower lip—in time to catch the bus that got me to work ten to fifteen minutes late. I worked in downtown Minneapolis at an unhip record store, a shabby, not terribly profitable branch of a locally based national chain, now shuttered. For the purposes of this book, I’ve been tempted to give myself a different early nineties job, something comparable to the record-store job in terms of status and remuneration, yet more fertile, original, and attractive. For example, I have an acquaintance, roughly fifteen years my senior, who makes hand-carved Judaica and Nativity scenes (his latitude and large collection of Coltrane bootlegs are just two of the things I admire about him), and there’s no reason I couldn’t have served, during the early nineties, as his assistant or paid apprentice. I’m picturing it now: the wood and so forth, the tools, the bench or what have you, the dusty tape deck playing Hedy West. Considering the work, it’d be natural for master and apprentice to talk of theology, philosophy, history, politics. An antimemoir of ideas might result, the carver playing Plato to Wade’s Diogenes. But no, it wouldn’t work. One must write the tedium one knows, on top of which the carver has never been in a position to hire help. My title at the record store was full-time keyholder.
That first morning of Wade’s stay, I had time to eat my bagel at the unsteady Formica table in our small dining room, which was also a library for some of my records, and an office, in that it lodged a sewing table on which Wanda and I kept a collegiate dictionary, its spine held together with packing tape, and a word processor, whose alien-green letters shimmered around their edges as I typed my mostly plagiarized and unpublished record reviews. From this axislike dining room one could potentially see into all four of the apartment’s other rooms, though on that morning I could see only a buttery sliver of the sun-lit bathroom and none of the bedroom, its door closed to give Wanda privacy from our potentially lupine guest. In the living room, Wade had thrown off my comforter and stripped down to his briefs, socks, and bandanna. The socks were the same shade of white but of unequal length. A thick patch of hair protected his sternum. His left leg hung over our spongy, thrift-store sofa, between whose back and cushions his right foot was burrowed; one of his hands rested atop his head (itself resting on the sofa’s arm, my pillow pushed to the floo
r) as if he were securing a hat (cowboy? beret? cockscomb?) from the wind. An apparently uncomfortable pose, of the sort Lucien Freud favors for his portraits of sleepers and recliners, though I wouldn’t have made that association then. Wade was even thinner than I remembered him—his spidery legs were especially arresting—but it wasn’t a druggy thinness. When I put on my coat, he roused, looked at me confusedly, smiled slightly, and asked a few groggy questions about my job. For instance: “What kind of keys do you hold as full-time keyholder?”
“The one for the front door,” I said. “And a few others.” I’d in fact been given more keys, duties, and privileges than the FTK was officially entitled to.
“That’s a start,” he said. “Later you’ll need the keys to the kingdom and the keys to the highway, maybe those of D and B minor.” He cleared his throat and spit some phlegm into his loosely tied bandanna. “I’m gonna be a deejay in Berlin,” he said.
“Berlin Berlin or Berlin, North Dakota?”
“Berlin Berlin. That’s what the records are for. I need to ship them over, over the world-sea. I’ll need some information about your post offices.”
“Okay,” I said.
“They’re bats for C&W over there, man,” he said, now sounding more awake. “Cowboys and Indians, swinging doors, sawdust floors. They can’t get enough.”
“They’ll have to self-destruct,” I said.
“Come again?”
“‘Disco Inferno.’”
“Oh yeah,” Wade said, “Tavares.”
“The Trammps, with two m’s,” I corrected. I was standing in the doorway, my right hand gripping the door’s exterior knob, my left foot already on the hallway’s indecisively Polynesian carpet. “Well, I should probably shove—”