Birdwell would see through it.
I would see through it.
“Finishing is what you have to do,” Ernest Hemingway said. “If you don’t finish, nothing is worth a damn.”
Unfortunately, that’s probably true.
Telly said, “Don’t do anything half-assed. Do it full-assed. Ten on a scale of ten. Angelina Jolie.”
Both Ernest and Telly are right.
But exactly what does “finishing” and “full-assed” mean?
David Cosgrove’s life is an endless series of details and facts, with something missing. A crossword puzzle where the border pieces are linked, but the inside is a gaping hole.
A cave where he’s hiding something. He’s been hiding it from me for four months. Now he wants to bring it out in the open, the sunlight, and he doesn’t know how. He’s just too damn stuck to the back of that cave.
But hey, I know a little about caves myself.
I can’t talk full-assed about Telly, because words just don’t do the job. The soul is a canyon, and the English language is a rope that goes down only so far, then leaves you dangling.
Maybe if I could sleep, not just catnap or skim the surface.
Yeah, sleep.
The only place I can sleep—sink into REM, if only for forty-five minutes—is in the furnace room at Taft, in that narrow slot, about the size of a coffin, between the brick wall and the furnace. Knowing José is nearby. Keeping a safe eye. Keeping that old stove humming and thrumming.
José—Janitor God of Sleep, Lord Protector of Comatose Teen agers.
A man in coveralls doing the work of Zeus. Scraping by on a poverty salary. He should be the highest-paid employee in the school district.
Right now, I don’t feel sleepy because I’ve just transfused twelve ounces of taurine into my blood. But I know my body craves sleep—Marianas Trench deep sleep. Where owl-eyed fish glide silent and spineless. Deeper than light.
Chapter 21
When I walk into the Delphi about 1:45 p.m. on Sunday, Dreadlock’s chair is empty. This throws me because she’s always there, and I figure she’s just stepped away. Maybe to tweak her “dreads.”
So I sit in the lounge among the soon-to-die and listen to the laughing TV. Is there a hollower sound in the world? Can death be worse than this?
I wait for her. Wait twenty minutes, but no Dreadlock.
No Dreadlock means no Agnes. No Agnes means no Ruby the Lute.
Ruby rests sadly on my shoulder. Zipped in her gig bag.
A beautiful guitar, like a beautiful girl, needs to be unzipped and plucked.
That is my motto. In Latin:
Guitarus unzippus pluckus.
I’m getting used to playing for Agnes. When everything is right and in tune and my voice is on key, she falls into her chanting. It doesn’t matter what I play—the theme from “SpongeBob SquarePants” or something from American Idiot—Agnes gets into it. She starts her mantra. Claps in time. Chants:
Free the swimmers in the dark.
Free the swimmers in the dark.
We could do a whole CD of Agnes chanting, with me throwing in guitar licks all the way from folk to funk.
Guaranteed not to sell.
What I like about playing for Agnes is, she doesn’t see me when I play. She just hears the music. So after a minute, I can get into it. Forget about everything else. Forget about my ego, whether I’m any good or not. Just play.
Flat Ass waddles over and sits in Dreadlock’s chair. She’s all potato and no gravy. When the flat asses of the world take over from the tight ones, some god somewhere must be weeping.
So I leave the laughing TV, leave the thought of Dreadlock and Agnes, of guitars and lutes, and go to David Cosgrove’s room. Lean sad Ruby in a corner. Pull out a fresh canary yellow legal pad and a Bic retractable.
And begin my scrawling day.
In David’s mind, there is only one war: “The War”—World War II.
Not Iraq. Not Afghanistan. Not Vietnam. Not Korea.
One war.
David talks about life on a “tin can.” Specifically, about life on his tin can, DD-414, the destroyer USS Gabriel Trask.
“It’s not like a movie, Jonathan, starring John Wayne or what’s-his-name, George Clooney. For every day of action, there were hundreds of days of boredom, where we did nothing but wait. Or drill. For the most part, Jonathan, drill and drudgery are the linchpins of the sailor’s life. But then, in the last months of the war . . . my god, my god . . .”
