by KUBOA
Garland.
Even the list of songs on our sophomore album seems to me now, precious, affected, and weighted with self-importance. From the opening “Story of Chism” to the closing “Goddamned Past Full of Sex,” the whole thing is wordy, silly, fraught with a “look at me” sensibility. In a way, given the posturing of the time it was recorded, it is a perfect album. The 80’s were fixing to implode the whole punk movement and we stood at the cusp of that collapse. Forgive us. Pity us.
Hell, we made a lot of money. Where is it now?
We made one more album, in 1981, the forgettable, “Vanity’s Sister.” It was a single long track and features the worst writing I have ever done in my life. I still like a line here and there:
“In Niagara Falls once I slept with a rock star’s girlfriend’s sister. I felt the great tear of that overflow underneath me, even as her hand reached down for something still and central.”
But such concreteness was, for the most part, missing from that forty-eight48- minute exercise in self-indulgence. It should be said that Chuck’s departure from the band right before recording hurt our group-gestalt, but the addition of Renny White on bass was a real plus. What could we have done if we had stayed together? Here’s my ideal line-up: Larrivee, Whit (yes, his drumming became more than competent, it became distinctive), Renny White, and the lovely Garland Draper on vocals. And, humbly, me in the murky dimness, listed only as “lyricist.” Procol Harum got away with it.
What dulcet sounds could that group have accomplished? One can only speculate.
And, here’s the wrap-up, like at the end of the movie where they tell you what happened to each character.
I turned my attention to writing full time, produced one novel, the experimental Talk: A Novel in Dialogue. It sank like a lark falling suddenly to earth. I got a job in a bookstore, where I am today, and where I am known as Jeb, the guy who writes wobbly poetry that appears in literary rags with readerships in the single digits.
Whit Whitaker drummed with The Elastic Jug Stompers for a while and when they disbanded, so to speak, he began teaching drum lessons out of his home. He married a sweet and patient woman named Sharilyn Hover. She used to sing with Dick Delisi’s band but is now a nurse.
Norm du Plume, whoever he was, disappeared. Someone said he ran guns to the Sandinistas. I never heard anything else from or about him.
Larrivee, you know, plays with Taint, whose astronomical success is long -running and deserved. They seem unassailable and can be seen on MTV and VH1 as regularly as back fence cats.
Chuck sells cars out on Covington Pike. Fucking Chuck.
And Garland, whom I miss with an ache like “the day let suddenly on sick eyes,” also hit it big as a solo artist in the countrypolitan genre. Her appearances with Nanci Griffith and her platinum album, “Glimmerless,” have established her as one of the most formidable artists in the nineties90s. She married Tony Jungklas, who played with Emmylou Harris. She may be the only woman I ever loved.
Though I never touched her.
Though I never said a single romantic word to her.
I wrote her one song, a song no one will ever sing: “Garland Draper in the Morning.”
She smelled, listeners, like milk bath.
The Door
“Whatever hour you woke there was a door shutting.”
—Virginia Woolf, “A Haunted House”
James Royce did not like it when his parents left him alone. Anywhere, at any time. Being sent to his room was especially galling to the ten-year-old because he liked nothing better than being in the middle of family doings. He resented his parents when they went out for the evening and left him with his older brother, Norm. And now that Norm was dating and going out on his own, James often felt left out. It was maddening and it was disorienting.
He never wanted to miss anything—even bedtime was difficult for him. He could hear the low-level burble of the TV from his room off the hallway. He could hear his mother occasionally making comment, something about “Mrs. Pewitt,” something about the church. He strained to hear—he had to know everything. Life was going on all around him.
Therefore, when he sat in the parlor—the overly decorated front room the Royces referred to as the parlor—he could feel the loneliness seep into his very bones. It made his limbs heavy. It made moving around difficult. He cursed the family for leaving—even though Norm was only in his own bedroom, down the hall, with the door closed and weird, Indian music leaking out of it.
James sat on the piano bench and studied the room. He had memorized its every contour, its minutia, like he had memorized the wallpaper at the dentist’s office, which depicted a sylvan scene of indeterminate time, a swirling, off-green representation of a world that, really, never existed. The parlor was dark, the drapes of a heavy synthetic material that blocked nearly all light. They drained the room. The furniture seemed made of the same opaque substance, as if the whole room was webby, or an undersea city like Atlantis. James thought about being underwater, the pressure on every square inch of you, the suffocating weight of the water.
And as he mused on things dim and melancholy and shadowy, a slight movement to his left disturbed his peripheral attention. He slowly turned his head toward the disturbance, if disturbance it was. His eye fell on the closet door. James measured it. It had opened itself, he thought. While he was sitting there the door had opened—just that. It was now slightly ajar; an inhospitable sliver of darkness now appeared between door and jamb.
A shiver went through James. Why would a door suddenly open? He did not like thinking about it. The dark sliver drew him. It was an obdurate black—a black that swallowed light, swallowed sight. James had to get out of the room—that’s what he knew. He had to get out but his limbs felt so exhausted. Could he run, or would it be like the dream where his legs would not move, as if clothed in concrete?
