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Know Your Beholder

Page 14

by Adam Rapp


  I wanted to lie at her feet. I wanted to place my head in her bare lap and breathe in her scent and moan like a cow.

  “Okay,” I said, and stopped circling her.

  “Okay,” she said, opening her eyes.

  I replaced her on the stool.

  She picked up her clothes off the floor and put them on matter-of-factly, layer by layer, as if we were in the locker room of a same-sex gym class. Then she reached into the apple box of chalks and charcoal stubs, stood before the easel just to my left, took me in, biting her lower lip, presumably deep in thought, and started to draw. I never mentioned the rent.

  When I returned to my apartment, the attic door was ajar.

  I slowly pushed it open, half-expecting to see Todd and Mary Bunch holding their DVD player or one of my body hairs, forensically confirming my burglary. But that’s not who I was greeted by—no, not even close.

  Glose was asleep on the bearskin. Or appeared to be. Was it really him?

  Had my session with Harriet Gumm unlocked some metaphysical slipstream and somehow conjured the Third Policeman’s troubled, meta-destructive drummer?

  He was asleep on his back, per normal, which I’ve always found to be incongruous with his insane unpredictability. You expect someone who thrives in chaos to sleep as if he’s been thrown from a speeding car, but Glose always sleeps with perfect, sublime stillness, no matter how cramped the quarters or noisy the conditions. In waking life he is a human disaster. In sleeping life he’s like some sort of Zen master of unconsciousness, transcending all circumstances. It used to really piss me off, especially when band funds were low and the four of us were forced to negotiate a thirty-dollar motel room—say, for instance, the Rodeway [sic] Inn, just off Route 26 in Ogallala, Nebraska, where the carpet smelled like a breakfast burrito. If I got the floor I would toss and turn all night, practically wrenching my shoulders out of their sockets. I’d often wind up sleeping in the van. If Glose got the floor he would lie on his back, tilt the bill of his Mao Communist cap over his eyes like some Dust Bowl hobo on a freight train, and sleep like the dead for ten hours. He wouldn’t even bother taking off his shoes.

  His hands were crossed under his chin now, like a vampire in a coffin, his disposed figure perfectly still, as if carefully arranged for a viewing. His black hair had grown long. It was dry and unhealthy-looking, graying in splitting, wayward strands. He had a few days’ growth of a beard going, dark like his hair. His beard starts way high up, like almost under his eyes, and when he doesn’t shave, it gives him the air of an irritated bandito. He was thinner, his big-boned build looser now, whereas normally it was overly fleshy, usually a little flabby. His fungal toenails were extraordinary to behold, with so many colors marbling their thick yellow carapaces that they seemed almost artistically manipulated.

  He must have felt the air shift when I opened the door, as his eyelids separated in that strange, indifferent mechanical way of crocodiles. It was downright fucking spooky. I almost thought he was still unconscious, between planes of existence.

  After a quiet moment he said, “Francis.” His voice was soft, weaker than I remembered.

  “Glose,” I replied. “What a surprise.”

  “I would’ve called but I lost my phone.”

  I mentally scrolled back to the last time I’d seen him. I couldn’t place it. Was it before or after Kent had moved to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan? For the life of me I couldn’t locate his last day in Pollard. Glose was like that. He never said good-bye, would just disappear, abandoning IOUs, dirty laundry, drumsticks, percussion toys, half-eaten sandwiches, unresolved arguments, etc.

  “I really like this bearskin,” he said.

  “Yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s yours.” I told him he’d left it in a box in the old rehearsal space. “You found it in that weird thrift store in Joplin,” I added.

  He said, “Joplin…” as if the town itself was a confusing half-memory.

  “Joplin, Missouri. We were on tour. You bought the bearskin and Kent bought the little taxidermy bird. I think it was a finch.”

  This didn’t seem to register. It hurt me deeply that Glose was forgetting things band-related. This was real history, spent in rented vans and cheap diners and venereal-smelling roadside motels. We crashed on friends’ living room floors when we were way too old to be crashing on friends’ living room floors.