“Tell me about April sixth, 1945.”
David’s head jerks. His blind eyes home in on me.
“It’s almost time, Jonathan.”
Hey, I say, it’s way past time.
“If there’s one day that defines me, Jonathan, it’s April sixth, 1945, and the morning of April seventh. Have you ever had a day that defines you? An end-of-the-world-as-you-know-it day? A kind of Armageddon?”
“Yeah, thirteen months ago.”
“Your brother?”
“Yeah.”
“What was the date?”
“April seventeenth—that’s the day he got hit. He died twenty-five days later on May twelfth. All those days were Armageddon.”
“I’m sorry, Jonathan.”
“What about April sixth, 1945?”
“All the facts are in the inquest report.”
“Yeah, I know the facts,” I say. “Your ship got blasted and some guys died. But there’s a lot I don’t know.”
“That’s true, Jonathan. The inquest report, the newspaper accounts—they don’t begin to tell the full story.”
“Words never do,” I say. “They’re supposed to, but they suck.”
David nods. “Yes, words can get in the way. We shoot at the duck, but we often miss.”
“Shoot at the duck?”
“Seek the true meaning, Jonathan.”
“Whew!” I say. “I’ve never hit that duck either. Not even once. People say I have, in my poems, but I haven’t.”
“Maybe we don’t need to hit the duck, Jonathan. Maybe all we need to do is say what we must say once, to another human being, openly and honestly, with humility and remorse. Maybe that is enough.”
I ponder this. “Yeah, maybe.”
“Jonathan, I want you to go back to the inquest report and focus on pages one hundred to one forty.”
“You mean the battle?”
“I mean the aftermath of the battle.”
Aftermath.
It’s not a place I want to go. I skipped that section of the report—Transition Theoried myself right on to the next section. But David seems ready to go there, and I know we have to. He’s talked around the edges long enough. He’s ready to shoot at the duck.
Well, almost.
“Next time,” he says, “we will talk about the aftermath.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Let’s take a few potshots at that duck.”
“Yes,” David says.
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
“But today,” he says, “we will talk about ‘Iceberg.’”
So today we go back to April 1, 1945.
The Gabe is steaming toward Okinawa, part of a giant task force—part of something called “Operation Iceberg.”
“We arrived off Hagushi Beach,” David remembers. “Everything felt different this time. The stakes higher. We desperately needed Okinawa. It was to be our steppingstone to the home islands of Japan—to ultimate invasion. The enemy knew this and was equally desperate to repulse us. On April first, we patrolled north of Ishima. On April third, fourth, and fifth, we escorted a convoy headed to Ulithi.”
On and on David talks. Till his voice—like a dimming flashlight—runs down to nothing.
Finally, he rasps, “Enough.”
I shove the legal pad into my backpack. Stand and shoulder Ruby. David reaches into his table drawer, pulls out an envelope.
“Jonathan . . .”
His hand trembles.
I grab the envelope. Peek
inside.
Shake my head. “Dude, this is way too much.”
“Goodbye, Jonathan.”
“Well, thanks.”
“Oh, Jonathan?”
“Yeah?”
“Katie’s taken a turn for the worse.”
“You mean the receptionist?”
He taps his vocal chords. Recharges them a bit. “Katie’s not our receptionist. She lives here.”
“Lives here?”
“Yes, she’s part of our community. Didn’t you know?”
“No—yeah! I mean, she’s no ordinary receptionist. What’s she got?”
“She has the Mother Teresa gene,” David says.
“Is that some kind of cancer?”
“It’s her way of looking at life, Jonathan. It’ll see her through everything, including this latest reaction to chemo.” He smiles. “She’s down the hall in one forty-seven. Say hello on your way out. Give her my fond regards.”
Chapter 22
The door to room 147 is open. A nurse stands inside, checking monitors, jotting notes.
Katie lies in bed, hooked to tubes.
Skinned-potato bald. Big bruise on her IV arm.
Her wigs rest on mannequin heads in a small bay window. One is black ropes of dreadlocked hair. One is bowl-cut Day-Glo-blue hair. One is long Beyoncé-brown hair.
