“Good, you’re home. I’m a few minutes away, can I stop by?”
“Yeah, but I’m in the middle of sorting crap for my taxes.”
Nik couldn’t possibly be in the area by accident; I lived forty miles northeast of him, forty traffic-thick, developer-contrived nowhere sprawly miles. There was no reason to be there unless you lived there, unless you decided you wanted to go for a drive on a congested freeway to shop at Best Buy or Bed Bath &
Beyond instead of going to your nearby neighborhood shopping mall and shopping at Best Buy or Bed Bath & Beyond.
Nik walked with a slight limp across my paper-strewn living room. He opened the sliding glass door to the patio and lit a cigarette. He stared at the piles of papers on the floor. He took off his sunglasses and rubbed his eyes and his chin. I could see he hadn’t shaved in a while: his beard was not ever all that heavy, and he had to skip shaving for a couple of days for anything to really show.
I got up from my stack of receipts and went into the kitchen. The whole house was built on a one-level horizontal line facing southwest. The kitchen opened to the dining room, which was open to the living room in a sort of L shape. It was an old-fashioned California suburban setup, built for fair-weather, optimistic middle-class comfort. The modest square footage didn’t feel too small because the two bedrooms off the hall and the main living space all faced the patio and were accessible to it through sliding glass doors. The orientation to the sliding glass doors and the outside beyond the doors also made it feel as if there were no distinct spaces, so I could make coffee in the kitchen and still talk to Nik by the patio door. He reached in his coat and pulled out a thick manila envelope.
I knew what was coming, I had seen it before. I wasn’t in the mood for making it easy.
“How’s your foot?” I said.
“Much better, actually. Thank you.”
“Did you see Dr. Fillmore?”
“Yeah. You were right, it is a kind of arthritis. He gave me some medication.”
I nodded as I poured myself a cup of coffee before the maker had stopped brewing. The coffee dripped from the filter onto the exposed burner, sizzled, and instantly smelled burnt. This would be my third cup of afternoon coffee.
“Good,” I said. I had given Nik the $150 for the doctor. I knew he also had a $975 bill from the emergency room. He would ignore that.
“How’s work?” he said. I just stared at him.
“How is your work?” I said.
“Great—see for yourself,” he said, holding out the manila envelope to me.
“I mean your job, have you—”
“I missed almost two weeks. I still can’t work too much. I can’t stand for long.”
I sighed.
“But you know, Dave is very cool about it, he lets me sit most of the shift.”
I poured milk in my coffee and stirred it. I didn’t look at him.
“I’m broke myself right now,” I said, frowning and stirring. “I don’t really have it. I mean, I really don’t.”
“Of course,” he said, “I know that. I’m not asking you.”
He put out his cigarette. He smiled and opened the envelope he had been holding out to me and pulled out a CD case. “Guess what? What you have been waiting for, hoping for—a new Fakes bootleg. Very rare. I’ve had a lot of time to work, so I compiled it this week. The unreleased 2004 sessions, made exclusively for you.” He handed it to me.
“How much do you need?” I said, ignoring the CD.
He shrugged and waved his hand. “A thousand,” he said.
“The whole rent, Nik? You don’t have any of it?”
“That’s not the whole rent. My rent is twelve hundred.” He reached in his jacket pocket for another cigarette. “You don’t need to worry about it. I have things in motion,” he said.
“I thought you worked some shifts,” I said.
He exhaled. “I had to buy food and gas, too.” And cigarettes and scotch, I thought. At least I didn’t say that to him. I marched over to my desk. I pulled open a drawer. I riffled through the papers until I found a credit card offer that included some low-interest-rate checks attached to a piece of paper upon which many caveats, warnings, catches, and asterisks (which I supposed meant risks of a sidereal nature) were printed in the classic credit card tiny faint print. The first time you actually read the words printed on these things was to feel the last connection to your childhood die. I filled one out for a thousand dollars. I handed it to him. He folded the check and put it in his billfold.
“I’m grateful, but you don’t need to do it.”
“Nik, this is truly it. You gotta figure something out. I’m in over my head here. I’ll fucking never pay off what I owe.” This was a true statement.
