by Mark Richard
When the husband comes home and his wife tells him you kept an eye on them and wouldn’t come into the house because it wouldn’t look right, he decides he wants to drink a bottle of bourbon with you and you do, and later, when you need a car to drive on book tour, he gives you his 1972 Cadillac Sedan DeVille, gold with brown leather interior, pristine, rebuilt stock-car engine, and a Navy five-shot Smith & Wesson revolver to keep in the seat pocket just in case.
ON YOUR WAY BACK TO NEW YORK to turn in your novel, you stop by your mother’s house. You have Tom Waits’s album Rain Dogs blaring on a boombox as you sprawl on a mattress on a cheap frame after your father looted the house, and as your mother passes the door, she says, No wonder you’re depressed, listening to THAT.
You ask Esquire to let you profile Waits and ask him about his creative process; there is something in his music that calms you even in its most discordant melodies. You do research into music therapy for autistic children, finding that some music reorganizes autistic children’s brain waves. You are also interested in how you can create tension in texts between what meanings the words are conveying on the page and what the sounds of the words themselves are evoking in a reader. Why are certain melodies sad? Melodies without words. You find a theory it all has to do with sound recognition in the most primitive part of our brains and the primal caterwauling of mothers calling their children back into the cave, back into the safety of the fire, the sounds and tones when the children are in sight, nearby but out of sight in the jungle, and, finally, sadly, the grief of when the children having been in the jungle all day and now night is falling, the sound the mother makes when the children are not returning.
You travel to Europe to find Waits, who’s putting up a show called The Black Rider with William Burroughs and Robert Wilson, both of whom you interview, one is a creep and the other is a genius. You spend two weeks in Hamburg, where the show is a hit, and you see The Black Rider several times, and you see snow fall in flakes the largest you’ve ever seen, the size of silver dollars. You follow the show around Europe, but Waits is not available; someone says you should look for him on the Reeperbahn. You stumble around the Reeperbahn and see the prostitutes in the windows, but you’re fearful of all the ice, and you lose your scarf often in the street. You start drinking with the cast and orchestra after the shows and hang out with Robert Wilson but no Waits.
You follow the show to other cities until you are in a small German city somewhere, a grim grey place in winter. A man is demonstrating a carpet cleaner outside of a department store. He has a broom, a donkey, and a crate of carpet cleaner. He lets the donkey shit on a piece of carpet, then he applies the carpet cleaner and sweeps it off, revealing a dirty piece of carpet. You enter one of those deep, deep dark moods, and you stop going to the show, and you hole up in your hotel. There’s nothing but fuel-truck racing on the television. It’s winter and it’s snowing and you’re in deepest, darkest Germany.
One Sunday morning it’s snowing hard again, and you pack your little suitcase and go down to the train station where it’s just you and the ticket agent. You make a promise to yourself that you will get on the first train that comes into the station and ride it to wherever it is going until dark, and you do.
When the train comes into the station, you are the only new passenger, and you sit in an empty car staring out at the fog and snow, and by mid-morning you feel as if the train is climbing but can’t really tell because of the dense fog; you hate to do it, but you ask God for a sign. You somehow feel as if you’ve done your part, by making the pact to get on the first train that arrived in the station, and you have no idea where you’re going.
What a comedian God is! The light begins to change, there is in fact light through the fog, patchy light at first, and you lean close to the window in eager expectation. Nothing, nothing, and then suddenly the train bursts through the tops of the clouds, and you see a jagged brown finger of snow-tipped rock any third grader who has seen You Only Live Twice would recognize as the Alps. A conductor comes through to take your ticket, and you ask if those are the Alps, and he says, Yah, and you forget to ask him where the train is heading because the mountains are staggeringly beautiful in a transfiguring glare of sun on glacial ice.
That night in the Milan train station some kids try to steal the tiny portable typewriter that one of Robert Wilson’s assistants has given you, one that runs on European current, and in the morning you take the first train out of the station going anywhere, and at dark you find yourself in Florence. You disembark and stumble into the nearest four-star hotel, Hotel Diplomat, and you spend a week in Florence, mainly in the Galleria Palatina and the Brancacci Chapel.
It is winter, and there aren’t many other tourists. You go back so often to the Brancacci Chapel that a woman who works there selling tickets scowls at you when you keep showing up to stay for hours, and you can’t help it. Saint Peter resurrecting the boy who was dead for fourteen years, the cripples cured by his passing shadow, the looks on the faces of the neophytes after their baptism, meditative, confounded, stupefied.
On the Ponte Vecchio you buy tortoise-shell earrings for your agent in New York. At rush hour there are flocks of girls passing on scooters, their skirts snapping in cheeky flourish. When you can’t feel good about Esquire paying for the four-star hotel any longer, you go to the train station for the first train out, and you arrive in Livorno. In the morning you go into a travel office and ask what’s leaving next, and they say a ferry is boarding to Corsica, so you go down to the docks and are swept up with a group of Arabs and arrested by the police.
