by Dylan Hicks
“Yeah,” I said.
“And sometimes that hurting face is what makes you hard?”
“I’m not sure I’ve exactly—”
“So I was thinking about this chair, on one of those tours with your old man.”
“Wade’s probably not my father. I mean, he might be, but …”
“Well in any case I was thinking about this chair,” Bolling said. His havelock was on the coffee table; he had hair on the sides of his head but only a few long, doglegged strands on top. “John Lennon said the Beatles couldn’t play the chair in the same way as maybe Son House could, ’cause they was from different houses”—Bolling laughed at his own pun. “So they had to build their own chairs. I was thinking about this chair. To me it was an armless wood chair, painted yellow but maybe a bit chipped.”
“Yeah, I can picture it,” I said.
“Now they have chairs that come chipped. I saw one in a catalog. So I put that chipped chair into a room, and also in the room is a little tape deck on a clear plastic table. One of those desktop tape recorders with a microphone built in. And a big Play button, and a smaller Record button next to Play.”
“Sure,” I said. I was excited to be in the basement with Bolling. I thought it was a kind of achievement to be talking to him, or listening to him, in what seemed to be so natural a fashion. He’d made some beautiful things; I’ll never forget how good “West Texas Winds” sounded when Wade and my mother Marleen listened to it through the screen on the stoop while I sat on the sofa watching their twilit heads, drums and guitars loping and floating all around me. But also I was getting tired. It was nearly two a.m. Soon the bar’s owner would ask us to leave.
“And if you press both buttons at the same time,” Bolling said, “it records whatever’s happening in the air.”
“Omnidirectionally,” I said.
“So someone comes into the room with a guitar. That’s how I picture it, but it wouldn’t have to be a guitar. My daughter plays the turntable.” Bolling smiled. “She’s a turntablist. I tease her. I say, ‘You sure did toast that toast in that toaster. Are you a toasterist?’ I do that with all the appliances. So you walk in the room with a guitar and you sit down on the chair. You push Play-Record and you play-record your song. You didn’t really write the song, the song wrote you, or it was already kicking around, but you put your name on it. When you finish, you lean over, and maybe the mike catches you knocking the guitar with a belt buckle or a wedding ring or something, and you push Pause. And then after a while someone else comes in and plays his version of the same song over the next stretch of tape. And this keeps happening. It’s a ninety-minute tape, forty-five minutes per side, and eventually someone’s song gets cut off in the middle, when the A-side ends. Someone else comes in, sits down on the chair, flips the tape over, and plays his version of the song. Some people, before they play their song, they listen to all the songs up to that point, and then they play their version. But other people, they just push Play-Record straight off. Either way, lots of ’em will walk out the room with stars in their eyes saying, ‘I just played a whole new song, or played an old song so brilliantly it may as well be new. I don’t know where it came from. Maybe from God. A gift: I have one or am one. But it’s the same shit, of course, the same song. By this time folks are crowding the halls waiting to shove into the room, while inside the room the tape keeps getting flipped over, songs layered on top of songs, and it starts to wear out. Maybe at first it was a tape like the one that swept back that dude’s hair in the Memorex commercial. But now it sounds like one of those no-case, normal-bias tapes that hang in long packs at drugstores, on those hooks they stick in those gaps in the wall—”
“Slatwall.”
“Slatwall. And then it starts to sound like a really old version of one of those shit tapes. The little tape player, its little microphone, the little tape—all o’ that’s been distorting the songs from the first, but now it’s distorting them nearly beyond all recognition. So some people finish their song, they give it a listen and get all excited ’cause they think they’ve distorted the song into a whole new song, while other folks try to play in the pure old way, just how it was supposedly meant to be played. But that comes out distorted beyond all recognition too. And some folks forget to hit record, so their song isn’t quite there, though at the same time it is, you see. I thought about all this while we were driving, and I told Wade about it. We talked a lot on those tours. This band you saw tonight, they don’t talk much. Sheila just looks out the window and smokes; Danny smokes and looks out the window. Sometimes we’ll drive for nine hours and say as many words: ‘Gotta pee,’ ‘Wanna stop?’ ‘You fading?’ ‘Here it is.’ Maybe that’s more words than nine. I don’t know how you count words like gotta and wanna.”
