by Dylan Hicks
A few months after I bought the Hope LP, I bought a used Wayne Shorter album that had also belonged to Grady McGill, and then, maybe a year after that, another album exiled from his collection, this one by the then-popular R&B singer Gregory Abbott. I’d taken McGill for a hardcore jazz collector, a type normally dismissive of modern pop, so his ownership, however short term, of Abbott’s album surprised me. On the Shorter album, Schizophrenia, he’d checked his two favorite cuts; on the Abbott, he’d written the words “As will I” next to the album’s closer, “I’ll Find a Way.”
Years later, probably in 1996, I met Grady at a birthday party thrown for a locally notable tenor saxophonist. I knew it was Grady McGill even before I learned his surname. Grady isn’t a common name and it was a jazz crowd, so I can’t be credited with much clairvoyance there, but for a few minutes I felt the excitement of knowing more than I was assumed to know. He was a tall, large-framed, slouchy, mostly bald computer programmer, but for all that not bad looking. Taking in Grady’s size—he must have been six foot seven—I recalled the two checked cuts on Schizophrenia, “Playground” and “Tom Thumb,” both by a man named Shorter, and wondered if some sort of wish-fulfillment psychology had been at work or in play. We chatted comfortably about jazz for ten minutes or so. He was elegant, relaxed, melancholy. When our conversation began to lose steam, I said, “You must be Grady McGill.” By then I had six of his old records, and named each one. Grady was flattered by my secret admiration, if that’s what it was, and from the party we drove in separate cars to the studio where he kept most of his records, some twenty thousand jazz, blues, R&B, and pop LPs, plus about a thousand forty-fives, a few hundred seventy-eights, and two or three stacks of CDs.
Grady had two old floor lamps in the studio space, but ignored them in favor of unpleasant fluorescent overheads, chosen, I guess, to best illuminate my browsing. It was the kind of light Wanda liked to fuck in, I thought, risking with the thought a noticeable erection that might have misled Grady. I hate to fuck in the dark, mostly because it leaves me with so few images to return to the next day, but severe light is perhaps worse even than puritan darkness; I doubt Wanda’s subsequent partners have tolerated it. “There’s a stack of duplicates and some other things I’m ready to sell over there,” Grady said, “if you want to look them over.”
“I probably won’t buy anything tonight,” I said.
“That’s fine,” he said, standing on a stepladder to see if he could stop one of the fluorescent light tubes from buzzing (he couldn’t), then resting on the concave seat of a brown recliner, in reach of which was a stereo system that probably received good marks in some early sixties issue of HiFi Review.
“Do you keep your favorites at home?” I said, turning away from the record shelves to look at him.
“Not exactly,” Grady said. For several minutes he didn’t elaborate. As I was getting to the jazz D’s, he said, “I spend every Sunday here, listening to my buys from the previous week. Then I stack them up in order of preference and bring home the top five or six. I listen to those at home until I feel I know them well, if they do after all seem to deserve that, to be known well. I try to bring home only deserving records, but sometimes I misjudge. My ears get tired by the end of the day.”
“Sure,” I said.
“Isn’t that the challenge,” he said, “to spend time only with things that deserve to be known well?”
“That might be.”
“I mean people too, even though they’re not things. That’s why people move to new places.”
He had some highly valuable records.
“Or for a job,” Grady said. “For a lot of reasons, I guess.”
“Yeah.”
“But in my experience people are the same everywhere, so moving doesn’t help.”
I said, “That reminds me of something Werther said.”
“A friend of yours?”
“No, from a book.”
“A man in a book?”
“Yeah, a young man in a book,” I said.
“Is that what interests you, young men in books?”
“No.”
“So what did he say?”
“What you said: What are people like here? Like everywhere!”
“Yes, that’s right,” Grady said.
“Or it’s something like that. I can’t quote it verbatim,” I said.
“Verbatim. Do you speak Latin?”
“No.”
