Furnishing Eternity

by David Giffels

  Three-point-one miles seemed like a long and potentially painful stretch, and these particular 3.1 miles involved a hill that I didn’t feel comfortable scaling in a car, in dry weather, much less on foot, on a late-March, much too early, very cold morning.

  On a Saturday, no less. And we had paid money to be here. This was a fund-raiser for the church connected to our Catholic high school, celebrating its 175th anniversary, hence the sign-up fee: $17.50. When I had asked John early in the week if he wanted to join me and Gina, he responded dryly: “Running is free. I don’t pay to run.”

  But here we were. We had paid. I had my hands wrapped around a travel mug of coffee, partly for warmth and partly for the delusion that if I held tightly to something, anything, it might save me from being dragged to the starting line. I was wearing insulated pants, and a thermal top, and a long-sleeved T-shirt, and a zip-up sweatshirt, and gloves, and a stocking cap. John was dressed in sweatpants and a bulky At the Drive-In hoodie and a bright green windbreaker and a Dodgers cap. We did not look fleet. We did not feel fleet.

  I had been running some since the previous summer. Like most middle-aged people who begin this pursuit, I was more or less running from something. In this case, other people’s cancer. First my mother’s, and now John’s and my dad’s. One fact was becoming impossible to avoid: that I was not going to live forever and ought to be taking better care of my body, or at least that I ought to recognize I had the option to do certain things toward that notion. I was well. Suddenly, maybe for the first time in my life, I was distinctly aware of this fact and my good fortune within it. I was well. I wanted to stay that way. And so I’d been running. Some. My philosophy was that I was willing to run until it hurt but no further. So I didn’t measure in miles. I measured in minutes. A half hour was my threshold. Long enough to listen to eight or nine songs on my iPod. Such was the strictness of my exercise regimen: half a Stooges album. I’d never run an organized 5K before this morning. And therefore I had no idea whether I was capable of running 3.1 miles.

  John, on the other hand, had been jogging and going to the gym for a long time leading up to his illness. In a bullheaded attempt to take control and to prepare his body for the previous summer’s surgery, he had covered nearly a hundred miles in the week before entering the hospital.

  So the two of us, ever competitive, made a pretty even match: more or less healthy me versus cancer-recovery John.

  Gina, John, and I wandered toward the entry gate to the football stadium, where a table was set up to distribute number bibs and safety pins. I leaned against a fence post to halfheartedly stretch my hamstring. Gina held her coffee mug with both gloved hands close to her face, trying to keep warm. John chatted with some high school friends. He and I had first met in this place, but it was really just a casual beginning point for a friendship that took its true hold in college. In high school we were something like friends, but John was something like friends with just about everyone in the school. He moved easily between cultures and discovered new ones. He wrote and distributed an underground publication called Offbeat, which of course we immediately began calling “Beatoff.” John discovered graffiti on a railroad bridge near the school with “V-Nervz” spray-painted across its side, and upon investigation discovered that this was a local hardcore punk band, and then in his fanzine he announced their upcoming all-ages show at an underground venue called Club Hell, and soon we were Club Hell regulars. He found a way to be avant-garde even in a place as ordinary as ours.

  John wandered back over to where Gina and I stood near the shuttered concessions stand, and he pulled out one of his standard catchphrases, mimicking the announcer who called our football games back when we were kids sneaking Mickey’s Big Mouths into the stadium: “And the rest . . . of your 1982 . . . Fighting Irishhhhhhh!”

  * * *

  John had been improving steadily since the fall. He had begun painting again. In his basement workspace, amid the dense clutter of cheap pro-wrestler action figures, underground rock-show posters, old printing-press letters, and the like, he had been working with black and red ink on large sheets of vellum. He’d been unusually private about this. For a long time, I didn’t even know it was happening. The two of us had a long history of trusting each other with work we had in progress. He read pieces of my writing before I showed them to an editor; I always saw his projects in their various stages before they became public. As we had for our whole lives together, we shared music and books. I would suggest music to him that I’d discovered by way of music he had suggested to me, which he had discovered by way of music I had suggested to him, and so on. John would buy a stack of CDs at the record shop in our neighborhood, then digitize them and sell them back to the same store, where they would be placed in the used bin. It became a running joke with the owner that whenever I would stop in and pull out a stack of used discs to buy, most would be from John’s recent delivery.

