This box was big. And it was heavy. And it wasn’t even a box yet.
What it was still was a set of planks stacked against the back wall of my dad’s workshop, with the graph-paper drawings taped to the front so we could refresh our memory whenever we returned to it. Since that day in late August when I’d left off on the sanding, life had repeatedly gotten in the way of the work to be done. Dad had retaken territorial rights to his workshop for his usual autumn process of building Christmas gifts. I’d been taken over by a busy semester and a book tour. Then he’d been taken over by the business of this lung tumor. And I’d been taken over by worrying about infringing on his time.
But one day in late winter, I stopped over to visit, and Dad suggested we go out to the barn and take a look. We trudged through the snow to the big red outbuilding, clomping our boots clean as we entered the doorway. The room beyond the glass door was warm and cinnamony with the smell of the wall-mounted gas heater. We hung our coats outside the workshop to keep them free of the dust that coated everything; even at its cleanest, the big room maintained its yellowy patina, the lingering toasted scent of cut wood.
The boards were resting where we’d left them. Their imperfections reintroduced themselves; their grains and cuts regained their distinction. I looked for the bloodstain but couldn’t find it. We carried the boards to a set of sawhorses and laid them flat. Dad ran his hand along the surface, then knelt down to eyeball whether they’d warped or shrunk as they’d rested. “They look pretty true,” he said. “Not bad.”
For all the questions that had found their way into the process, I was reminded of why I had started the project in the first place. It was a way to spend time with my father. The year of his first go-round with cancer, I stood one day at my attic-office window. It was mid-November. I was looking out at a series of three backyard trees with wide, bright yellow leaves. Of the two dozen or so trees in my yard, these were the only ones that had not made their autumn release. It’s like this every year: after all the other trees are bare, these three come bringing up the rear, a good fortnight behind, remaining green till they finally transition to the radiant color of Christopher Robin’s raincoat. I’d never given it much thought, just figured that’s the way things are.
A few days later, I was at my dad’s house, and he was talking about raking his yard. “And of course I always have to wait on that one,” he said, pointing to a big tree with those very same wide, bright yellow leaves. “Because it’s a Norway maple, and they don’t lose their leaves until a hard frost. Because, you know, they’re from Norway.”
An answer I hadn’t asked for to a question I’d hardly realized was a question. He’d been teaching me like that his whole life, delivering knowledge, unprompted, in the natural course of our interactions.
I believed building my coffin could be a way to work through the bafflement of death. But the truth of my time alone with my father was that we were each finding ourselves too full of other parts of life for this to be an urgent and all-consuming venture. We were spending plenty of time together, in lots of ways. And plenty of time individually, each busy with life, enough so that scheduling what we sometimes called “coffin time” was often an infringement. Gina and I had begun having Dad over for dinner every Sunday, and this new ritual had become a highlight of the week. It seemed like the most valuable time we spent together was specifically the time not working on the coffin. In fact, Dad didn’t want to assemble it permanently until we were both ready to put in a good chunk of continuous work to get it finished, because at that point it would occupy a lot of floor space in his workshop and would be in the way of anything else he wanted to accomplish there.
Meanwhile, I wasn’t learning nearly as much from him as I’d expected. His design, based so much on his singular foresight and experience, had me at its mercy. It was like the workings of my automobile or Bob Dylan’s brain: I didn’t fully understand it, but I trusted it completely.
I’d believed that embarking on this scheme would allow me to learn some of the many skills and techniques of woodworking and design that I did not yet possess. In the ongoing renovation of our home, I’d become at least adequately proficient in certain skills—bricklaying, tree felling, floor sanding, drywall hanging, the inglorious unglunking of sewer lines. And I’d done some furniture building, but my main accomplishment in this field was decidedly crude—a set of rustic log furniture made from trees I’d cut down, stripping and curing the logs (all with my father’s guidance), assembling the pieces in a free-jazz interpretation of traditional peg joinery, the final appearance of which had earned it a not entirely complimentary nickname from my friends: the Gilligan’s Island furniture. I wanted to engage with advanced skills of fine carpentry, like those my father possessed. So far, my only significant progress was not losing fingers to a router mishap.
I’d believed that through our long hours in his workshop, I’d somehow absorb his life wisdom. The problem was—and I’d known this full well going in—my dad is not a bestowing-life-wisdom kind of guy. He’s just not. And he never has been. One of the few times I went directly to him for Dad Advice—I was debating a high-risk career move—he listened silently to my whole spiel, sat for a long time deliberating, and finally declared that every time he took such a risk in his own professional life, it had worked out for the best. That was it: solid and unadorned, like the block lettering on his graph paper. It was the right advice, and it gave me the confidence I was seeking. But it’s not the kind of thing that pours out of him naturally. (I, on the other hand, am more or less a Toys-R-Us water cannon of aphorisms and loose counsel with my own children, who I suspect think of me as a sort of emo mascot of the homestead.)
Maybe all my reasons were wrong.