“I had to study it as a boy, but I’ve forgotten everything. It’s horrible how much one forgets. You’ll see. Even the albums I say I love: I pull them out sometimes to look at them, and I stare at the titles, try to remember the tunes, and there’s nothing, often there’s nothing. So every February I bring home fifty or sixty of my favorite albums, and just savor those. I really do, I savor them, and I don’t bother at all with my recent acquisitions. So I should change the answer to your earlier question and say that yes, I do keep my favorites at home, but only in February.”
“Maybe you should pick one of the longer months for that,” I said.
“No, I need it to be February. I’m in rough straits by then.”
“Yeah,” I said, looking over at him. He blew his nose and put the hanky back in his khakis. I asked if he collected any country records.
“Not really. I have a Hank Garland, a few by Willie Nelson, one by Bill Wills.”
“Bob Wills?”
“Bob, right. And you, you like country?”
“No,” I said.
“Oh.”
“I love it.”
“Ha, that’s good,” he said. “I love it. Did you make that up?”
“No.”
“Maybe I’ll use that.”
“Do you like jazz?” I said.
“Beg pardon?”
“Do you like jazz?”
“Oh, right. No … that’s good. I love it.”
A few weeks ago, I pulled out Hope Springs Eternal and listened to it on vintage, long-corded headphones, stolen from Wade, I may as well now confess, over three decades ago. Inside the jacket I found a pencil drawing of a bald man with a thick mustache, prominent cheekbones, lonely eyes, and, on his flat forehead, two differently sized avian furrows. He was wearing a plaid shirt with a narrow, button-down collar. Underneath the drawing were the words, “Grady McGill, jazz man.” I knew it was Wade’s drawing, both because I recognized his hand and because I knew Wade would distinguish a jazz man, a man who loves jazz, from a jazzman, a man who plays jazz, although on the other hand Wade loved ambiguity more than fine distinctions. “I’m a red man,” he once said at a restaurant, meaning not that he was an American Indian but that he preferred red wines to whites, though the waiter (“My grandma was Mandan”) reached the former conclusion.
I also knew it was Wade’s drawing because he left a number of other scraps in my records, how many I’m not sure, since I’m trying to discover them naturally, in the course of regular listening. So far, despite periods of financial duress, I haven’t had to sell any of my several thousand records. I’ve even kept the thousand or so that I never play and have no desire to play. Sometimes I pull out one of those undesired records, partly to challenge my ear, partly in random search of Wade’s leavings (and in so doing I suppose I’m disrupting the course of what I just called regular listening). The Hope record, though not his best, isn’t one I’d consider undesired, though I guess I haven’t played it in nearly two decades, or I’ve played it but overlooked Wade’s drawing. Had there not been a legend underneath the drawing, I might not have recognized Grady—I see now that the cheekbones are especially off, the whole face short on flesh. Still, there’s a resemblance. Probably a coincidence, but maybe Wade knew Grady too. Maybe they’re still in touch. I didn’t meet Grady till long after Wade left Minneapolis, so I couldn’t have described him to Wade. I’m not sure how meaningful or eerie this really is, this possibility that Wade knew Grady and left a clue pointing to their acquaintance in that Elmo Hope LP, but it seemed that w
ay, eerie and meaningful, when I discovered the drawing a few weeks ago.
Also not so long ago—it might have been a year ago now—I found a strand of long black hair sticking like a bookmark out of a 1990 world almanac. Right away I was sure it was Wade’s. I held it up to the light. It was sable. It’s possible that the almanac hadn’t been opened since Wade’s stay with Wanda and me, and that the hair was never displaced during my several moves or at the yard sale at which the almanac was predictably passed over. In other LPs I’ve found Wade’s pornographic drawings, an annotated take-out menu, a few defaced dollar bills, and one poem, slipped inside the Carpenters’ Close to You:
Alison, the carpenter’s wife, flaxen
maculate Mary, her laugh bawdy yet
soft,
reaches across centuries (her alchemic
chemise!) to make a middling American
hard.
