Boarded Windows

by Dylan Hicks

  At Bey’s I got a plain hamburger, black and crispy on the outside, instead of my habitual D-Luxe Frenchy. All the booths were full so we had to sit at one of the tables. I conducted a football game between differently colored sugar packets. The owner-manager stood by the cash register whistling “Wichita Lineman.” Wade and Marleen were reconciled uneasily, like the somewhat accusable harmonies Bolling and his band sang later that night.

  From Bey’s we drove Wade’s dolphin-like coupe down hilly Foster Avenue to the auditorium. I sat as usual between the adults on the front bench, my mother’s hand on my knee. In the parking lot, Wade kept the car running, reached over the seat, lifted a baby blanket, and picked up a compartmental black leather case, a jewelry case or, I thought at the time, a tackle box (but tackle boxes are rarely if ever made of leather). “Oh Lord, put that away,” my mother said. I looked intently at the case. Bolling’s “West Texas Winds” was on the radio: “The west Texas winds / Blow angles in the rain / Tinfoil down the lane / It’s still a-crinklin’ in my brain.” Wade must have turned the dome light on, or perhaps by radio- and lot-light I got a good look at the contents of the case, the bottles of pills, the assorted plastic baggies: grams of coke, quarters of weed. Also needles—I thought I saw needles, but when I asked my mother about this much later she said that Wade never dealt heroin, that there was no real market for it in Enswell; most likely, she said, I’d seen Wade’s darts, since back then he carried around his own set.

  Spirits were high in the auditorium as we walked underground to the main floor or basketball court and found our seats. It was open seating, but a friend of Wade’s from KECF had set aside some folding chairs for us near the front. Our names-even mine—were Sharpied on typing paper and taped to the backs of the chairs. The seats in the stands were various colors, and I tried to count if there were more empty reds or more empty greens, but soon there were hardly any empties at all. Over a tenth of the city was there (well, many attendees must have come from smaller towns nearby). I doubt Bolling’s performance was cynical, impartial, or perfunctory, but I know it wasn’t magical like the State Fair show. I could feel my mother’s enthusiasm quickly wane. The crowd seemed satisfied, though. They stood up for some of the fast songs, so that all I could see were backs, asses, and legs, though Wade lifted me up for part of “In Spades,” one of Bolling’s clunkers (“But now I know I dig you in the sunshine and the shade / So darling, please come back to me in spades”). After Wade put me down he left his seat to talk with one of the security guys. During the encore, my mother told me years later, Wade leaned into her ear, said he was going backstage. She could come too if she wanted, he said. “What am I supposed to do with him?” she said, pointing at me. He gave her the car keys. “I hate driving your car,” she might have said. “Well, you guys can wait for me if you want,” he might have answered. They argued a bit more, and in the end he said he’d see her at home, that he’d walk or get a lift. I watched the security guard step aside to let Wade backstage. Wade was wearing a long-sleeved henley shirt, navy blue with one wide horizontal red stripe across the middle, and I could still see the red stripe through the glamorous smoke after I’d lost sight of the rest of him. My mother and I didn’t stay for the whole encore. Backstage, I later learned, there was more than the average partying, and then the band, crew, and tagalongs moved to Oran’s, where there was an after-hours guitar pull and dart tournament, Wade victorious.

  I was awake that next morning when Wade left in the silver bus, behind schedule, the driver-trombonist hopped up for a long day of lead-footing. My mother always said I slept through his exit, as was noted earlier, implying that I’d made up my memory, but the reliability of her narration has been questioned. I clearly remember hearing the commotion, remember sneaking out to the living room, peering through the mail slot. Wade and Bolling were on the front lawn, Marleen was on the stoop, closest to me, and accordingly seemed much taller than the others (she would have been an inch or two taller than Bolling even if they’d all been standing on the same level). By the time my eyes made it to the mailbox, the three of them, it seemed, had been talking and fighting awhile. The first thing I made out was Bolling saying, “Marleen, we gots to ramble.” And then my mother let loose: “Be quiet, you fucking clown. You Bozo, you charlatan, you fucking sellout. Take off that vest, that fucking hat, take off that fucking hat. You.” She pointed. “You sold us out, you and all the rest. Take off that stupid hat.”