The worst of these may have been the arrogance of believing I could understand death. The coffin wasn’t helping much at all in this regard. I was still struggling to forgive my mother for her stubbornness near the end, her fatalism and abject refusal to follow any doctor’s orders, her unwillingness (by my estimation) to eat properly, her passive insistence that all was in God’s hands. I was only beginning to allow the fact that I couldn’t know how much pain she was in. I was only beginning to acknowledge that she had a stronger faith than I did. In my selfishness, I took her death personally, as though it were something that had happened to me. I didn’t want her to want to die because I didn’t want her to die, because I still wanted the woman she had been to me, the woman with the deliriously infectious laugh, the woman who ate good food with such pleasure that it made one’s lips move involuntarily in vicarious imitation, the woman who gave me Nine Stories, the woman at the crossword table thumbing through the OED. I hadn’t allowed the possibility that her desire was an acceptance, maybe not much different than the acceptance my father had revealed, that he was at peace with the idea of dying, which struck me as healthy, maybe even noble.
And I certainly hadn’t gained enough distance from the chaos of losing John to put that into order. The only progress I’d made there was the occasional sappy Facebook post about missing my friend, which in the world of Facebook is hardly a distinguishing emotion. Everyone on Facebook either loves their cat or misses someone who died. Trying to understand John’s death just left me feeling inept and confused.
19: A DIVERSION
* * *
I did another thing I often do: I replaced what I was supposed to be doing with something else. This is the standard deduction of the workaholic.
On the afternoon of John’s funeral the summer before, in the dense air under the white backyard canopy, I had sat talking with my friend Arnie Tunstall, the two of us perched at odd angles to each other in mismatched folding chairs. All around us, children ran, chasing one another this way and that through the backyard, throwing a basketball at the hoop, missing, throwing again, while the teenagers at their own table leaned forward eagerly in momentous conversation, and the adults, in pairs and threes and fours, sipped and talked at leisure.
Arnie
had gone through art school with John, and like both of us, he had remained in Akron ever since. He had worked his way up the ranks at the Akron Art Museum, where he now managed the collections. We sat sipping cold beer and told old stories about John, laughing in that painfully odd way of funeral afternoons.
“We should do an exhibit,” Arnie said.
“We could do a Dick Tappan retrospective,” I said.
He laughed.
Our friend Andrew Borowiec joined us under the canopy. Andrew was a photographer and an art professor at the University of Akron, where he’d had John and Arnie as students. In the newspaper feature about John’s life, Andrew had described him as having “more enthusiasm, curiosity and imagination than any student I’ve known in over 30 years of teaching.” (In the twisted auto-translation, Andrew’s assessment became “more enthusiasm, oddity and imagination than roughly any tyro I’ve famous in over 30 years of teaching.”) Andrew had already begun the process of establishing a University of Akron scholarship in John’s name. The fund would be used to send a student each year on the same field trip to New York that John had taken all those years ago, the one that, as much as anything, had established his aesthetic and his ambition, as well as his love for that city.
“We should,” Andrew agreed when he heard the idea of an exhibit.
“It’s what John would have done,” I said.
* * *
Three months later, in October, I found myself in John’s workspace, in the basement of the house where he’d thrown so many parties, the place where he’d put his life back together after his divorce, and the place where he’d died. John’s family, sorting through his estate and at a loss to understand how to quantify all his artwork, had asked Arnie and Andrew to help catalog and give some sort of a monetary valuation to John’s body of work. I’d joined them, along with another friend, Robbie Schneider, a coworker of John’s who’d collaborated with him on work. Beyond the estate process, the four of us were hoping to get an idea of what work was available and what an exhibit might look like. John’s parents and his younger brother, the executor of the estate, looked on, just hoping for some way to appraise this sprawling detritus of a busy mind.
This was strange work. At the exhibits the year before, paintings had sold for two hundred dollars. But John had also freely given pieces away. The snowy night of the Michael Dokes opening, Gina and I had bought one painting, and when the show came down, John had given us two more. In wide racks in his basement, we found a startling amount of work—John had been producing even more than I knew. Some was finished or nearly so. Some remained in early sketch form, some clearly marked with strokes of frustration, some apparently abandoned, giving way to a more polished version of the same idea. Many of the pieces were on the scale of those large vellum-and-ink pieces that had become his style in his last years.
I hadn’t been down in John’s workroom since the week he died, and being there now in his absence felt remarkably similar to the afternoon I’d found myself alone in my dad’s workshop. All the effects of a man, the unstudied accumulation, the tumbledown trail of activity, the story a person leaves.
Hanging from a nail on the side of a shelf was the CBGB messenger bag he’d bought at the club’s gallery eight years before. On his worktable was the bottle of Campari we’d sipped from one night down there, when he’d shown me some early factory paintings he was working on. A Barry Manilow poster from Dynamite magazine, Issue No. 43, 1977, hung on the lavatory wall across from a tattered and torn handmade flier for one of the few shows by the Generics, the garage band John sang in when we were eighteen and knew nothing but believed everything. And then there was the smell, the slightly musty carpet mingling with the scent of paper and ink, an underground smell. Most of the people who came to John’s parties didn’t know there was a bathroom in the basement, so I always used this one when I was there, to avoid the crowd. Leaving the din of the upstairs and entering this private place with its bluish shadows, where John busily maintained his own promise, was, oddly, among my favorite memories of those nights. I could hear his music bleeding in when I was down here, weird tangents of Americana and the underground—Granddaddy, Uncle Tupelo, the Mountain Goats, Modest Mouse.