I’ve read worse. That’s the only poem I’ve found in my LPs, but I found another one written in minuscule script on the interior bottom of the matchbox Wade left, circled with a green rubber band, in the glove compartment of his hatchback. All the other items had been removed. This poem read:
Baby, I need your loving
Got (!)
To have all your loving.
A ready-made. If I find another of Wade’s poems in my records, I’ll submit the trio to literary journals. They’ll be rejected without encouragement, I’m sure, but I might take some comfort in that.
Chicagoland
IN LATE SEPTEMBER OR EARLY OCTOBER OF 1998, I WAS gently summoned to Chicago’s northwestern suburbs to get the last of my mother’s things. “There’s some stuff I think you’d like to have,” my aunt had said over the phone, “some keepsakes, and her favorite easy chair.” I’d been to Chicagoland twice since the funeral of late ’91: once in early ’92, to fill Wade’s former hatchback with some of Marleen’s belongings; another time in ’96, to finally apologize to my aunt and uncle for my callow and callous behavior at and around the time of my mother’s funeral (my uninspired eulogy; my crude beseechments of near and distant relatives for plane fare to Berlin; my actorly tactlessness and calculated, ostentatious frazzle: the loosened knit tie; the tousled hair; the pant leg trapped inside the sock; the incoherent, vaporously metaphysical responses to simple condolences).
The hatchback wouldn’t hold the chair, and I couldn’t afford to rent a truck, so I borrowed the failed singer-songwriter Maggie Tollefsrud’s van, which had been driven nearly three hundred thousand miles and nicknamed. Maggie and I first met as fellow temps at a print shop, assembling ad supplements for the Sunday paper. Somehow, though I dislike being onstage, she later talked me into playing bass guitar, rhythm six-string, rhythm synthesizer, ornamental electric piano, and occasional vibraslap in several of her bands, including Terrycloth, the Sullen Nieces, Hash Slingers, and Mag and Her Wheels. A few of these bands made vanity records of not entirely merited obscurity.
My other motivation for going to Chicago in ’98 was to see Maryanne, who’d moved there sometime in ’92. I’d thought about contacting her earlier but always came up with a reason not to. Now the idea seemed more pressing, and I managed to get her mobile number from a shared acquaintance. She seemed unsurprised to hear from me, even said she’d been meaning to call me, though it had been a long time since we’d seen each other, the early spring of ’92 it must have been, and we’d never socialized without Wanda or Wade and Wanda. On the phone, she said she had a six-year-old son named Rowan and was working at a shop that engraved plaques and trophies for schools, businesses, chess clubs, curling leagues, and the like. She said she’d love to see me, said so with a mellow yet frank enthusiasm that made my penis creep tinglingly away from my slightly tacky testicular skin. I decided to drive directly into the city and pick up my mother’s last unclaimed things on the way home.
A few mornings later, I got to see the skyscraper sunrise from the Kennedy Expressway. In the city itself I spotted what looked like a funky breakfast joint, but I couldn’t find a parking space big enough for the Rhino, so I kept driving, eventually wound up at a regional franchise where I spent an hour reading the paper and eating not truly scrambled eggs and ultimately disagreeable hash browns. It still felt too early to call Maryanne—we’d discussed a midmorning meeting—so I left the van in the restaurant’s lot and took a walk, sticking to a single street so I wouldn’t get lost. The sky was the color of grimy snow, the trees mostly leafless, and the air felt cooler than the forty-eight degrees claimed by a bank’s digital thermometer, but the walk did me some good, and by the time I returned to the van my dour achiness had given way to achy punchiness.