“I think it’s fair to call them—”
“I didn’t really mean for us to discuss that. Someday,” he went on, “the tape’s gonna snap. That’s what I realized. Or it’ll get caught in one of the spools. And no one will want to splice or untangle it.” Bolling looked up through the basement ceiling to the stage. “So I wait in the hall, I go in the room, I sit down, I play-record my song, I leave, and I wait my turn to go back in. What I figured out is that I’m hoping that someday I’ll be the one the tape snaps for. Have you ever been to a chiropractor?”
“No.”
“It doesn’t work all that well, but you always want one crunch to drive all the pain away in a flash. Now part of me knows that if I’m around to see the tape snap, it won’t really be me who snapped it; it’ll just have snapped with me in the room. But some nights, I start to think I will be able to snap it. I’m not talking about Uri Geller and what all.”
“No, I think I follow you,” I said.
“I’m saying that I’ll play the song so well, or it’ll play me so well, that I’ll become the tape; I’ll become the tape and destroy myself for the sake of the song.”
“Right, that’s it. I want something like that too.”
For a moment he honored me with stretched, vulnerable eyes. “You say Wade’s working as a deejay these days?” he said.
“As far as I know. In Berlin.”
“No kidding? I miss Germany.”
“Sometimes I think about visiting him,” I said, “but it’s too expensive. I haven’t seen him now in almost eight years. I told you how he visited me back in ’91?”
“You mentioned it,” he said.
“Well, I think he got this friend of mine pregnant back then. I think he meant to, I think he meant to father a child when he was here, so that maybe I could be the kid’s stepdad and have the family Wade could never have with me and my mom.”
Bolling squinted. “Well, it’s hard to say. Most of the time these things aren’t really mapped out like that.”
“I know. But it’s just this feeling I’ve had.”
By then the bar owner was indeed hovering around us. When Bolling rotated his neck in response, the owner nodded and said, “Yep.” We walked upstairs, Bolling holding the railing with one hand, resting the other above his left knee. We walked through the bar, now shiny and disinfected, the mustard vinyl booths sparkling like my first bike’s banana seat.
Bolling’s rhythm section was waiting in the van. He took out a sheet of paper, a list of songs labeled “Second Set.” It was strange that he had a set list, since that night he’d called out the songs on the fly, and when I studied the list later, I couldn’t remember having heard any of the scheduled material in either the first or the second set. “Y’all hungry?” he’d yelled at the start of the show, and then he and his taciturn rhythm section barreled forth, no frills, no solos, few concessions to pacing, no fear of playing five consecutive train-beat songs in G. The set list was a photocopy; some of the longer song titles disappeared into the sheet’s right side. Maybe Bolling just carried a bunch of these set lists around to distribute as souvenirs. He held the list to one of the van’s windows and signed his name under the words “Encore (if demanded).�
� Two pieces of wrinkly duct tape were attached like teddy-bear ears to the sheet’s top corners-earlier the list must have been stuck to a monitor or something, or the tape was there to lend the souvenir more authenticity. The tape left faint marks on the window after Bolling handed me the list. I hadn’t asked for an autograph and don’t like to have or keep them, though Bolling couldn’t have known that.
The Poor Orphan Child
BY DUMPING OR ABANDONING THINGS I DIDN’T NEED or couldn’t carry unassisted, I was able to cram all my stuff, including my mother’s unwieldy pink-and-blue easy chair, into Maggie Tollefsrud’s van, whose remaining benches I’d removed the night before. The van was Ford’s second-largest model and I’d used all but a few square inches of its cargo space, but I felt proudly Franciscan all the same. It was just after four o’clock on a bright Monday afternoon in ’99, the last day of May. Wanda or Maryanne would meet me at my new basement apartment in the late afternoon, or so we’d agreed about a month earlier. I would have called to confirm the plan, but had lost Wanda’s unlisted number.