  We had been operating this way since we were teenagers. But this new endeavor of John’s, this immersion in his artwork, seemed different. It seemed insular, almost hidden. I knew John wasn’t sleeping much; it was hard for him to find a position that didn’t make him feel like his guts were bubbling back up through an esophagus that no longer had a shutoff valve, and I knew there was something about his new work that was ambitious and urgent and probably desperate. He was using the ink and sheets of vellum to create a series of large 39-by-28-inch paintings loosely based on his experience during college working in a small rubber factory. A quarter century before, when Akron was still known as the Rubber Capital of the World, he’d done his senior project on this same subject. I’d helped him set it up in a janitor’s closet he’d commandeered in the University of Akron art school, which he turned into an installation space where he created a multimedia show with film, photography, painting, and sculpture, all about factory culture. Visitors punched in at a time clock as the Minutemen’s frantic two-minute punk rock song of the working life—“This Ain’t No Picnic”—played on continuous loop, a crash of images and sounds forming an all-encompassing collage of John’s experiences and ideas. The paintings he was making now derived from the dark mythologies of stag films and illegal drinking and gambling in the underground tunnels where the pipefitters worked; the macho, ball-busting insults of the lunch room; the weird chemicals and invented language that had stayed with John since then. As part of that senior project, he made a photo book titled “Hone That Bone,” a crude jerk-off shout-out the men made to break up the boredom of their labor. And now this roiling, formative memory was coming out in work that was raw, dark, and energetic. The paintings were the size of movie posters. When the ink soaked into the vellum, which is sort of like parchment, it created a wrinkled effect, so each piece had a distinctly visceral feel.

  When I’d stopped over to visit him on Christmas Eve, he insisted that I stay, and he fed me a plate of huevos rancheros and potatoes he’d cooked that morning, and he showed me some of the paintings. We went down the basement, and I was taken aback by just how much he’d been working. The scare of mortality was obvious here: this was as much as anything else a tangible display of the simple message he’d given me years before, sitting in Gina’s and my kitchen: life is short. Now we had evidence.

  * * *

  We got our race numbers and pinned them to our fronts, on the top layer of clothes, then joined the cattle call making its way across the parking lot to the starting line. John still had trouble keeping up with his breath and had told me he’d probably be alternating between jogging and walking. This suited me just fine. I told him I’d keep to his pace.

  We stood under leaden early-morning light, somewhere in the middle of a couple hundred people. Near the front stood serious runners angling for starting position, some holding one foot awkwardly behind them to stretch quad muscles, others leaning down at angles, bouncing lightly, some jogging in place. We who knew no such preparation kept ourselves at a safe distance, nestled more comfortably among the rear guard of complai
ners and coffee drinkers.

  Someone up front said words we couldn’t really hear, the parish priest gave a blessing, a starter’s pistol fired, and we took off, jogging into a pace amid the nylon swish and early puffs of rhythmic breathing.

  The first leg took us steeply down a hill, a paved street in an old roughed-up part of our hometown, the sidewalks scattered with gravel and bottle-glass kernels and random litter left behind from the snowplow piles. Over a set of railroad tracks, and then we crossed onto a picturesque national-park trail that followed the old Ohio & Erie Canal.

  The clump of runners had stretched out, and the pace was quieter. We could hear the water’s slow progress and the birds in the sketch of late-winter trees. We could see our breath. It burned now that my lungs were taking it in deeper, and as the course leveled off and John slowed to a walk, I did, too. I talked as John labored to get his wind back. Then he talked. He told me this had been part of his route before he got sick. He would take his lunch hour to run down through here, then power his way up an impossibly steep parkway. I’d never known this. For as much time as we spent together and as long as we’d been friends, there were always parts of John’s life I didn’t know about. He was naturally stoic. His heart was always guarded.