  The anecdotal stuff is the beautiful part of rock ’n’ roll. Like when Kent, because of his cat allergy, slept on a pontoon boat, where he was attacked by the same dander-rich cat that had driven him sneezing and teary-eyed from the lake house in the first place. All these weird experiences on the road. The strange conversations at three a.m. The incessant two-lane highways. The water towers and farmland architecture. The bizarre small-town mom-’n’-pop thrift stores. The flea markets and pancake houses. The post-hangover conversations with teenage cashiers at gas station snack bars.

  About the bearskin I said, “I had it flattened and cleaned. Figured you were through with it.”

  He neither thanked me nor confirmed his ownership of the bearskin. He simply watched me with his crocodile eyes.

  I asked him how he’d gotten into my apartment and he said that the door was unlocked. “I knocked,” he said, “and it just sort of opened on its own.”

  I never leave the attic apartment unlocked. It’s one of my more responsible adult habits. But I had to believe Glose. My lock is a Sunnect Advanced Protection digital deadbolt. And my attic door is made of steel. There’s no way he could’ve picked the lock.

  I asked him how he knew to look for me in the attic and he said he studied the mailboxes. I asked him how he got into the house and he said that the front door was ajar.

  He said, “I’ve come a long way, Francis.”

  I wasn’t able to engage with him about his personal journey just yet. I was still dealing with the possibility that he might be a figment of my imagination. Or here simply to ruin my life.

  He told me I had a righteous beard and I thanked him. He told me I’ve always been so clean-cut.

  “Not so much anymore,” I offered.

  Then he slapped at something on his neck and said that he keeps having this recurring dream that he’s grown a full beard. “But it’s a beard made of almonds,” he added. “And I’m on the run from the Almond Pickers.”

  I asked him who the Almond Pickers were and he said he wasn’t entirely sure but that they wear these safari hats with the words Almond Pickers on them. “And they’re chasing after me with sacks to put the almonds in and they’re fucking fast as cats.”

  I told him that it would be really weird if he was on the run from the Almond Brothers. “Like if they were really the Allman Brothers but changed their name just slightly for the purpose of hijacking your dream.”

  We laughed and that made it official: I wasn’t hallucinating. In our finest hours, this was the way the band came up with song ideas. We were at our best when we were goofing off. And we were at our very best when Glose was at the center of it.

  His teeth were dim, his tongue chalky white.

  “Homonyms,” I said.

  “Homonyms,” he echoed.

  He propped himself up on an elbow. He wore a gray hoodie over his signature kelly-green Girl Scouts of America T-shirt and old split-pea-colored Levi’s cords with holes in the knees. Black hair was tufting through the holes. No winter coat. No socks on his feet, not a pair of shoes in sight.

  “Can I get a hug?” he said.

  I approached him and he stood. Getting to his feet was maybe a seven-part move. I suspect his body carries so much survival inflammation that he probably suffers like an old person with rheumatoid arthritis. His breath smelled like the back of a garbage truck and his clothes stank of body odor and stale feces and mold. I worried about acquiring bacteria, but we hugged nonetheless. At the height of our embrace he sort of sighed. Something felt irretrievably lost about him. Like parts of his soul had gone missing. When the hug was over there were tears
in his eyes.

  I asked him where his shoes were.

  Clearly embarrassed, he said, “I don’t seem to have any at the moment.”

  “You’ve been walking around barefoot? In this crazy weather?”

  “Just for the past few days.” He said that he’d been wrapping his feet in newspaper and plastic bags.

  In addition to the psychedelic toenails, he appeared to have trench foot. Both feet were cadaver white, wrinkled, maligned with crust and abscesses.

  I went into my minicloset and pulled out a pair of old Doc Martens that I hadn’t worn in over a year. They were still in pretty good shape, a bit scuffed up, but with solid soles. I also grabbed a pair of winter socks for him. I handed him the shoes and socks.

  He said, “Thanks, Francis.”

  I think it was the first time he’d actually thanked me. As in ever. And when you’ve been deprived of that from someone, no matter how much bitterness and vitriol you’ve stored up, it can still be touching and it was.

