Because in my mind, I’m stepping into the kitchen.
Sitting down at the table.
Just me and my thicks.
My voice shakes.
“Here’s a little Pinky Toe for you. Sorry if I’m pitchy. Listen at your own risk.”
Chapter 36
The intro to “Crossing the River Styx” is a series of fast notes, with one short frill and one long one. It’s a ditty I’ve messed up countless times in practice because I’m not much of a picker.
But now I don’t mess up. I play it metronome perfect.
Each note a thunderous sound blasting out of Big Bertha and Fat Phyllis and soaking into the state-of-the-art acoustic walls of the Kenny G.
Raw power.
Yet innocent, as Gupti would want it.
The taste of cotton candy.
I sense the Ric knows the song better than I do. Because when I reach the end of the intro and am supposed to start singing, I don’t. I feel a great desire to go back and play the intro again.
Play it my way.
And I do. This time, though, I don’t sound metronome perfect.
Or frilly. Or sweet.
I open my eyes on the dark bright glare of the auditorium.
I can’t see a thing. But then through a hole in the glare I see Vic and that little baby clinging to his neck. Guess that baby is my half brother or sister. Or something like that.
I slow down “Crossing the River Styx.”
The Ric wants me to bend a few notes, so I do. I play a bending lick, off B, way up on the tenth fret. Push it up a whole step—which is hard enough off the B string, but the Ric wants me to push it two whole steps—a gigantic leap. An aching arch.
The notes that bleed out are the bluest blue I’ve ever played.
Yet lullaby, too.
The Ric seems to know all about it. The Ric seems to know everything. About me, Telly—even this baby.
I fire off another round of notes. They are totally unfamiliar. But they sound tight. They ring perfectly.
Jeezus!
How did I do that?
This is no time or place to be experimenting or improvising, but that’s exactly what I’ve just done—and it worked.
When I open my mouth to sing, my voice comes out greasy. Not as pink lemonade, the way the Pinky Toe singer does it. But as a midnight cheeseburger, slopped with onions and ketchup:
I’m crossing the River Styx.
From Charon I wrest the oar,
To speed my soul to the Plutonian Shore.
These lyrics have always tasted like some kind of sugary Greek goo, but now I’m starved for them.
’Cause I’ve got to be free,
To lie upone the breast of Persephone
In the land of Nevermore.
When I sing “’Cause I’ve got to be free,” I give it everything. Bend it far. Feel it deep where the loneliest butterfly flutters.
Because I do have to be free.
Free of Gupti and everybody else who wants something out of me.
I add another blues run—the tightest yet.
A raw wail in the night.
Holy shit!
Clearly the Ric does not mind my ignorance.
I open the kitchen door and step outside. Go to the edge of the cliff.
When a baby eagle leaps from its nest for the first time, how high can it fly? That’s my dilemma. Because now I want to go all the way up to the sun.
When I open my eyes again, I see, through the glare, an old man. Gray beard. Walt Whitmanesque. Sitting there.
I focus on him.
Rip through a run of hard notes—all rocketing from the basic “Crossing the River Styx” theme, but firing in different directions, then interlacing in the sky.
Fountains of sound.
Intricacies beyond all of my powers as a guitar player, even on the best day of my life.
I don’t dare think about this. All I know is, I could fall out of the sky any second.
But it’s nice to soar. Up close to the sun.
Deep inside one of these riffs, I hear a voice. A kind of echo.
Javon must be messing with me. Adding some kind of talk-box effect.
I play the riff again. Hear the voice again—damn!
Now everything I’m doing on the Ric is new and untried. Flying higher and higher. Shuddering up my spine and down to my tailbone.
But also shuddering up and down Kong’s spine. Because we are moving together. In a jungle dance.
“Crossing the River Styx” is really two songs. The first half is a distinct melody, to be played with exactitude, which I have done more successfully than I could’ve dreamed.
Stitched it both even and jagged.
Played it straight. Bent it blue.
The second half is operatic. Open to interpretation.
It’s the easiest part. Just the chords C–F, G–F. Repeated. Maybe toss in a minor or a ninth. And the chanting:
Crossing the River Styx,
To the land of Nevermore.
I swap to a crunching strum. Crunch is a muscle approach to guitar, and in all my practices, I’ve never used it.
But now I do. Each down stroke sends a jackhammer-like shiver through Kong.
I’m staring into the blinding light. Hearing the ghostly talk-box echo.
Who the hell . . . ?
And then I know.
I peer through the glare. At the back of the Kenny G, I see a lone guy in a yellow T-shirt. Slumped in his chair. Watching me.
As Kong sways back and forth, I focus on him.
Begin to chant lines from my masterpiece, “Tales of Telemachus.” Just a little chaos.
“Where do we go in the night, o brother?”
I hear the echo: “Where do we go?”
“When will the rain fall?”
I hear the echo: “When will the rain fall?”
Kong weaves back and forth. Throbs primally.
“Who knows?”
“Who knows?”
His voice is so alive. So part of me.
