Shadow of Ashland, A Witness to Life, and St. Patrick's Bed

by Terence M. Green

  “What you writin’ about?”

  I thought. Then I said, “Shift work in large factories. People who work them. Like that.”

  “You come to the right place.” He inhaled the last smoke from his cigarette, ground it out in an ashtray, shook another Marlboro loose from the package lying on the counter in front of him.

  “Delco?”

  He nodded. “Yup. Most who come in here work there.” He lit the cigarette, held the smoke deep in his lungs, expelled it in a stream toward the Tiffany shade. “Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company. Owned by G.M.”

  “What do you do there?”

  “Goin’ to put me in your article?” He smiled.

  I looked down, unsure how deep I should get in. Then: “No. Just askin’.”

  “We make shocks and struts. I oversee the packaging. Make sure it’s okay for shipping.” He shrugged. “It’s a livin’.”

  I heard my father’s voice, me asking him if he liked his job at the Star. It’s a living. I heard my own answer to myself, when no one had even asked the question, just as I hadn’t asked Bobby Swiss—realized that it was one of the things men would confess to, unbidden, one of the bonds so many of us shared, and was stunned.

  “You from Dayton?” I wanted to hear what he’d say.

  “Kentucky. Ashland. It’s on the Ohio River, near West

  Virginia. ’Bout a hundred miles from here. Been in Dayton twenty years though.”

  “Why Dayton?”

  “Dayton, Cincinnati, Columbus, Akron. Could’ve been any of ’em.” He smiled. “You know that car, the Pontiac GTO?”

  “I know of it.”

  “In Kentucky, they say GTO stands for Goin’ To Ohio. It’s where there’s work. Can get a good union job. You know of Ashland?”

  “Not much.”

  “If you aren’t at Ashland Oil, jobs are scarce.”

  I was in real deep now, in territory I’d never even dreamed of entering. None of it was planned. It was just happening.

  “The Judds are from Ashland.” Then he chuckled. “There’s a Judd Plaza. Chuck Woolery, the game-show host. They even got a street named after him—Chuck Woolery Boulevard.”

  “Lots of celebrities.”

  “Lots? Right. Sure. Oh, I forgot.” He gestured with his hand, expansively. “George Reeves.”

  George Reeves. I actually knew the name. It was from my generation. “Superman?” It struck a nerve, one that the other names hadn’t tweaked. I was suddenly back on the floor at Maxwell Avenue, 1953, in front of the black- and-white RCA. Wednesday nights, 7 p.m. WBEN-TV, channel 4, Buffalo. The never-ending battle for truth, justice, and the American Way. Brought to you by Kellogg’s. “He’s from Ashland?”

  “Well, not exactly. He was born in Iowa, they say. His mother’s parents lived in Ashland. When his own parents broke up, his mother moved back to Ashland for a while. He did some growin’ up there.”

  I tilted my head.

  “He’s a celebrity. We’ll take what we can get. You remember watchin’ him?”

  “It was my favorite show.” It was true.

  “Killed himself.”

  “So they say. As I recall, it was never clear.”

  “I was just a little kid.”

  “I’m a bit older than you.” I looked at him. “It was 1959.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Pretty good memory.”

  I nodded. “I’m good at the past,” I said.

  “What do you think of that?” Bobby Swiss nodded toward the television above us.

  I glanced up. Some kind of triangular, glass, architectural wonder was on the screen, at water’s edge.

  “Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Cleveland. Opens in about a month. Big news there. Big tourist attraction. Architect is the same guy who built the addition onto the Louvre in Paris.”

  My eyebrows rose upward. A modern-day pyramid, on Lake Erie.

  A list of the 1995 inductees appeared, superimposed on the building’s image: The Allman Brothers, Al Green, Janis Joplin, Led Zeppelin, Martha and the Vandellas, Neil Young, Frank Zappa.

  “What the fuck,” he said.

  I was quiet.

  “I couldn’t even name a song that any of them cut. How about you?”

  “Maybe Neil Young. Canadian, I think. Maybe Martha and the Vandellas. ‘Dancin’ in the Street.’”

  “Del Shannon,” he said. “Where the fuck is Del Shannon? How come he’s not in there?” He looked at me.

  “I dunno,” I said. And I didn’t.