  Wade looked at the ground. I’m not sure why my mother took out her rage and disappointment on Bolling, who, clearly hurt, started playing the jester on cue, looking fixedly at the ground, circling one of our rented spruce trees, patting his pockets. “So where’s my money, Marleen?” he said. “From the sellout. Where is it?”

  “Who gave you permission to call me by my first name?” my mother said.

  “Ours is an informal nation, Marleen,” Bolling said.

  “Get back on your bus.”

  “Marleen, I’m coming back,” Wade said.

  “No, you’re not,” she said. “Get on your bus. Get on your bus.”

  So they did, and I scampered back into my room. I listened for the front door and screen, both squeaky; they didn’t open for half an hour. Maybe my mother was smoking and crying on the stoop, or maybe she cried later. I know I waited a half hour for the doors to open because I watched my little white bedside alarm clock. Its hour and minute hands were black, which is standard, but its second hand was blue, which is not; most clocks in that all-business style have red second hands. See, I remember. And then when my mother came in the room to check on me (not to wake me up, it being a Saturday), I quickly closed my eyes and expertly played asleep.

  Hejira

  SECONDS AFTER THE DISPIRITED YOUNG WOMAN FOR some reason walked away from preparing my toasted sub sandwich, a fly landed on a frayed, floppy edge of roast beef and started working its way to the congealing white cheese. The sandwich went unattended for at least a minute. My useless attempts to shoo the fly through the sneezeguard seemed to amuse the UPS driver behind me in line. Mentally I practiced the lordly umbrage I’d use in demanding a new sandwich, but when the young woman returned, seeming more dispirited than before, I let it slide. I left my car in the sub shop’s parking lot and walked in the sunny Milwaukee afternoon to the Golda Meir Library, for several blocks tasting irrational hints of the fly’s filth.

  The librarian at the rare-book room’s front desk was wearing a roller-derby T-shirt and reminded me slightly of Maryanne. Le sexe de la femme, which I’d called about earlier, was waiting for me behind her desk. Affecting a scholarly stereotype, I patted my pockets as if I’d misplaced my wallet, but the librarian seemed unconcerned about my pretended loss. She asked me where I wanted to work, then used both hands to carry Zwang’s heavy book over to a long, empty desk. The book was cheekily packaged like a Bible, with a fancy slipcase, two ribbon markers, and a supple leather cover bearing the title in formal gold lettering (there might have been gilt-edged pages as well, but I can’t remember). The paperback I’d ordered earlier wasn’t so much a shadow of this original as a faded Polaroid of the original’s shadow.

  On the drive from Minneapolis to Milwaukee, I’d relistened to decades-old beginner’s French cassettes (perhaps my terminally tyronic accent carries a hint of wow and flutter), but having only reached unit twenty-three of French II, I couldn’t read Zwang’s text beyond an occasional word or phrase. I had limited reading time anyway.

  Pictorially, Le sexe gives an eccentric history of erotic and pornographic art, with support from nonartistic documents. It’s very much a product of its time: it doesn’t scrimp the reader of Day-Glo pussies or bedroom surrealism (Roland Bourigeaud, André Masson, Jane Graverol, Hans Bellmer), including the surrealism that leads into or is pyschedelia or fantastic realism (Ernst Fuchs, Félix Labisse, Mati Klarwein). But the book contains images of all sorts going back to antiquity: cave drawings; Titian; a daguerreotype of a couple fucking in a haystack; Pierre-Paul Prud
’hon; anatomical drawings by Leonardo; two views of Le grand écart, a bronze, nineteenth-century statuette of a ballerina without, the base reveals, underwear; Modigliani; anthropological photos of the type sometimes sought out by young masturbators; Rubens; photos of chastity belts; drawings of gynecological procedures; the great George Grosz; an Egyptian statuette; an American advertisement from 1960 for Vibra-Finger ($9.99), presented as a dental aid whose “novel design allows localized massage in needed areas”; Beardsley; a Babylonian cylinder; an anonymous drawing called La revue des inspiratrices (“The Examination of the Muses”), in which about twenty women lift their skirts and pull their dresses below their breasts for a small team of male examiners; Rowlandson; several disturbing photographs accompanying the chapter contra female genital mutilation; photographer Lucien Clergue’s arty black-and-white nudes, which I once furtively examined as a teenage B. Dalton customer. There are other images I might like to name or describe, but my notes are shoddy; I find in my yellow notebook the following phrases without further explanation: “Indo-Chinese” (Indo-Chinese what?); “horse sex”; “bending over back of chair w/ [smudge].”