  But then he followed it by asking, “Would it be too much trouble if I crashed here for a coupla days?”

  I noticed that I was crossing my arms in front of my sore chest, sort of defensively. I asked him if he’d called his mom.

  “I don’t think I can do that,” he said.

  At nineteen, after one semester, Rodney Daniel Glose dropped out of Waubonsee Community College to join an eight-piece Chicago-based stunt-band called the Spirit Dicks, whose shows would often devolve into paintball wars with their fans. They had two drummers, one who’d bite a beat and one who’d enact a kind of mathematic score of war. Glose was the latter drummer. The Spirit Dicks died after the band’s lead vocalist was sent to Cook County Jail for stealing high-end Winnfield executive chairs from the Libertyville office-furniture warehouse where he was a part-time loading dock worker.

  When Glose dropped out of Waubonsee Community College and moved to Chicago, he broke his mother’s heart. Lorna Glose still lives in the small tar-paper house where her only son was born, on the east side of Aurora, Illinois.

  Glose’s father is an unknown entity. Kent, for reasons that were never entirely clear to me, believed him to be living on a pot farm in Jamaica. I’m still not sure how Glose wound up in Pollard. Morris and I met him at the Crooked Dog, a now defunct bar where he briefly worked busing tables. One night he overheard us talking about forming a band and he started talking about drums in a cool way, particularly about the idea of melodic drumming, so we invited him to jam with us. He blew our minds on a makeshift kit and the rest is history.

  “Don’t worry,” Glose said, “you won’t even know I’m here.”

  With a dirty index finger he probed inside his ear, employing a slow, churning technique that issued audible squishing noises. Critters were inside him. Did he have lice? Crabs? Or worse yet, scabies?

  I wanted to scream at him for killing our band, something I’d never done. I wanted to scream so fucking loud that his face would cave in from the megahertz, but instead I said, “I’ll track down an air mattress for you.”

  “No need for that,” Glose said, ceasing his ear probe. “I’m happy on the bearskin.”

  Though I knew I was in for trouble, I nodded.

  And thus the mooching began. And thus was I forced to abandon my typewriter, at least for the time being.

  I called Haggis and traded the Bunches’ DVD player for a month’s supply of his new penis-enlargement pills. When he came to drop them off, I met him at the front porch.

  “So they really work, huh?”

  “They’ve put an inch on me,” he volunteered.

  I handed him an old Pollard Memorial High School gym bag containing the DVD player. He held his fist out and I bumped it idiotically.

  “You could probably get a hundred bucks for that,” I said of the DVD player.

  “Oh, I’m not sellin’ it,” Haggis said. “It’s gonna be the main cog in my new backseat entertainment system.”

  “In the Nissan?”

  “Hells yes in the Nissan. I got me a twenty-seven-inch, high-def LED monitor, Bose speakers.”

  He was in good spirits. I wondered if the penis pills were helping his mood.

  “I might get a hibachi,” he said, “start hosting client barbecues.”

  I told him I was impressed. And I was. Here was someone finding great joy and purpose in the confines of a compact car.

  Afterward, he shoveled the front and back porch steps, and the walkway from the street.

  For the first time in years Hazard Groom’s wife, Eugenia, crossed the street and buzzed the attic apartment. The last time she had paid a visit to the house was after my mother died. On that occasion she had dressed in all black, complete with a mourner’s snood. She brought with her a huge bouquet of red carnations and was so made-up she looked waxen. You would’ve thought it was her mother who’d died and that she was coming over to borrow an egg for some memorial cake she was baking.

  When I met her on the front porch, she seemed deeply troubled. I thought maybe Hazard had suffered a stroke, or worse yet, died. Somehow I always expect senior citizens to go in the winter. Their fragile, brittle bones turning to glass, their hearts winding down like shrinking, faulty clocks. Their lungs thinning to faint sacs of frost. Hundreds of Pollard seniors slowly teetering while filling the teakettle or reaching for the refrigerator door, landing face-first on their cold kitchen floors.

  I brought Eugenia Groom around to the side porch and we sat on the wicker furniture, which was actually colder than the air.