Even though your hair is shaggy and you are Cajun dark and have a rough beard, the police soon realize that you are not with the Arabs who are holding suspicious passports. When the police captain asks you in Italian what your business is, you try to tell him you are a writer, and the policemen all laugh. While the policemen are laughing, the Arabs make a run for it through a yard of cargo containers, and the police captain smiles and hands you back your passport and says, Good luck, signora. It is on the ferry, where people are throwing up over the side because the crossing to Corsica is rough in winter, that you look through your little Italian pocket dictionary and realize you had pronounced yourself a romanziera, a lady novelist.
You stay in a hotel in Bastia where the people are also suspicious of you, and in the morning you take the first bus out of town that takes you to Calvi on the other side of the island. In Calvi it is the off-season, and you stay in an old hotel where you are the only guest and the woman from whom you have to ask for extra blankets has tears tattooed at the corners of her eyes.
The hotel is across the street from the fire station, and the firefighters are on strike, so in the evenings they build big bonfires in front of the fire station that the winds whip up as they stand around and drink all night, putting more and more firewood on the fires. You stay for a couple of weeks in Calvi, long enough that everyone from the waiters in the restaurants to the pharmacist from whom you’ve had to buy flu remedies refers to you as the American. You tour the Genoese castles and discover the place that overlooks the spot where Admiral Nelson lost his eye in the bombardment of the city. The constant drizzling rain that pours down on you in the evenings as you walk the empty streets is not rain; it is the sea spray from waves pounding the ninety-foot cliffs nearby that sound at night like distant thunder.
On the morning you are evicted because it doesn’t make sense for the lady with tattooed eyes and her angry husband to keep the hotel open for one guest, you take a shuttle that is leaving town, and it takes you to an airport, a surprise, and the first flight out is a short hop to Marseille, so you buy a ticket and board the plane.
In Marseille, you buy a stiletto that you lose on the bullet train to Paris. You realize you are returning home as you cross the sea and land, so you let the trains take you from Marseille to Paris to London, where you crash on the sofa of a friend who, like Steve later, will suggest you spend a week, you’re looking that kind of
rough, and you do, and you think to call Esquire, and the first thing they want to know is where in the hell have you been.
You have been traveling on Esquire’s expense account for a couple of months now, and it’s hard to explain where you have been, and even harder still to admit that you never interviewed Tom Waits. You tell them that you are in London and your only plans so far are to find where Captain John Smith is buried, you’ve heard it’s around the Old Bailey somewhere, it’s something you’ve always wanted to do.
The only thing that saves you is that your seafaring novel is finally coming out, and people are talking about it, and the editors at Esquire have said the pretty girl whose stories you loved wants to contribute your first review, can you find a photographer in London to take your picture for the article? So you call a friend and end up having your picture taken by an actress who has starred in nude films and was a girlfriend of Prince Andrew’s. You hobble to her apartment because London is hard on your hips, the steps, the cobblestone streets, the cold fog. The door is answered by a young woman in a kimono who has no front teeth and has a perfectly round wound in her forehead like a Cyclops who has had its eye sealed with plastic surgery. She had been hit by a cab and had fallen facedown on her lens cap. You spend a great afternoon with her having your picture taken. She suggests fire cupping on your perineum to alleviate your hip pain, which is no longer silver, more like grey lead. When you see her next in New York, she is beautiful again.
ENTERING THE LINCOLN TUNNEL driving out of New York on your book tour, you ask God for a sign. God, never willing to disappoint, provides this: as you exit the Lincoln Tunnel, you see a car stranded in the median, and it is a fireball burning as hot as is possible for a vehicle to burn prior to the flames igniting the gas tank for an apocalyptic explosion. You pull over and take pictures with a disposable camera.
At the end of the twenty-eight-city book tour you find yourself at your friend Steve’s house in Pensacola with a dog you have taken out of the highway, and you have uncontrollable shaking in your hands that even shots of schnapps in the morning don’t seem to diminish. Your friend Steve suggests you stay with him for a while, and after a week of deep-sea fishing in the Gulf on Steve’s boat and sleeping twelve hours a day, you are okay to drive back to New York City. You set out in search of an audience for your book, and you return with mixed reviews and a dog who is half beagle and half rottweiler.
TOM WAITS CALLS.
He’s in California mixing The Black Rider, he’s sorry for the confusion, would you like to come out and do the interview now? You get on the first plane to Los Angeles.
You call an old friend who lives in Venice and ask her if you can flop on her sofa. It’s a red-haired girl who was in your writing class, and you always liked her drugged-out surfer-trash California stories. You had a strange thought one time when you were looking at her shuffle her papers on the floor of a rich lady’s apartment; you wondered what it would be like to be married to her. People were always whispering that she had a famous father, and when you ask someone who her father is, you have never heard of him. He was a football coach, you don’t watch football. When you signed your book to her, you said, As if you need another brother, because she already had three older brothers, and that is one reason you always liked her, she had grown up among men, and you felt as if she didn’t hold it against you that you were a man. You double-dated with her and her boyfriend, and when she and her boyfriend broke up, you took the boyfriend up to a bar in Harlem where your Alamo cousin Joe was playing the piano. You bought the boyfriend a lot of drinks and told him what a great girl she was and it would be a shame to let such a great girl go.