  Stupidly, I wrote nothing at all about how The Origin of the World looks in Zwang’s book. It was hand-tinted I know, in pastel hues I want to say, but really I’m not sure how it looked. I spent just two hours with the book. I had a shoot in Minneapolis the next morning and a gig the next night with Papa Freud and the Lazy Vulvae, so I wanted to get a decent night’s sleep. But I did find, before leaving prematurely, a surprising artifact in between the book’s last page and its endleaf: a pubic hair. Or what I took to be a pubic hair; it may have been a short, squiggly, dark brown hair from someone’s curly head, though I didn’t entertain that possibility till later. The hair looked a lot like some of my own pubic hairs, and like others I’ve seen. My first explanation was that the librarian, sitting at her desk after I’d called to make sure Le sexe was on hand, had reached into her underwear to pluck a memento for me. (I’m said to have an attractive telephone voice, if that information seems relevant.) Snapping out of that fantasy, I then considered that the book I was about to close was the very one my mother Martha had stolen from my mother Marleen, the copy Wade had undoubtedly perused and perhaps indefinitely borrowed. The pubic hair had been Martha’s, I thought, was a kind of relic. Of course if Martha is still alive, the hair wouldn’t be a relic in the Catholic way I had in mind, but it could function in that way for me. I stared at the hair. I thought about touching it. I thought about slipping it into my pocket. I could keep it in a tobacco box with the strand of Wade’s hair I found in that world almanac.

  It was better, I decided, to leave the hair where it was. Should you happen to go to the Golda Meir Library’s rare-book room and ask for Zwang’s book, I suspect you’ll find the hair and out of courtesy won’t displace it.

  I was glad that it had turned overcast for my late-afternoon walk from the library back to the sub shop, where I bought a soda that I must have left on the roof of Wade’s car. It’s my car, but it still feels like his. My mind continued to drift for an unremembered number of minutes, during which I drove as if in a dream but apparently avoided an accident. Just seconds after I became aware again of my surroundings, I saw a sign for I-94, from which I was soon passing the baseball stadium, wondering if I’d ever been lost at all.

  I can’t feel at home in this world anymore.

  I drove without music or French instruction till sunset, when I put on a tape I’d made in my late teens, with Steve Reich on the A-side, Porter Wagoner on the B. The juxtaposition wasn’t meant in the self-satisfied way of college-radio deejays, I don’t think—well, no doubt there was some self-satisfaction behind the pairing, but I also think I’d just happened to buy and tape those two albums on the same day. Reich’s music is suited to the sort of contemplative driving I enjoy, but it can be dangerously lulling, and when my eyes closed for the third time, I fast-forwarded to the B-side.

  After a while I came to a Porter Wagoner song that drew incipient tears, the first I’d cried in a decade. I played the song a few more times and found that it could make me cry at the same spot every time. When I’ve cried in the past, I’ve often imagined that someone was watching me, from above or on a screen of some sort, and soon I’ve become too focused on how my tears might affect this unseen spectator. But this time I was able simply to cry, the tears strong and desperate by the third pass, strong and relieving by the fifth, somewhat attenuated and self-conscious by the seventh.

  I drove near the speed limit in the right lane, let the other vehicles pass me, let the best lines from Wagoner’s songs pass through and circle my head: “Money can’t buy back your youth when you’re old / Or a friend when you’re lonely, or a love that’s grown cold”; “What is to be will be, what ain’t to be just might happen”; “The light through the knot of my boarded window / Is just enough to keep me awake”; “Lord, I guess I haven’t learned a thing.” When an orange Yellow truck passed me, I gave the driver the thumbs-up and thought of Magritte, thought of Wade.