  For years, much of our time together involved going out, to see bands in clubs, to art openings, to oddball events he would drag me to. In a particularly troubled spell of his marriage, he and I had gone up to Cleveland on a subzero night to see a C-grade Elvis impersonator who looked and acted more like Carmine “The Big Ragoo” Ragusa than the King of Rock and Roll, a night that as it progressed may as well have been a David Lynch short subject, ending with us returning to his pickup truck to find a frozen pigeon in the bed.

  His new discipline translated to a new distance between us. He didn’t drink. He didn’t go out. Our once natural time together had dwindled. Our friendship had become about his illness and not much more. We both recognized this, so we’d been talking for a long time about setting up a standing breakfast date. This is how middle-aged friendships often go, slipping and slipping until “we really should get together soon” becomes a discomforting veil for the truth—that such friendships cease to exist. While it seemed absurd, it also seemed obvious: we needed to schedule ourselves into each other’s lives.

  “We need to get this breakfast arrangement happening,” I said as we continued walking.

  “Can you do Tuesdays?”

  “Yeah, I can do Tuesdays.”

  “Seven-thirty?”

  I groaned. “Really? I guess if I had to.”

  John reached into his nylon pocket, pulled out his phone, and did something with the keypad. “It’s done,” he said. “We now have a scheduled breakfast date, second Tuesday of every month, seven-thirty, at Wally Waffle.”

  “What did you just do?”

  “I set up an Outlook reminder.”

  To my low-tech self, it seemed as though he had performed some sort of digital alchemy. “I don’t think that will work,” I told John. “I don’t use my phone.”

  “It’ll come to your email account.”

  “Wow. That’s like magic. Okay. So we’ll be meeting for breakfast once a month?”

  “Yep.”

  “Like old men.”

  “Yep.”

  Ten days later, an auto-generated Outlook Express reminder would chime, and a box would pop up on my computer screen: “WALLY WAFFLE TIME.” An odd thing, to schedule time with your best friend this way. But it was a way to keep a connection that had been strained in the past year, a way to replace nights in bars and the planning of parties and countless afternoons drinking beer around a patio fireplace.

  John was ready to run again, and we picked up our pace, jogging to the turnaround at the halfway point and making our way back through the trees, the cold canal dragging along at the same pace we were. We both groaned when we returned to the hill, which now we’d have to climb, and began our labored way back up. The final stretch led through the school parking lot and into the football stadium, where the runners completed half a lap before crossing the finish line. John and I entered the stadium, picking up our pace to a jog.

  He broke into his announcer’s voice: “And the rest . . . of your 1982 . . . Fighting Irish!”

  We rounded the turn toward the finish line. I pulled ahead, looked back, grinned, and raised my arms in victory as I crossed the line before him.

  * * *

  John and I had our first breakfast at Wally Waffle, then a second and a third. He got us tickets to a Radiohead concert. We made plans to see Richard Lloyd of Television at a small local club.

  My dad, meanwhile, was looking and feeling more and more like himself. The low droop in his lip—nerve damage from the tumor surgery—was easing back, hardly noticeable. He’d been exercising the muscle according to doctors’ orders, and he was improving and improving. As springtime progressed, it almost seemed as though his recovery had been timed to prove that these milestones—him turning eighty; their fiftieth wedding anniversary—did not mark how old he was getting but how much time he had left.

  And then my mom died in July.

  * * *

  “Your mother will talk to you in a dream,” Gina said on one of those early days of confused, exhausted bereavement. She said this as a matter of fact from her own authority of grief; she had lost her parents a year apart not long before. People had told her this would happen, and it did. My mother, she said, would visit me in some way, and it would be real.