  “Old Del shot himself.”

  I nodded, thoughtfully.

  “You gotta go way back. Gotta go to the roots. Chuck Berry, Sam Cooke, Fats Domino, Buddy Holly. And the King. Elvis.”

  “You’re probably right.”

  “The Coasters, Clyde McPhatter, Roy Orbison, Otis Redding, The Platters.”

  “You sound like you know this stuff.”

  “Love it.”

  “I thought you weren’t big on the past.”

  He looked at me with wonder. “Hell, music ain’t the past. Music is forever. I can put my tapes on in my car right now, and it’s there. There’s a song, ‘American Pie,’ about ‘The Day the Music Died.’ The music never died. It was those assholes ridin’ around in cars or on motorcycles or in airplanes or doin’ drugs that got killed. Not their music.”

  JESUSROX, I thought. “Whatever happened to Del Shannon?” I remembered “Runaway,” “Hats Off to Larry.”

  “Shot himself. Age fifty-one. All the good ones, the music killed them. It consumed them. They gave themselves to it, now they’re gone. But not their music. No, sir. Not their music. The music is forever.”

  An image of Graceland Wedding Chapel, Las Vegas, rose up in the back of my head. “Even Elvis—” I started.

  “—is dead. Age forty-two. Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, the Big Bopper, Otis Redding, even Rick Nelson—plane crashes, all of them. Clyde McPhatter, heart attack, age forty. Roy Orbison, heart attack, age fifty-two. Mama Cass, heart attack. Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye, even John Lennon, shot to death. And I haven’t even started on the drug overdoses. Morrison, Joplin, Hendrix …”

  But part of me had stopped listening. I was thinking about Jeanne’s line, about loving singers who had died violently in motorized vehicles.

  I was quiet. I’d heard a lot of this before.

  After a third beer, I had no plan left. Finally, when he’d drained his jug, finished the fifth cigarette, he sat back. “Gotta go,” he said.

  I half smiled and nodded.

  “Wife’ll have dinner ready.”

  I’d wondered. Now I knew. But I wanted more. “Got kids?”

  “One,” he said. “Got a boy. Sixteen.” He frowned, added no more. Then, “You here for a couple of days, you say?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Might see you tomorrow. I’m here most days after work.”

  I studied the strong chin, the slicked-back hair, the five o’clock shadow that Adam favored. I wanted to ask him if he’d ever gone to the Trail Drive-In, to Crisp’s, to the Bluegrass for a hot dog and a root beer or the Flying Saucer Burger with the special sauce.

  But I didn’t. I couldn’t. That had been more than twenty years ago.

  I looked around, up at the TV, thought of Nanny, the bars in Buffalo. I took a plastic swizzle stick, put it in my pocket, left.

  THIRTEEN

  I

  I went back to the Hampton Inn, rested for an hour, went for dinner at a Pizza Hut nearby. When I got back, I phoned Jeanne. It was our shortest conversation since I’d left. I didn’t know how to tell her anything, and she didn’t ask. With grace, without details, we enjoyed the contact. It was enough. I was tired. I was more than tired. I was drained.

  “You can live too long,” my father had said to me, in one of the sporadic retrievals of his old self, on his ninetieth birthday, four months before he died.

  For a moment, he knew what was happening to him, how he was losing his dignity.

&
nbsp; Then just as unexpectedly, he was gone. “Call the Musicians’ Union,” he said.

  I was quiet.

  “Make sure my dues are paid up.”

  I already mentioned finding the little brush that he had used to clean his electric razor. I also found his folding nail file just last month—the one I borrowed one day several years ago—while looking for the TV remote control down the sides of our bed. And it was Jeanne who found his scapular medal on the floor under his bed while moving it aside for vacuuming. A stylized cross on a chain, he had worn the medal around his neck all his life, even though he was anything but a devout Catholic. Nevertheless, he wasn’t anything else. He knew what he was supposed to be, even if he couldn’t be it.

  Pieces of him dotted our house, like shells washed up on the shore.

  In his wallet he kept his TTC—Toronto Transit Commission—Blind Pass, his social insurance card, birth certificate, his Old Age Security card, an Ontario Senior Citizens’ Privilege Card, one of Dennis’s business cards, his Toronto Star Limited Employee Photo ID Card, dated November 24, 1964. He had no bank card, no credit cards. He said he couldn’t see well enough to use them.