The interview with Waits is a sit-down at a small Italian restaurant, and you think it will be the first step on a wild night in the gutter with Tom Waits, but it is not. He is sober and polite, gives you some good quotes about the Black Rider album he’s mixing, and before you can even begin to ask him about his creative process, you can tell the interview is over. When you ask him if you can come into the studio with him, he politely demurs, saying, Oh, no, it would be like watching someone bathe.
In the morning you are packing up to go back to New York City, and the phone rings at the red-haired girl’s house in Venice. It’s Waits, he says it’s okay if you want to come down to the studio after all, so for the next four weeks you go into the studio with him at midnight to sit in on the mixing of The Black Rider.
During the day the red-haired girl takes you to the beach, which feels good on your hips, and you hang out together on the Strand. This is the girl whom you used to call at two or three or four in the morning when she was in New York and ask her what she was doing, and she’d say, Sleeping, but she’d stay on the phone while you recounted the date you’d just had. This was a person to whom you could tell everything, and you did, and now you realize that she’s still your friend even after everything you had told her about yourself.
One morning you are lying on the extra bed on the sunporch, where she’s been letting you stay, and you can see her through the open door in her office wearing a pair of her father’s old pajamas, with her feet up, drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette, reading the sports page, and you think, Her.
At breakfast you say why don’t the two of you just go down to city hall and get the paperwork done and get married right away. Maybe have some kids. Three. Two boys and a girl.
Her brother is running for governor of your state. The polls show him behind by thirty-three points. When she says she’s going to help with his campaign, you volunteer to drive her around the state in your Cadillac handing out campaign flyers and stapling posters to road signs. It’s a rainy fall in your state. Often you two are at late-night shift changes in front of factories and shipyards handing out her brother’s soggy campaign literature. A lot of the workers are about to ball up the paper and throw it on the ground until they see that she’s the daughter of that football coach. All of a sudden she’s standing in the rain with these workers talking about the glory days of the Washington Redskins. A couple of the guys always ask her to sign a campaign brochure. It is a long rainy campaign, and you seem to be changing out of wet clothes in adjoining rooms a lot.
Her brother wins the election, she goes back to California, and you drive the coast road back to New York. There is a letter waiting for you there, asking if you would like to teach at a school on a mountaintop in Tennessee that has a fifty-foot cross overlooking a big green valley beyond.
IT’S A SUNDAY AFTERNOON in late winter on the Tennessee mountaintop where there is that fifty-foot cross, and you’re alone deep in the woods when you get the call to ministry. All that is needed to round out this greeting-card epiphany would be for your face to be turned toward the bloody setting sun and you saying, Yes, Lord, yes, Lord, take me, I am yours.
Instead, you are not watching the sun at all, which is a mistake, because in this part of the world the sun sets quickly over the mountains and you are alone deep down a dark tree alley of an old logging road on the thousands of acres of mountaintop, and it will be pitch-black dark soon, and it is still winter and the temperature will drop below freezing, and no one knows where you are, and there is only your dog at home who would miss you if you do not return.
You have been filling your coat pockets with fossils you find in the muddy banks of the logging road that have been split open by the ice you are still fearful of walking on, and that is how you first saw the fossils, palm-sized reddish orange sandstone pieces with perfect impressions of calamite leaves and branches of lepidodendron trees. Three hundred million years ago these were hundred-foot Dr. Seuss–type trees with cartoon bamboo bark trunks topped with bursts of long thin leaves from the time when the mountaintop was a swampy forest on the edge of a warm shallow ocean.
You are running your thumb over a little twig of a perfect sprout forever part of the stone in the failing bloody light when you feel the Call.
The sun catches you out, and it’s a long walk home slipping and so
metimes falling where you can’t see in the dark, you can only find your way by looking up and seeing what’s left of the sky between the wall of trees on either side. Okay, You have my attention, you say. Something is changing, and you will never ask God for a sign again.
YOU DON’T TELL ANYONE about this thing that has been placed on your heart. You don’t tell Jennifer, the red-haired girl in California, who is coming out to see you soon, you don’t tell the poet at the university, you don’t tell anyone; you go about teaching your writing class in your black academic gown on the Cambridge-style campus, and when you sit in chapel during the week, you think about what has happened to you, and you start praying your ass off.
It is good that Jennifer is coming to see you; you have missed her terribly. Your dog loves her, a good sign. She is concerned on a night when she sees you sitting next to a roaring fire you have built in the fireplace and you are sitting so close your clothes are hot to the touch because you need the heat to work on your bones; this is a cold and damp place in winter, and sometimes at the end of the day the pain is making your eyes water, and the fire seems to help.
You noticed when you were at her house in Venice that she burned votive candles to Saint Monica and she threw the I Ching. Visiting the mission in Santa Barbara, you find out she has never been baptized. You take her to chapel, and she sees you struggling with something spiritual, and she tells you one day she would like to learn more about faith. At that time catechism classes are starting on the campus for those wishing to be baptized later by the bishop, and you suggest she go to the classes, and she says she’ll go if you go with her, and you do.