I should have tried harder to track it down, because when I got to her place no one was home and the doors and windows were boarded over (naturally I thought of “Boarded Windows” from Bolling’s songster-for-hire days). The boards had been nailed unevenly, I noticed, and there were several nails on the ground, their shanks curled and bent, pointing to a particularly inept carpenter. Taped to the door was a thin sheet of printer paper labeled “Notice”; under this heading were the sort of sentences once used to test typists and typewriters: “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country,” and so forth. I pounded on one of the windows, pointlessly, then grabbed a warm bottle of diet soda from the van’s cockpit and started walking to the UCC church I’d mistakenly parked near on that afternoon a month or so earlier. Church secretaries, I’ve found, are as a rule more generous with their phones than shopkeepers.
Before I made it to the church’s office, however, I saw a boy standing alone in the middle of its parking lot. As I got closer, I recognized Rowan, and when I got closer still I saw that he was crying. It was a whimpery, soft-pedal cry. I said hello, kneeled, moved within hugging distance of him, smelled his troubled breath. There was dirt on both his fat cheeks. I wanted to suck up his tears with a medicine dropper and drink them.
“They stole my bike and they kicked me,” he said.
“Who did?”
“These guys.” He sobbed.
“Where’d they kick you?”
“Here.” He spread his arms to indicate the parking lot.
“No, I mean which parts of your body did they kick?”
“Leg,” he said and pointed.
I lifted his pant leg; there was no visible injury.
“Who are you?” Rowan said.
“You know me, I’m a good friend of your mom’s. Where is she?”
“Who?”
“Your mom. Where’s your mom?”
“I’m an orphan.”
“No, you’re not, Rowan. Your mother is alive and she loves you more than anything.”
“It was a new bike.”
“Do you know the serial number?” He didn’t.
He snuffled, and I told him that I’d once recovered a stolen bike, which was not exactly true, though a roommate of mine had. After a while he started to calm down. I told a dumb joke and just as he lightly laughed I heard a sound similar to the ring of a telephone, and he reached into a slanted zipper-pocket on the side of his pants and took out a mobile phone. “Why do you have a phone?” I said.
“For safety,” he said before answering the call, soon into which he resumed crying.
“Is that your mom?” I said. He shook his head yes. “See, I told you you weren’t an orphan.” I held out my hand.
“This guy wants to talk to you,” Rowan said, and handed me the phone.
“What’s going on?” I said.
“Why don’t you”—it was Wanda; Maryanne had passed off the phone—“have an answering machine?” she said.
“I hate answering machines.”
“We’ve been trying to get in touch with you for three weeks. You didn’t get my note?”
“What note?”
“I left a note with the super at your apartment.”
“The super’s a drug dealer,” I said.
“Well, he told me he’d get it to you.”
“Why is your house all boarded up?”
“For a film,” Wanda said. “Maryanne and her boyfriend are making a film.”
“The city allows that?”
“Filmmaking?” she said.
“No, not fucking filmmaking; boarding up a house like that just for kicks.”
“It’s not for kicks, it’s for a film. The back door isn’t boarded.”
“Rowan’s really distraught here. All alone, without a bike.”
“We’re on our way. Look, we’ve been trying to get in touch with you. Because it’s not gonna work.”
“What isn’t?”
“Renting the basement.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just what I said.”
“I’m all moved out,” I said. “I’m on the street if you renege.”
“We’ve been trying to get in touch. All your emails bounced back.”
“I got a new address. I was getting all this porn spam at my old one.”
“Well, I don’t know, you can stay with us a few days, but it’s not gonna work long-term. Maryanne and Jeff are gonna live upstairs and I’m taking over the basement unit.”
“You’re gonna live in the basement of your own home?”
“That way they cover more of the mortgage. I’m overextended.”
“Is that why the place is boarded up?”
“No, that’s for the film. I just explained that.”
“Did Maryanne write the script?”
“I don’t think there’s a script.”
“Is this a stag film?”
“No—what? No!”
“I have a lease, Wanda.”
“If you want to live in the basement for two months, fine. But in that case I’m giving you your two months’ notice now.”