  In the top drawer of his dresser, after he died, in a plastic case, I found a small metal plaque with his name engraved on it. It stated that he was a Life Member of the Toronto Musicians Association, Local 149 A.F. of M. “THIS TOKEN WAS PRESENTED TO Thomas Nolan IN RECOGNITION OF TWENTY-FIVE YEARS CONTINUOUS MEMBERSHIP.”

  His dues were paid up.

  That night, in the Hampton Inn, he appeared again. But it wasn’t just a dream. It was more.

  Things were changing.

  We are in a recording studio somewhere, surrounded by microphones, tape machines, a small orchestra. My father turns and points to my sisters, to Anne and Judy, who are here with us. They left me here, he says.

  I don’t know what he means.

  Then he comes over to me and says I’m not leaving until I get some satisfaction.

  I look at the orchestra, at my sisters. The musicians are packing away their instruments. They didn’t leave you here, I say. We found you here. You got here by yourself.

  Dennis comes in with my brother, Ron. They hold him by the shoulders and try to calm him down. I know what’s going on, he says to them. I know exactly what’s going on. Then Ron takes a small, smooth stone from his pocket, and puts it in his father’s hand. Tommy Nolan closes his hand over it, relaxes visibly.

  He looks at me. Don’t be a fool, he says.

  I don’t want to be a fool. I stare at his clenched fist, see the knuckles white, know he is holding the stone. Ron smiles, puts his arm around Dad’s shoulder. Then my older brother speaks to me. It’s okay, he says. Everything’s okay. He’s coming with me. I’ll calm him down.

  Dennis, Anne and Judy, and I tell the remaining musicians they might as well go home. The recording session is over. We help them carry their instruments out to a parking lot, put them in car trunks, backseats. My eye is drawn to the brass gleam of a trombone resting in the plush purple velvet lining of its case.

  It begins to rain.

  When I woke up, I was drenched in sweat, alone. It was 4 A.M. I got up, went to the bathroom, dried myself with a towel, had a drink of water, got back into bed with the light on, sat there. My night sweats, I was thinking. They’re not gone.

  That was when it happened.

  The noise was like a gunshot. Without warning, the wooden coffee table in front of the love seat split down the middle. I got up, went over, looked down at it, stunned.

  Solid wood, split in half, a sound like a thunderclap. I stared at it, touched it, sat back on the edge of the bed, dizzy.

  I put on the coffeemaker. I didn’t sleep anymore that night.

  In the morning, at the desk, the lady looked skeptical when I told her.

  I shrugged. I didn’t blame her.

  “Maybe it was a contraction of heat and cold. Maybe it had something to do with the room being dry—you know, no humidity.”

  I was still getting that look.

  “Just bill me for it.”

  “I don’t even know how much it will be.”

  “I’m sure you can find out. You’ve got my credit card imprint. I accept responsibility. It can’t be that much.”

  While I was talking to her, I put my hand in my pocket. My fingers galvanized at the touch of a small, smooth stone there. Slowly, catching my breath, I closed my hand around it, squeezed it.

  II

  My father’s tackle box.

  He loved to fish. Mom told me once that he took it up back in the 1930s, because my brother Ron, only a little kid then, had an operation on his mastoid—the bone behind the ear—and couldn’t go swimming, couldn’t get water in his ear as a result. Mastoiditis, I think it was called. Ron loved to swim, and was good at it.

  Dad wanted to find something he could do with him, something they could do together, that might help a kid forget that he was drydocked for the summer.

  Tommy Nolan, in his thirties, worked for The Globe & Mail back then, and the newspaper owned The Globe Park in Port Dover, on Lake Erie, about eighty miles southwest of Toronto. The park consisted of a dozen or so small cottages that the paper made available to employees and their families as part of their annual two-week summer vacation, if they wished to avail themselves of them. It was a part of my childhood too for a while: the clay in the cliffs, corn roasts on the beach at night, the sandbars, perch fishing. The outhouses with two holes, side by side, fascinated me. It all ended in 1952, when Dad left The Globe and went to work for the Star.