The nurse looks up from her clipboard.
“Who are you?”
“Good question,” I say.
“It’s okay,” Katie says.
I shamble in, Ruby on one shoulder, backpack on the other. I’m too frayed and disheveled to be standing in such a clipboard-efficient room, one so tidy and well lit.
The nurse leaves, flashing five fingers. “You have five minutes.”
Katie sneers at her back, mouth-echoes five minutes.
Like David, she’s got a transparent oxygen tube connecting her nose to a little green tank on the floor.
“Stare all you want.”
“No thanks.”
I step to the window.
The view is of Schmitz Park—deep ravine, big trees, trails. A spoonful of Telly lives in Schmitz Park, where Grandpa took us to see the last of the old growths, pick the blackberries of August.
Grandpa—he lived his last eighteen months in a senior care facility. Called it “an old folks’ home,” which made the other old folks grind their teeth. He was a dedicated smoker, a coughing shifter of gunk from one charred lung to the other. Wore his white hair long, hippie-poet-style, like Walt Whitman.
“Only three things in this world I cherish,” he used to say. “Jasper and you boys.”
Jasper was his Border collie, a fat, limping wreck of a dog.
Grandpa spent a good part of every morning standing on a strip of grass on Delridge Avenue waiting for Jasper to poop. And waiting . . . and waiting.
Love is patient, I guess.
Or constipated.
He was not one to scoop. “Dogs been crappin’ on grass since Neanderthal times. You think those knuckle draggers scooped shit? Why mess with tradition?”
Grandpa wasn’t too popular with the local residents.
I think he cherished Mimi, too, but it’s not easy when you’re both cut from the same spool of barbed wire.
“I know this for sure,” Grandpa told us. “You boys will stride across far bigger ground than I ever did.”
I’m grateful to god, the seven fates, and the thirteen furies that Grandpa never lived to know about Telly.
It would’ve killed him.
“Which of my heads do you like best?” Katie asks.
I gaze at the three faceless mannequin heads. Touch the long Beyonce hair, rub a strand between my fingers.
“This one.”
“Typical.”
“How’s it typical?”
“Never mind. Play me something.”
“No way. That nurse’ll kill me.”
“We all gotta die sometime, Jonathan.”
“Yeah,” I say. “We do.”
I slide Ruby out of her gig bag. No good chairs in the room, so I move the mannequin heads and perch my scrawny ass on the sill of the bay window. Fish a pick from among my pennies.
My repertoire isn’t big enough to take requests, but I do like to match the music with the moment. Best way is to start noodling and let your instincts decide. So I play a C chord and stumble onto an old trail, something I haven’t played in forever, right out of the beginner’s song book: “Oh! Susanna.”
I pick it rusty and messy. Then I pick it again, to clean it up. Third time, I hammer a couple of notes, bend a string. Give Stephen Foster a squeeze of blues juice.
Thing about bending strings, you bend every one, it sounds like crap. You bend one or two, it sounds good.
More is less, less is more.
True of poetry, too.
Maybe of life itself. I haven’t worked that one out yet.
While I’m messing around with Ruby, Katie’s eyes glaze over. She doesn’t seem to mind the tune. Fact, I can see she likes it. Because she’s smiling about two percent.
I pick it, hammer it, chord it, bend it.
When I stitch it up, she says, “Jonathan, everybody at the Delphi has good days and bad. Just like you.”
“Yeah,” I say. “But most of my days are bad.”
“Most of my days are good,” Katie says. “Play it again.”
This time, I slow it down.
When you play “Oh! Susanna” slowly and bend a string or two, it feels like ancient America—swamps and snakes and buggies and dirt roads and moonlit kisses. It’s Walt Whitman whistling down the magnolia path. It’s Abe Lincoln swinging his ax in the Illinois woods. It’s Kurt Cobain playing the opening licks to “All Apologies.” You hear a thousand ghostly voices in that melody.
You can play it folk, rock, grunge, hip-hop, blues, any way.
But slow is best.
It’s not like I knew this ten minutes ago. But I know it now.