* * *
Just about every guy I’ve ever known who has taken on a mortgage—that societal standard of adult responsibility—has immediately claimed a space within his new piece of real estate to be devoted specifically to the opposite of adult responsibility. I spent part of a summer helping my brother build a barn (the designer and principal builder of which was, of course, our father). The construction process itself was an indulgence in male pleasures: amateur masonry, beer drinking, uninhibited profanity, peeing from the rooftop. The final product extended those whims, as it sheltered a vintage tractor, a motorboat, and a drum kit.
This barn included a set of century-old rolling carriage-house doors that were the original garage doors from my house. I donated them to the barn, having replaced them with a roll-up door I’d scavenged from my dad’s house when he’d converted half his garage into a laundry room. (These things are always circular in my family.) Once the barn was under roof, Dad designed a mounting system for the doors and toiled day after day while my brother was away at work, custom-fitting them and preparing the rollers and the opening. One rainy afternoon, he attempted to move a door leaned against the outside rear wall of the barn. It started to come backward on him, and in his attempt to get out of the way, he slipped in the mud and it came down on top of him, landing in such a way that he didn’t take its full weight but was nonetheless trapped. Seventy-six years old, possibly injured, mud soaking thorough his clothes, he lay there thinking not that he was going to die but that he was going to be in big, big trouble with my mother, who frowned upon such self-inflicted misadventures despite their frequency. His cell phone was in his rear pocket, and he worked agonizingly to reach underneath his backside with his one free hand, but could not get the shoulder turned far enough to allow it. So he lay there some more, thinking. Then, slowly and carefully, he started wriggling in the mud, and he wriggled and pushed and wriggled and pushed, and after an hour or so, he managed to work himself out from under the door. Then he got right back to work. He figured he was already dirty, so why not? A new barn needs stories.
I’ve found that the best of these spaces are the imperfect ones, the ones unmeant for their purpose, claimed from a void of the unwanted. I’d built my first version back in my parents’ basement, with those boards hauled from beside an alley Dumpster. John, as an adolescent, had taken over an old cellar pantry in his parents’ home, where he set up his stereo and his meager but growing record collection (the Sweet, Devo, Monty Python’s Flying Circus), along with his Super 8 equipment and the reels that represented his growing oeuvre—mostly stop-action animation involving plastic dinosaurs that inevitably were doused in gasoline and set afire, dying in the foul soup of their own flaming evil.
As soon as John and I each became homeowners, I took over the attic of my house and he took over the basement of his, and it was from these spaces that we continued the way we continued, the earnest mess of trying to be the selves we’d imagined we might become.
John’s basement in that first house was poorly lit and poorly drained, and his work often smelled of old damp concrete and tree roots. When a crappy tavern up at the corner was torn down, John’s “studio” temporarily inherited its rat problem. But if you can’t make art with a watchful eye and a pellet gun at your side, you may just not be cut out for the work.
My space on the third floor, meanwhile, was unheated and un-air-conditioned. I typed away on my brand-new Brother “electronic” typewriter, which had a tiny display window above the keyboard allowing me to preview every seven words or so before the daisy wheel committed them to paper. In the winter, my longhaired literary self sat wrapped in a heavy parka and stocking cap, analyzing unfolding prose through the haze of my own breath. In the summer, I wrote shirtless, adhered by sweat to the turquo
ise vinyl backrest of the office chair I’d plucked from a curbside one garbage night.
The next place Gina and I moved to was the falling-down house we took on more or less as a lifelong shambolic immersion into our own permanence, chickens of which have been coming to roost ever since. I immediately claimed the squirrel-and-bat-infested third-floor servants’ quarters, with broken windows and wisteria growing in across the floor, which Gina was more than happy to concede. John, meanwhile, slipped into a spell of instability as his marriage took a series of hairpin turns and spinouts that led him to one apartment, then another, then back into a shared home with his wife, then back out. (Sitting on his patio one night some years later, we tried to count the number of places he’d lived since moving out of his parents’ house. He came up with seven. I came up with eight. I was right—he’d forgotten one.)
In each place, John had found a room of his own, and in each instance, he’d had to carve this space out of nothing. These are our most cherished spaces, the ones of our own making, the ones we have to force our way into. In order to create, we become uninvited aliens of storage rooms and crawl spaces, with bare bulbs above and plywood flooring below, and in so doing, we plant our little flags.
* * *
After Andrew and Arnie had finished the painstaking process of their inventory, we left John’s house and reconvened at an old pub John had frequented, owned and bartended by a guy he had played Little League baseball with.
In the dim restaurant, we hashed out the idea of organizing an exhibit, a retrospective of John’s work, to open on the first anniversary of his death, July 14, 2014. This gave us a goal and a deadline—nine months to get it together. Andrew suggested the University of Akron’s art school gallery as a venue.
“There’s a lot more of his work than I thought,” Arnie said.
Furnishing Eternity Page 13