  For the first time in more than twenty years, he had to find someplace new to go for his annual two weeks vacation, so we headed for Bancroft, Ontario, 160 miles northeast of the city. Bancroft was a small town in the Kawartha Lakes district, on the Canadian Shield, famous for its annual Gemboree, which attracted rock hounds from all over to savor its mineral deposits. It was also surrounded by beautiful, clear lakes, wonderful fishing.

  Dad’s sister, Eleanor, my aunt, had moved there when her husband, Tommy Weatherell, a car mechanic, had wanted to open his own service station. They also built the Homestead Restaurant beside their gas station and their bungalow on Highway 28, and Eleanor ran it. Several lodges or cottage group owners in the area that didn’t serve meals would refer their guests there. Eleanor was Mom’s friend from her schoolgirl days. In fact, she had met Dad through Eleanor.

  For several years in the fifties, every summer, we rented a two-room cabin with a rowboat, on Bow Lake. It was one of five cabins that were operated under the name Ida-Ho Lodge by the middle-aged couple that lived at the end of the road—Jack and Ida Horsepool. Ours had double bunks in the bedroom: Mom and Dad on the bottom, Dennis and I on the top. The other room was mostly a kitchen. There was an outhouse—no indoor plumbing. Mom washed the dishes by carrying water up from the lake. There was no refrigerator, just an icebox. We drove down the highway daily to Paudash Lake, watched a man with giant tongs climb into the sawdust-filled icehouse and pull up a chunk that had been cut from the lake and stored since the winter, then loaded it onto newspaper in the trunk of our car.

  Every evening, right after dinner, my father would take us out in the rowboat and we’d fish for smallmouth bass until it got dark. Hula popper, crazy crawler, jitterbug. The memory of the splash of a smallmouth hitting a surface lure on those calm July evenings—the rod bending, the water like glass, our collars turned up against the fall of night—can still make my heart race.

  Mom stayed behind in the cabin and read a book. It was her time alone. But she waited for us. We could see it in her eyes when we came through the door, closing it quickly to keep the mosquitoes out.

  Eleanor died of cancer in 1966, age fifty-five. Her husband, Tommy Weatherell, eventually remarried and moved away. He outlived her by twenty-one years, dying in 1987.

  My father’s tackle box. Behind the furnace in my basement.

  That same day last summer that Jeanne and I detoured do
wn the Bird’s Creek turnoff in search of the vanished Bancroft Drive-In, I also stopped on the highway at Bow Lake and turned onto the private dirt road that had once led to those cabins. There is no wooden sign for Ida-Ho Lodge anymore. The cabins have been torn down. I stared at the ground where they had been. You’d never know they had ever existed. Like the drive-in: disappeared—not a trace. Jack and Ida Horsepool’s names are no longer on their mailbox. New people live in that house at the foot of the road.

  Driving from Bow Lake into Bancroft, I saw that the Sunoco service station was now Wayne’s World, a business that sold snowmobiles. Someone had converted The Homestead Restaurant into a private home.

  Las Vegas, the Poconos, drive-in theaters in New York State. The next summer, in July, it was time to try something different. Jeanne and I rented a cottage on Paudash Lake for one week, the site of the long-gone sawdust-filled icehouse, a few miles down the highway from my boyhood.

  I keep going back to my childhood. I know it wasn’t perfect, but it doesn’t matter. I hear the irrational siren songs that are my past, balance them against the longing for a better future.

  Two bedrooms, a living-dining-kitchen area with a cathedral ceiling, an all-glass front with sliding doors leading onto a cedar deck that hovered over the water’s edge. Stone fireplace, TV, VCR, microwave, telephone, gas barbecue, a sixteen-foot aluminum boat with a 30 hp Yamaha, all nestled in pines, tall hemlocks, and birches, with three hundred feet of lake frontage for complete privacy. Like nothing I’d ever seen before. Certainly not on Bow Lake.

  It even had indoor plumbing. A shower no less.

  Cold beer, smoked salmon with onions and capers, bread, cheese, sipping Caesars on the deck, the sun on Jeanne’s skin. Skinny-dipping at night, the moon on the water, the shower of northern Ontario stars across the sky. Mist rising off the lake at dawn, the loon’s call, an otherworldly echo. Lovemaking, indoors and out.