I crush the strings.
Scream: “ME LEAST OF ALL!”
This time, though, I hear no echo. It’s like he’s disagreeing.
Just like always.
Protesting my self-doubt.
Because Telly builds me up.
Believes in me.
Even now.
Even as Kong leans forward, ready to dive for a vine. I press my back into his chest. Throw all my weight to get him centered again.
But it’s not gonna happen.
I scurry through a reflection of “Crossing the River Styx.”
Play with all the adrenaline and taurine left inside me. Bend the notes till the walls of the Kenny G suck inward.
A gigantic decibel flourish.
A final stitch.
Ain’t it a bitch.
We’re going down.
Kong drops away.
Falls face first onto the stage.
Amid a bedlam of leaping faculty members, flapping gowns.
Ricky and I swing across the stage, in a swooping arc, me clinging to his neck.
I’m thinking about how damn valuable this guitar is.
Probably the most valuable instrument in the whole United States system of public education.
Worth a fortune on eBay.
The strain of my weight is gonna break the harness. Send Ricky crashing to the floor. This is gonna happen any second.
So I let go.
And fall.
I fall, fall, fall into Javon’s blinding light.
Swim toward the shimmer.
Thinking of my brother.
Thinking of Telemachus.
Chapter 37
Craacckk!
Something happens in my bones when I hit the stage.
But I’m so focused on the Ric that I feel no pain.
I rise up on an elbow and track the transit of Ricky as he swoops above the stage.
Watch how, with all of my unloosened
weight, the momentum flings him into the wall of the proscenium arch, smashing him against it.
Watch how he jerks like a hooked fish.
Watch him erupt—in a burst of short-circuitry, a geyser of notes, blasting from some computerized memory cell that mashes all of my previous “Crossing the River Styx” sounds into something even more frenzied and agonized.
Hear the notes screaming through every sweating pore of Big Bertha and Fat Phyllis.
Till a flame leaps out of the F holes. Flares up. Engulfs Ricky.
The Kenny G—the whole school community—gasps.
Katie drops beside me.
Agnes rolls up.
We are all—everyone, from Gupti on down to the last usher—staring transfixedly at Ricky.
The flaming guitar. The tortured prince.
Dangling. Swaying.
We watch the flames die down. The smoke clear. See the beautiful cherry body streaked black.
A hush falls over the Kenny G.
A single, twangy note pops out of Ricky.
Then a burst of notes. And another.
Then spasms of them.
Remembered from way back when Telly played “Here Comes the Son.”
Burned and dying, Ricky remembers.
The contrapuntal stuff.
The bass run.
The uplick.
The downlick.
All the angel notes.
Dewdrops of sunlight.
Premonitions of death.
Ricky plays them all.
Nails it.
Nails it fast and hard and forever.
Ends on a final sublime D.
Ching!
Chapter 38
In that paralyzing pause, when god tries to explain to twelve hundred people what just happened, Agnes is the first to act.
She reaches down from her wheelchair and grabs my headset. Puts the golf-tee-size mike to her lips.
Lifts her voice to the audience:
“Free the swimmers in the dark,” she says.
Fat Phyllis and Big Bertha carry these words to every last eardrum.
“Free the swimmers in the dark,” Agnes repeats.
Then she says, “Never give up. Never give up!”
Pain is shooting through my right leg. Throbbing in my ankle. Nick is there, helping me up.
Kyle steps beside Agnes, takes up the chant.
“Never give up!” he shouts.
He waves for the crowd to follow.
And they do.
It starts out slowly. But it builds. And it keeps building till it becomes a tidal roar.
“NEVER GIVE UP!”
People are standing.
Then the whole fucking house goes crazy.
Chapter 39
I go into the hospital with a broken leg and broken ankle.
Specifically, a compound fracture of the tibia. Plus an acute hairline break in the talus.
Plus a host of contusions and lacerations.
They operate. Put in titanium screws and a metal plate.
I now have a bionic ankle.
The nurses jack me with painkillers in the form of a sweet, intoxicating intravenous drip.
A wondrous syrup.
My own log cabin in the woods.
Drowsiness falls drop by drop upon my brain.
And I sleep.
A dragonless, dungeonless sleep.
Day and night, the sleep of the weary mind. The comatose soul.
And in those rare minutes when I’m not sleeping—but spooning some bletchy hospital gruel or watching some blond weather lady on TV—I’m thinking about a nap.
Visitors come and go, but they all blur.
A couple days later, Mimi checks me out of the hospital. Rolls me outside in a wheelchair, into the thin Seattle sun. My right leg is elevated in a thigh-high cast. I’m holding a helium balloon that says “Get Well Soon.”
I, too, feel a lightness. In parts of me that have long felt leaden.
My body is achy. Scratchy, squirmy, throbby. But the ether that I breathe—my own mix of air, for we all breathe our own unique blend—is somehow purer. I take it in. Breathe deeply.
Don’t pretend to understand.
Kyle and Nick are leaning against the Volks in the drop-off lane.