He looked at the door that led to the hallway and then to Norm’s room. He could make it. He could just make it.
He rose like an automaton and moved quietly out of the room. He could hear Norm’s music. Familiarity flooded him. He was safe for now.
***
“There’s something creepy about the front parlor,” James tried at breakfast the next day. His father snorted under his mustache.
“James,” was all he said, a one-word disruption of his newspaper perusal.
James’ mother was more accommodating.
“What’s creepy about the parlor, dear?” she asked, placing cinnamon toast on the table.
“I think there’s—uh—something in there,” James said. “Sort of.”
“Sort of in there?” his mother asked.
“I mean, the door in there—” James stopped himself. A door opening itself is not exactly the most fearful thing in the mind of adults. James recognized this now.
“Never mind,” he said.
“Just stay out of there then,” his mother smiled at him.
“Squirt” was Norm’s only addendum.
***
A few days went by. A few days of kickball and curb-sitting and sweat and mosquitoes. A few days of the Dorich brothers and their athleticism and guns. Summer was its usual under-the-surface self, voices that whisper, mumble, and intimate an adventure that is just beyond reach, one that stays just beyond reach. Summer promised much and delivered in percentages.
So it was that one afternoon James was alone in the house—his mother standing near the backyard fence, swapping privations with Mrs. Pewitt.
The house ticked as beams pandiculated. A fug fell over the entire home—born of heat and air that seemed weighted with something other than humidity, an indolence, an oppression. The parlor called to James—it petitioned something base and basic to human curiosity, a desire to see the worst, to experience the dreadful, and then to measure one’s self.
James entered the room as if he were entering church, a church filled with strangers who worshipped strangeness. He left the joining d
oor open—it allowed a weak, cloying light to waft in and mingle with the murk like a poor solution. James shuffled his feet, a tentativeness that addressed the parlor’s influence.
He returned to the piano bench. Everything seemed the same as on his previous visit. He could hear the air conditioner make its mechanical sleep sounds, a machine laboring against the world’s seriousness. James imagined that in its susurration he could perceive the voices of drowned men, of mermen and Triton’s gulag.
Somewhere in the distance a lawnmower started up, a razory buzz. And underneath it, perhaps, his mother’s bright chatter.
James had not looked at the door. Now, as confidence leeched into him, he slowly turned toward it. It was closed.
In his mind he could see the inside of the closet. It held seasonal things—winter things—and hence was all but forgotten in the summer, just as winter’s hardships were. James could see his coat, too -thick for comfort, his rubbers, the sled against the back wall, held in place by heavy outerwear hanging on the cross rod.
Then he saw it happen as if his attention were causing it. The door opened with a smart click. The same one inch of darkness presented itself. James could only stare. It opened—for him. The door knew he was there. It opened because he was looking at it. What did it want?
James looked quickly to the outer door, making sure his egress would be unimpeded. The outer door was closed. James knew he had left it open.
Now, panic rose in him like an ague. He sprang from the bench, grabbed frantically at the outer door, his small hand glancing off the polished doorknob, until in his fumbling he was able to open it. He caromed off the walls in the hall, his breath coming in painful swallows, and he all but bowled over his mother coming inside just then, clothespins still in her mouth.
“James,” she spat a pin into her palm. “What in the world?”
***
Later, James lay on his bed with a washcloth over his forehead. He had gotten overheated, his mother said, all corrective and utility. And she comforted him with a universal palliative.
“Don’t carry on so,” she admonished.
James was willing to believe that he had just been carrying on. Once returned to the known world, once more among family members and adult reason, his misadventure in the parlor seemed harebrained, at best. Afraid of a door? Ridiculous.
Later, in Norm’s room, James lay on the bottom bunk and spoke to the mattress above him as if it were his father confessor. Norm lay on the top bunk leafing through a Mad Magazine, only half- listening to his moon-stricken little brother.
“There are things in the world, in the ordinary world, that when you look at them too closely, you know, become creepy. Ordinary things. You ever have that happen?” James tried to keep the whine out of his voice.
“Uh huh,” Norm said, his concentration lost on the back-page fold.
“Really?” James said. “You know what I mean?”
“Mean about what?” Norm said, returning, slowly.
“Things. Things you are familiar with. You look at them and they…change.”
“What are you on about?” Norm said, now all big-brotherly.
“The door in the parlor.” There. He’d said it.
“What about it? You’re scared of the door in the parlor?”
“See...”
“Squirt, c’mon. You want to see me take that door in hand? Is that what you want? You know what—I’ll open it. Whad’ dya say?”
This was the kind of action he counted on Norm for. This was taking the bull by the horns. Norm would save him from his inner demons.
***
Someone had pulled the heavy curtains back in the parlor. A buttery shard of light fell on the floor, unredeemed. The room quivered in the gloam.
Norm looked it over quickly and then turned to his younger brother. His expression said, I don’t get it.
Norm walked to the closet door and yanked it open. Inside were the coats and toys and boxed games and dusty effluvia of seasons past. Nothing seemed menacing or inappropriate or even out of place. Norm scanned the interior.