“It’s not right.”
“I’m really sorry about this. We’ve been trying to reach you for weeks.”
“You might have gone to greater lengths.”
She invited me again, this time with some tenderness, to crash at their place awhile. I didn’t know how to hang up the phone. I don’t mean I was apoplectic, though there might have been some of that; I mean I didn’t know which button to push, in part because I have little intuition for such things and in part because I cultivate a luddite or elderly helplessness that some find charming. I handed the phone back to Rowan. Seconds later the bullies returned, most on bikes, a few on foot. One of them hopped off Rowan’s bike and let it fall on one of the parking lot’s corners, then started running, leaving behind a few incomprehensible shouts. “Joy ride,” I said to Rowan, and explained the concept while we went to inspect the bike, a discount-store BMX painted a mean black and silver like the Oakland Raiders’ uniforms. Part of the joy, I told Rowan, is simply in riding on or in a strange vehicle, and part of it comes from knowing that the vehicle’s owner is, for instance, crying in a parking lot. He got on the bike. “There’s nothing quite like the happiness you feel when something bad didn’t happen after all,” I said, and he started to pedal, built up a good head of steam on the sidewalk, then sailed off the curb and back onto the lot.
I could have left then. Maryanne and Wanda were due back soon and seemingly laid-back about leaving Rowan alone with bullies. But I thought I’d better stay, so I pulled my twelve-speed out of Maggie’s van, and Rowan and I pedaled around the puddly lot. He did loops of no-hands and several jumps off the sidewalk ramps, sometimes whooping with the jump, while I rode off the saddle, coasting slowly, leaning over the handlebars, my legs locked straight, sometimes turning my face to the sun. I felt a strange
mixture of calm and despair. Anything and nothing were possible. Then a young man whom I took for the youth minister, who earlier must not have heard the taunts and cries during and after the bike theft, came outside and commended Rowan’s balance, stayed at Rowan’s request to watch a few more tricks. I stopped coasting, straddled my bike, and the sweat-shirted possible youth minister and I watched Rowan together for a minute or two. As he opened his car door, the minister gave me a complimentary smile and wave, stinging in its kindness and misdirection, though I relished it for a moment.
Maryanne, Wanda, and a man unknown to me, the filmmaker-boyfriend presumably, pulled into the lot a few minutes later. I rode up to Rowan. “You’re a good boy,” I said, almost sternly, and booked over to Maggie’s van. Rowan yelled goodbye and Maryanne yelled “Hey!” but I didn’t turn around. I had some trouble wedging the bike back into the van—the boyfriend called out to offer a hand—but I managed. I climbed into the driver’s seat without looking over at the group, pulled carefully away from the curb to avoid any embarrassing tire squeals, then drove abstractedly for half an hour, briefly thought about driving to some clean-slate city or town, Fostoria or Wapakoneta, say. But I had almost no money, and before long Maggie Tollefsrud and I were unloading the van and replacing some of its benches. My homelessness made me more receptive to her deathless advances, and it was in her bed, six months later, that I watched Sting and others usher in the briefly anti-climactic new millennium.
Numerology
ON MY TRIP BACK TO ENSWELL, I FOUND A microfilmed review of Bolling’s concert at the Enswell Municipal Auditorium (HED: “The Greene-ing of Enswell” SUBHED: “Country Star Heats Up EMA”), which is how I’m able to say that Wade, my mother, and I went to Bey’s Food Host for the last time together on November 10, 1978, just before the show. I keep mentioning these dates, as if the dates themselves were important. By citing them I must hope that a few indisputable facts will offset the mysteries I’m forced or impelled to let stand. There is something pleasing about the certainty, about being able to mark the origins of a distant memory on a calendar, as diarists’ can, or as most of us can for our lifetime’s historically notable dates. There must be dates from which I have two or more discrete and relatively insignificant memories whose proximity I’ve forgotten (this fascinates me), as well as dates (hundreds? thousands?) that fall well within my postmemorial life but from which I nonetheless have no memories (these vanished days fascinate me too—today, I suspect, will become one).