Mimi kisses me and races off on a round of errands. She’s putting the final touches on the Chapel of the Highest Hap piness.
Her first wedding is Friday. The beginning of her ministry.
Kyle and Nick pack me into the back seat of the Volks, my bionic ankle sticking out the passenger window. They wedge my new crutches between the bucket seats. Pin me down.
Nick ties the balloon to my protruding big toe. We peel for West Seattle.
On I-5, the balloon tugs my toe. We hear it snapping madly, and then it breaks free. I watch it drift toward heaven.
“Dude, dude, dude,” Kyle keeps saying.
He shakes his head. Grins sublimely.
Kyle has warped the events of graduation night into the parting of the Red Sea, the second coming of Jesus.
But it’s safe to say, we made history. I’m not sure what kind of history. But we made it.
Nick hands me the Seattle Times. It has commemorated my performance with a photo and an article on page B-1. The photo shows me swinging on the Ric above stage.
The headline reads:
“Daring Young Man on Flying Guitar.”
I have mixed feelings about this. I have never sought attention, but somehow it finds me.
I like the picture, though.
The article quotes Miss Yan-Ling:
“Theater is all about magic. When you reach into the hat, you want to pull out something that surprises, shocks, and vivifies. These boys . . . well, Houdini would be proud.”
Kyle is also quoted:
“We choreographed everything down to the last detail. We didn’t plan for Jonathan to break his leg, or the guitar to explode, but everything else, dude, was in the script.”
The article names Kyle as “segment producer.”
It ends with a quote from Birdwell: “Jonathan and crew have driven every last atom of pomp out of the Kenny G for a generation to come.”
As we drive home, Kyle and Nick fill me in. Gupti is coming around, they say. Rising like a phoenix from the smoking embers of her anger. Except for her and a few faculty members who had to dive out of the way of the falling Kong, the word on my performance is “brilliant.”
“Ricky’s going into that glass case, all right,” Nick says. “Gupti doesn’t want to get it repaired. Just display it all charred and fried.”
“It’s a Hindu thing,” Kyle says. “You know, sacrifice on a pyre and all that.”
“And she wants to do a photo exhibit—pictures of you and Kong,” Nick says. “With a framed copy of the article. And a photo of Telly, of course. And one of The Vedder. Tell the whole story. With Ricky as the centerpiece.”
Kyle’s grin is wider than his bucket seat.
“Dudes,” he says, “we have much to be humble about. For Jonathan will be with us next year.”
“Of course,” Nick says.
We bump fists all around.
From the back window, I can still see the balloon, a pinprick in the sky.
I close my eyes.
Let the June air rush between my toes, funnel down my cast.
Wash me.
Scrub me.
When I get home, there’s a letter waiting for me on the kitchen table.
From a law firm: Olson, Johnston & Reed.
I circle the table. Nudge the letter suspiciously with the rubber tip of my crutch. Study it from different angles.
I’m pretty sure Gupti and the school district are suing me for damages to the Ric.
It’s worth a fortune, and I have now destroyed it. Destroyed the greatest guitar ever, the beautiful cherry red Ric 360-6, The Vedder’s gift to Seattle Public Schools. The Vedder’s tribute to Telly.
Even putting a low estimate on the valu
e of the Ric, I see myself paying this off for the rest of my life.
I tear open the letter.
Dear Jonathan,
You have been named a beneficiary in the will of my late client, David O. H. Cosgrove II.
Please call me at your earliest convenience. I will be happy to give you the details.
Sincerely,
Ansel T. Reed
Attorney-at-law
Chapter 40
Today I’m wearing my charcoal jacket and an old white dress shirt. I’m also wearing a tie.
I’m standing in the back of the Chapel of the Highest Happiness. Leaning on my crutches.
Mimi is swathed in some funky white robe. Belted with a gold ribbon. Preaching a gobbledygook avalanche of Bible verses and Native American Mother Earth metaphors.
Plus her own insights into universal love.
The happy couple doesn’t seem to mind.
They stand in stupefied bliss.
A guy named J.R Big-eared. Sweating.
A woman named Rhonda. Bulb-nosed. Bulb-assed.
Beaming the high beam of the bride.
Small cluster of family and friends.
Mimi pronounces them “husband and wife, a universal unit.”
J.R. and Rhonda kiss. Everyone claps.
Mimi presents the marriage certificate. They sign, and she gets a check.
Damn! She’s in business.
Chapter 41
Today is June 21—the solstice.
Sun gliding near to Earth.
Longest day of the year.
I’m in a new cast. Smaller than the old one, only knee high. A black Velcro-strapped, oversize moon boot.
Leaning on my crutches at the bus stop in the sun. Waiting for the 22.
At the Junction, I swap to the 128. Hobble downhill. Cross the bridge over Schmitz Park. Stop. Gaze down at the creek. The biggest ache I feel today is in my armpits. So I gaze at the creek the way everybody else does. For the sheer beauty and the music of it.
Adios, Nirvana Page 17