  I was at that point far too self-absorbed to have any sort of space in my imagination for an apparition of my mother. In that early spell, her death was about me, not her. I was talking to my own self about it so much that she couldn’t have gotten a word in edgewise. All the crying and all the listening to sad Rufus Wainwright songs left me fatigued. So did the neurotic math that I kept doing in my head, calculating and recalculating, for instance, that it had been three weeks and one day since her heart attack and seventy-six hours since she mouthed, “I love you” and thirty-eight days since the last time she was in my house, standing there on that fourth floorboard from the wall, and so on and so on. An internal obsessive compulsion to find logic, order, to make sense. It never worked. No matter how intricately I recalculated the sequence, there was still an infinite void at the end. Regardless of how carefully the facts and feelings were aligned, it always concluded with the same result: an insoluble mystery.

  For weeks, all I did was feel sad. What I found was that feeling sad about death made me feel sad about everything. Feeling sad about death made me feel sad about my son winning a baseball award. It made me feel sad about a birthday cake. It made me feel sad about a sunset.

  Feeling sad about death made me feel sad about everyone who was getting older, which is rather a slippery slope once you start doing that math. And it’s also kind of selfish. I knew I was supposed to be celebrating her life instead of mourning her death, but I was having a hard time getting there. I kept wallowing in the notion that this event had happened to me.

  So when John showed up that day of her funeral and toasted her with his first glass of wine, it suggested a new and better understanding. It was a slight but important gift that he didn’t know he was giving me, and one I didn’t realize I was receiving.

  Three weeks after her funeral, John celebrated the opening of a solo art exhibit called Pipefitters, Porn & P.B.R. at an Akron gallery. The gallery’s main room was filled with his paintings, the ones he’d been working on in his basement through the winter and spring. A second room was full of smaller mixed-media collages on the same themes, using materials and images he’d gathered over the years. It was clear he was using everything he’d stored up over a lifetime. The art told a narrative of the life John had lived in and around the old industrial city: A painting of a Ball jar labeled Earl’s Mercury, based on a story he’d heard about a worker who smuggled chemicals out of the factory. A portrait of a grinning man running a reel-to-reel stag-film projec
tor in the dark. A crumpled Lucky Strike cigarette pack. The show was not just an announcement of his return but an optimistic prediction that there was much more to be done. And there was.

  The series included a single portrait of a former heavyweight boxing champion from Akron, Michael “Dynamite” Dokes. John had met Dokes by chance earlier that year in the bar of a downtown restaurant. They struck up a conversation that didn’t end until several hours later, when John finally offered to drive him home. Dokes was energetic and gregarious and spilling over with bizarre anecdotes. He kept ordering drinks and appetizers, eating incessantly without benefit of silverware, telling his story. He’d had a great rise and a great fall, legendarily knocked out in a 1983 title fight at an arena just outside Akron, the final punch so brutal it broke the winner’s hand. He’d had trouble with drugs, served jail time for attacking his girlfriend, lost much of his fortune. Now he, too, had cancer and was fighting it. John was fascinated with him and wanted to make a documentary about his life. The two men became friends, but the friendship quickly changed as Dokes’s cancer advanced aggressively. Dokes died less than two weeks after the opening of the Pipefitters show.

  John buried himself in yet more work, three months of intense activity to produce another series of ink-on-vellum works of the same scale, all about Dokes. He made a second series of small mixed-media collages called Dynamite Vs., each depicting a Dokes opponent, labeled with the date of the fight and a brief note on the outcome: “Dynamite vs. John Lewis Gardner . . . June 12, 1981 . . . Joe Lewis Arena, Detroit, MI . . . Dokes knocked out England’s John Gardner in the fourth round.” The black-and-white photograph is overlaid with text from a boxing program, Dokes at the edge of the frame, cropped save for his round shoulder and round glove in recoil, in reload, a mesh grid layered over his eyes deepening their intensity, as the opponent falls backward, hair asunder, knees buckled, deadweight. Down.