All the time I’m playing, I’m keeping a nerve tuned for the nurse.
Pretty soon, I don’t care anymore. Let her come.
Let her hear “Oh! Susanna.”
She could use a dose of the shaggy old blues, played West Seattle—style, on a guitar from Saskatchewan that thinks she’s a lute.
In fact, “Oh! Susanna” might be part of the cure. Just what the Delphi needs. Music that transcends time, place, and disease.
Katie never lets go of that two-percent smile.
Even when she dozes off, her breathing tube wrapped over her ear.
Chapter 23
“Dude,” Kyle says. “Let me do all the talking.”
We’re standing in the Kenny G waiting for Miss Yan-Ling. The Kenny G is Taft’s performing arts center. It’s named after Kenneth Gorelick, a Seattle-born saxophone player who holds the world record for playing the longest note ever recorded on a saxophone, an E-flat, which he held for forty-five minutes and forty-seven seconds in 1997 at J&R Music World in New York City.
The Kenny G is more than twice as big as the Quincy Jones over at Garfield High School. It can seat a thousand people. But you can add a couple hundred folding chairs without blocking the fire exits.
The Kenny G was designed by egos for egos.
I’m not an ego. If I have to play, give me a no-tech theater that seats twelve people, all deaf grandmothers.
I follow Kyle upstairs onto the stage. It’s still a few weeks to showtime, but damn, I’m already shaking. My body, my voice, my whole being.
Javon’s up in the control booth, messing with the lights. He throws a pin on me. Suddenly, all of me is blue, even my orange T-shirt. Then I’m all green. Then all red.
“Hey, man,” I shout into the glare, “enough with the rainbow.”
“Listen up, dude,” Kyle says. “I wanna put you above the stage. For maximum impact.”
“Above the stage?”
“Relax,” Kyle says. “Javon backs me up one thousand percent. DON’T YOU, JAVON?”<
br />
From up in the booth, behind the blinding glare, Javon’s voice comes down, puny but clear.
“One thousand percent, dude.”
Kyle throws his arms up and shouts, “Raise the backdrops.”
Motors and pulleys start grinding. Slowly, one by one, the stage backdrops rise: the painted fire escape from West Side Story, the painted cornfield from Oklahoma!, the painted jukebox and soda fountain from Grease. Finally we see into the deep recesses of the stage, all the way past the ropes and Roman shields and mops and buckets and fake horses.
Standing against the back wall, tall as the highest furled curtain, is a statue of King Kong. Kyle is pointing directly at it.
“Do you see what I see?”
“The Velcro Kong?”
He nods. “The Velcro Kong, dude.”
Kong glares at us with painted-orange eyes. All these years in the dusty back shadows, and he’s still got it: primeval mystery; the potential to chew you up and spit you out, limb by limb.
Fact is, the giant prop is all that remains of a musical production of King Kong, which Taft presented back in 1999, a millennium ago. Kong is covered in black Velcro to catch the sponge-tipped spears.
“See that left paw, man,” Kyle says.
“It’s a hand, dude.”
“Whatever, dude. I’m gonna put you and the Ric up there.”
Kong has one arm dragging to his knee. The other he holds chest high, with the hand flat, palm up. It’s supposed to be for holding the girl, but the position makes him look more like a TV pitchman for Dove soap.
“You want me to stand up there and play the Ric?”
“Yeah, and sing, too,” Kyle says.
“Dude,” I say, “you are one hundred percent delusional.”
Kyle grabs my shoulder. Massages it. Slowly and profoundly, eyeball to eyeball, he says, “There is a fine line, dude, between delusion and genius.”
“Hello, boys.”
Here comes Miss Yan-Ling down the aisle. She’s young and foxy. Of the seven hundred sixty-two thousand words in the English language, the one that best describes her is pert. Here’s how I define pert: the state of being properly dressed while your body aches to be undressed.
Miss Yan-Ling climbs onto the stage. Peers up toward the control booth, shields her eyes against the glare. Lifts her voice theatrically. “Hello, Javon.”
Adios, Nirvana Page 10