Maryanne lived in a warehouse in Wicker Park. I’m pretty sure it was in Wicker Park, but maybe it just seemed like Wicker Park. I don’t know Chicago well. More and more I think it was probably not Wicker Park. She came down to meet me, and we took a freight elevator, the kind that requires a key to operate, up to the third floor where she lived. Like a janitrix, she had her keys on a leather ring hanging from one of her belt loops. She was wearing red jeans and a cleavage-revealing Gypsy blouse that mostly covered her full hips. “Is this a legal residence?” I asked. “I don’t know,” she said. “It has a bathroom.” As we walked down a long hallway, she explained that she subleased a corner of a recording studio from a guy named Luke. The words “Smash Palace” were stenciled in red spray paint on the studio/apartment’s heavy door. Maryanne moved closer to me and stood on the toes of her white nurses’ loafers. I leaned down and her lips brushed my ear when she whispered, “I’ve never actually seen a band come through, and I’ve been living here a year and a half.”
It was an enormous space, once a tea factory, Maryanne told me. The windows were covered by soundproofing material, but there was enough light from three banks of overheads and a Tiffany-style lamp that stood near Luke, who was arched over a workbench. There were faded Oriental rugs all around, overlapping each other like sleeping kittens. Luke said “hey” in a low voice when he heard us come in, raised his hand to say “just a sec.” From what I could make out, he was burning a cigarette mark into a drum-machine pad. He had frizzy brown hair and was wearing pajamas, expensive but unfashionable tennis shoes, and a velour bathrobe with a torn belt loop. He officially lived in an apartment a few miles away, I later learned, but spent most of his time at the warehouse and often slept on a soft leather couch in the control room. When he finished his work with the drum machine he greeted us less passively, answered some of my questions about the studio, and handed me an unwanted rate sheet. Maryanne went to check on Rowan while Luke showed me around. The space was shaped like a fat L, with the control room at the top of the vertical line and much of the horizontal line unused except for storage. I spotted something like thirty electric and acoustic guitars on stands or in dusty cases; also a mandolin, a banjo, a cittern, and a gimbri (“What do you call that thing?” I asked, and Luke misidentified it); plus old brown synthesizers and shiny new red ones; digital samplers; garagey European organs, Hammond organs, and a Leslie speaker cabinet; a half-dozen electric pianos; four upright pianos and a disgraced grand; a Mellotron; two clavinets; a theremin; two marimbas; a vibraphone; drum machines and nonmechanical drums; several turntables; a precarious mound of boom boxes resembling installation art; a few dozen microphones and mike stands; a large, rectangular spring-reverb box; probably a hundred stomp boxes and other electronic umlauts; a yellow racetrack for toy cars; and, reportedly, in the control room, which I never entered, a British mixing board once owned by Todd Rundgren, and a German tape machine that had taken in some of the basic tracks for Don Henley’s Building the Perfect Beast, or so Luke said, in a tone that attempted to both deprecate the album and call for its imprimatur.
Maryanne returned to the tracking room and smoked a cigarette as Luke finished giving his overlong tour. She seemed more subdued than she’d been when I knew her before (or maybe relaxed is better—I don’t mean to say she seemed repressed or conquered). She a
sked Luke if Rowan could watch TV in the control room awhile; Luke seemed cheered by the idea. Then she took me to the end of the L opposite the control room, to a byroom something like a large serif off the L’s horizontal line, where she and Rowan had their beds and dressers, a TV, a portable refrigerator, an enormous sculpture of some sort, and not much else. Luke’s tour hadn’t driven deep into the L’s horizontal line, so I’d caught only a glimpse of this byroom, had heard the TV but hadn’t seen Maryanne’s son, who was now sitting on his single bed watching a kids’ sitcom. There were toys, watercolor trays, books, loose sheets of paper, videos, and Pokémon cards heaped on, around, and underneath the bottom shelf of the old TV stand, but aside from that the byroom was fairly neat. Both beds were made. Rowan had black, home-cut hair and sounded like he needed to clear his throat. He looked a bit like Wade. “You can watch till the next commercial break,” Maryanne told Rowan, “and then you’re going to hang out with Luke.” The three of us watched the program for a minute. I laughed politely at a punch line. When Maryanne smiled at me, I pointed to the sculpture and said, “Did you make this?” My tone might have been too incredulous. “Well, I’m making it,” she said, and then the commercials started and she turned off the TV and took Rowan’s hand.