“Nothing here, Squirt, unless you find old sleds frightening.”
James wanted to say, it’s not what’s in there, it’s the door itself. It has cognition. It knows when James is in the room. He didn’t know what he wanted to say—he simply couldn’t explain the feeling that came over him when the door opened.
“That’s okay,” James said, investing his speech with a lightness that he did not feel. “It’ll be okay.”
***
Days went by, the measured dog -days of summer. James did not return to the parlor. He spent his time in front of the television, or reading Hardy Boys, or playing at anarchy with the Dorich boys. They rifled construction sites for their discarded gold. They stole Playboys from the 7/11. They undressed in empty houses to marvel at the differences in their private parts. Once they tormented a bat that had inexplicably flown into the sidewalk—a bat in daylight was a thing other.
The sun was relentless, a blazing voice in the sky that rendered each day a heated trance. The boys sat on curbs and talked about forbidden things. They pelted passing cars with ice cubes. They sailed stick -boats down swollen gutter drains. Everything seemed simple, predestined.
Norm came and went, finding his way into young girl’s’ hearts. He brought home a stream of varying models of young womanhood, as if his only delight was in their dissimilarity, or as if they were samples to be tried and either abandoned or venerated. They all seemed to be named Susie or Laurie. They all smiled, their brilliant teeth an exemplar of money and superior breeding. They all wore shirts that clung to their burgeoning breasts like good packaging. And they all seemed to worship Norm, holding onto his arm, or touching him when they spoke, or laughing at everything he said. Norm drifted through this time an observer of his own life, an objective explorer. Norm did not recognize that this was a golden time because we do not, none of us. James thought his brother just shy of a god.
James’ parents, at this time, also seemed to drift. But their drifting was of a different quality. They were adults who had achieved what they set out to achieve. And now they wanted nothing more than to watch it happen around them, in flow, a life like a garden. They smiled at their children, were proud of them, trusted that their lives were taking shape and form. James felt calmer in their presence. He almost forgot about the door in the parlor.
But almost is not creed. It is neither meal nor balm. Almost is a place of ghosts and recalcitrant waft.
James knew he would return to the parlor and he only half-believed that the days since he’d been there, the days of heat and distraction, had inured him, had fashioned around him a protective crust.
***
Still, James made no conscious decision to return. One day, a day of liquid hours and empty reverie, James found himself standing on the threshold of the parlor. Somewhere his mother was singing to herself, a song about Joan of Arc. James could just hear her voice, as if from afar, as if she were singing on a radio tuned low. James stood outside the room and looked at it for a long time. How could something so familiar—something owned by his family, a part of his life, a part of him—seem so eerie, so outside of workaday existence? It was like when James found himself peering at the back of his hand as it lay lifeless on the table before him. He didn’t recognize it—the russet hair on his knuckles, the knob of joints—and a queer feeling came over him. It was attached to him, yet foreign.
Now, James stepped into the parlor. There was a muffled pucker in sound, similar to a pressure drop. James worked his jaw as if the relief were there. He sat on the piano bench, his back to the door. His fingers picked out “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore,” a small, desultory reverberation, like rain on tarpaper.
He craned his head toward the closet. Nothing seemed amiss. It was the door Norm had opened so casually, the very same door. Behind it were winter belongings, that was all.
James turned his body round. He forced himself
to hold his gaze on the door. The door appeared to respire, a slight expansion like a current of air brings about. Yet, on this day, there was nothing fearful in its symmetry, its outline, its very doorness. James felt silly—all those days he had spent worrying over something his imagination had fomented. Really, he was a moony child, a beetlehead.
Just then it happened again. The door cracked. The black nothingness that it presented was the black nothingness that James feared most. Just that—a single, solid band of black that obliterated light, reason, hope. There rose in James a dread as dire as death, as foul as corruption. Tears welled in him, a sinister crapulence.
James quickly turned toward the exit—his hope—and the door was again closed. Had he left it open? His mind was jumbled. He turned back toward the blackness. Did he hear a whisper, a sound like the night makes? Was it his name? No, this was fancy—of course it was. James knew better than to believe that inanimate things doomed him. The world is neither stacked for nor against you, his father said.
Yet, the closet seemed to have a connection to him. What was this connection? What did it portend?
James stood, a sleepwalker. He moved toward the closet. Was it bravery? Was it damned curiosity? He was drawn closer.
Now, as he stood within a few feet of the opening, he was sure it was breathing, murmuring, making sounds of entreaty. James’ body felt bottom-heavy, his legs weighted attachments. His hand went to the knob.
The doorknob was cold, as cold as a graveyard stone. James pulled the door toward him—it moved so easily, soundlessly, naturally. The door was as weightless as cloud. It felt right to James, and a calm entered him.
James stood and looked into the darkness before him. It was a void, an abyss of impenetrable blackness. Its end was time’s end, its boundaries that of the soul’s limits. James felt oddly penitent yet untainted before it. He felt as if he could stay there forever, on the threshold of something larger than himself. He knew that what faced him beckoned, as each day the time you have left beckons, a skeleton’s curled finger, a faith.