  I said, “What can I do for you, Mrs. Groom?”

  Eugenia Groom has been wearing the same brown wig and identical shade of tuxedo-red lipstick since the midseventies. She is pretty the way an official Susan B. Anthony one-dollar coin is pretty. Her voice is a faint warble of desperation, perhaps more suited to a pigeon than a woman. You always feel like you’re going to have to console her when she approaches you. She trembles and moves at the same steady pace as, say, a canoe. How she’s survived all these years with a bombastic legendary football coach for a husband is anyone’s guess. Kent used to joke that she might have some kind of unexpected jack-in-the-box energy in bed.

  For this particular visit she wore an orange silk headscarf over her wig, black suede gloves, and black heels over sheer nylon stockings. Her navy mackintosh had specks of powder on the shoulders, which I assumed to be some sort of scented talcum that had escaped from her wig. She obviously hadn’t yet beheld the beard I’ve been farming and I could tell she was trying to make sense of my new look. Was the nice boy from across the street, the one who used to deliver her Chicago Tribune and play in those silly rock bands, still in there somewhere?

  She removed her gloves, placed them in her lap, and took my hands in hers, which I was sure meant Hazard Groom had indeed died. For a moment, she ceased breathing, enlarged her funereal eyes, and, with an expression that was distinctly corvine, said, “Francis, you have circus killers living in your house.”

  I took my hands back. “Mrs. Groom,” I said, “if you’re referring to the Bunches, I’ll have you know that they are very nice people.”

  “They’re cold-blooded killers. Circus killers.”

  I told her that there was absolutely no evidence that they’d done anything to their daughter. “They’re actually going through a lot right now,” I added.

  “They’re killers from the circus,” she said.

  She was starting to seem downright robotic with the variations on the “circus killers” refrain. It was as if she’d been somehow digitally downloaded with a well-mastered MP3 track and some fellow neighborhood witch huntress was zapping her with a remote from behind a nearby snowy hedge.

  “It’s unfair to say that, Mrs. Groom, it really is.”

  She cleared her voice and continued: “Gene and Cathy were wanting to bring the grandkids over this weekend, and I have to say it makes Hazard and me very uncomfortable knowing that these people are right across the street.”

&n
bsp; The thing that drove me craziest was her gentle, warbly voice. She really was scared to death.

  I assured her that she had nothing to fear. “They’re good, normal people,” I added. “Todd is a fireman and Mary watches George Clooney movies.”

  “That’s all a front,” she replied. “Can’t you see that?” She went on to say that she could see it—meaning their obvious murderous guilt—from all the way across the street, plain as day. “It’s all a performance,” she said.

  For a moment I doubted myself. Was it all a performance? Were my initial suspicions about the Bunches correct? Was I being fooled?

  Eugenia added that Hazard had wanted to join her on this visit but that he was too upset.

  I imagined Coach Groom standing behind the drapes, even-faced, smoking a pipe, his arteries thickening with a slow dull rage, poised to call out to the neighborhood with a bullhorn and unleash the ignominy, leading end-zone-style chants against the Bunches until they came out to face the throng.

  I suggested that she meet the Bunches for herself. “They’re probably home right now,” I said. “Let’s go knock on their door.”

  She stood and put her gloves back on. “I don’t think so,” she said, her voice quavering ludicrously.

  “You’re wrong about them,” I said to the back of her mackintosh.

  She clicked across the porch, faster than I’ve ever seen her move.

  “At least meet Mary,” I called after her.

  But she exited without a response, scooting across the icy street in her heels, as if chased by winter bees. Hazard Groom was already at their front door, just as I’d imagined him, stalwart as a can of nails, ready to let her in.

  It’s March at last.

  Glose has now stayed for three days and into a fourth.

  From the Internet, for thirty dollars, I bought him Calming Cleanse Delousing Shampoo and Conditioner. I paid for overnight shipping. The kit came with a comb and an instructional booklet. We didn’t discuss the critters that were living on him. I just handed him the little clear plastic zipper pack and he read the label and nodded.

 

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