  I imagined him at the radio station in Berlin. The studio is large but not as state-of-the-art as he may have hoped. Maybe the microphones aren’t even German. The pop guard is yellow instead of the standard black. Wade’s chair—it really is his chair, and sits in a corner during the other deejays’ shifts—is upholstered in torn, nubby, orange cloth; its squeaks can be heard over the air during quiet moments, such as a pause in his Porter Wagoner tribute, an emotional pause or a pause when he tries to find the German words to best describe a Nudie suit. There’s a lump in his throat as he finishes, then the tears start to tingle down his nasal passages, and he presses the remote button to start Turntable B.

  I hit rewind and played the song one more time. I’m a careful driver, but the next car was a football field ahead of mine on a straight stretch of highway, so I closed my eyes and with perfect clarity saw Wade pull off his headphones and lean back in his loud chair, saw him rest his boots on the console and tuck some of his gray hair behind his left ear. I could see his thoughts, and he was thinking of my mothers, thinking of me, and when he looked over at the studio phone, all the oily line buttons were flashing red in free time.

  Notes and Download Instructions

  About a year into working on Boarded Windows, I started actually writing some of the Bolling Greene songs I’d been referencing in the manuscript. This eventually led to the novel’s companion album, Dylan Hicks Sings Bolling Greeene, which can be purchased as a CD or LP, or downloaded without charge (it’ll be Bolling’s gratis non-hit). To download the album, go to soundtrax.com, and enter the following code: s3uD6kjB.

  The brief notes in the LP and CD to some extent try to proceed as if Bolling were a nonfictional country singer, though not to the point of giving him songwriting credit in the fine print, which isn’t really that fine. Despite the album’s title, only five of the album’s songs are, to my mind, covers of songs by this secondary character in my novel, and even these are somewhat free interpretations, with a few anachronisms and perhaps two or three lines that Greene wouldn’t have entertained or tolerated. The remaining songs derive from the novel’s narrative in other ways, or borrow some of its phrases, images, or themes.

  To incite readers to seek out the handsomely packaged LP or CD, I’m going to refuse to list personnel and other credits in this setting. If you can’t find the album in a record store, or can’t find a record store at all, visit dylanhicks.com. Or see me at a reading, where folks who buy the book, or already and demonstrably own it, will be given a sharply reduced price on the LP or CD.

  COLOPHON

  Boarded Windows was designed at Coffee House Press, in the historic Grain Belt Brewery’s Bottling House near downtown Minneapolis. The text is set in Caslon. Display fonts include Pussycat Sassy and Spin Cycle.

  FUNDER ACKNOWLEDGMENT

  Coffee House Press is an independent nonprofit literary publisher. Our books are made possible through the generous support of
grants and gifts from many foundations, corporate giving programs, state and federal support, and through donations from individuals who believe in the transformational power of literature. Coffee House Press receives major operating support from the Bush Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency, from Target, and in part by a grant provided by the Minnesota State Arts Board through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature from the State’s general fund and its arts and cultural heritage fund with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4, 2008. Coffee House also receives support from: several anonymous donors; Elmer L. and Eleanor J. Andersen Foundation; Suzanne Allen; Around Town Literary Media Guides; Patricia Beithon; Bill Berkson; the James L. and Nancy J. Bildner Foundation; the E. Thomas Binger and Rebecca Rand Fund of the Minneapolis Foundation; the Patrick and Aimee Butler Family Foundation; Ruth and Bruce Dayton; Dorsey & Whitney, LLP; Mary Ebert and Paul Stembler; Fredrikson & Byron, P.A.; Sally French; Jennifer Haugh; Anselm Hollo and Jane Dalrymple-Hollo; Jeffrey Hom; Carl and Heidi Horsch; Stephen and Isabel Keating; the Kenneth Koch Literary Estate; the Lenfestey Family Foundation; Ethan J. Litman; Carol and Aaron Mack; Mary McDermid; Sjur Midness and Briar Andresen; the Rehael Fund of the Minneapolis Foundation; Deborah Reynolds; Schwegman, Lundberg & Woessner, P.A.; John Sjoberg; David Smith; Kiki Smith; Mary Strand and Tom Fraser; Jeffrey Sugerman; Patricia Tilton; the Archie D. & Bertha H. Walker Foundation; Stu Wilson and Mel Barker; the Woessner Freeman Family Foundation; Margaret and Angus Wurtele; and many other generous individual donors.