He looked down, nodding.
“You have to do something, file for disability or something.”
“I’m not even on the books for more than minimum wage, so disability wouldn’t really help much.”
“Well, we have to figure out something soon.”
After he left, I put on Nik’s fake illicit record. He had made a gorgeous little cardboard digipak for the CD. It was deliberately sort of rough, so it would look like a bootleg. He had several fake “unauthorized” labels; this was a Mountebank Industries release, which meant it was acoustic demos, not a live concert bootleg, which would be, if it were the Fakes and not the Demonics (and never Nik Worth solo because he never played live), on the Cold Slice label. Nik said he had to tolerate these little sub-rosa products—after all, the fans demanded more than the bands could officially release.
The record is some wounded lyrical pop called Breakfast at Kingdom Come. It is just him with the piano or the guitar. No overdubs. His voice, totally naked and wrapped around a simple melody, sounds both familiar and strange. His uncanny lyrics always step up to surreal but never fall in. Just odd enough to mean something unusual. That’s Nik—the songs sound off and unexpected, yet after a second listen, you are hooked and craving their delicate circles and little returns and secret crevices.
I left all my papers on the floor and went to bed. I couldn’t sleep; drinking so much coffee had been a terrible idea. I lay there, closed my eyes, and tried to force my way into something approaching a rest state. My ill-considered sleep strategy was to mentally add up what I had given Nik over the years. Mostly the last ten years. The extravagant gifts, like the Canon color copier. (I had just received a home equity line of credit that I used to pay off my car and my credit card debts. I used the extra money to buy Ada a professional digital camera and Nik a top-of-the-line personal color copier. Of course both of those objects are more or less obsolete today. The massive credit card debt reaccrued.) I gave him money for rent on countless occasions. I gave him money for medical expenses. I gave him money for car repairs (uh, Nik, your tires look a little dangerous). He used to pay it back, but eventually we didn’t bother to keep track. After all, my boss did pay me well, fairly good-sized lump checks that were so easy to spend. I used to help out my mother, too. At least now I didn’t have to pay for things for her. Her low Social Security income and her age and her total lack of assets had made things much easier. I did have to spend hours calling agencies and filing paperwork for her, but I even managed to get her a home aide to shop for her and visit once a day through the state in-home services and Medi-Cal. And Ada’s father paid for many of Ada’s expenses. So why shouldn’t I help Nik? Why should I offer him money he doesn’t even ask for and then berate him? Why was I such a horrible and selfish person? How could I spend money on champagne for Ada when my brother needed money just for his life? What is wrong with me—did I always have to be so self-indulgent, so extravagant? But it wasn’t really just extravagances, I had a high mortgage (and still lived at least an hour from everything). Some of that debt was spent on my insurance, my gas, my basic cost of living. I also had to pay, for instance, income taxes, property taxes—I didn’t plan well and things always came up. I lived beyond my means, it was true, but th
at was not hard to do. If Nik needed money, what difference did it make if I spent another thousand or not? This kind of thinking explained how I had accumulated a tremendous amount of debt over the last eight years. My monthly payments were fast approaching an unsustainable level. Somehow the whole big monster just kept rolling forward. I wouldn’t be able to pay it off unless I sold my house and moved to Alabama or Bakersfield or some other place where I could afford to buy a house with the pittance I would have left after I paid my debts. Which I couldn’t do. Or I could sell my house and pay off my debt and then rent a place. But I was reaching the point where I had depleted my equity so completely that it was possible I might not break even when I sold my house.
I needed to get some sleep. Downward I plunged—just watch me, I won’t stop.
I could file for bankruptcy. The ruptured bank option. Chapter 7, I should do it. But I wasn’t behind yet, I managed it all somehow. I tried to comfort myself with options, tried to put these things into perspective. I redirected my thoughts, I focused on breathing in and out. To find my way to some rest. I gave up and took a blue oval tablet from a bottle containing a quick-acting nonbenzodiazepine hypnotic, a nonaddictive sleep aid. What we used to call sleeping pills but can’t anymore because it sounds too tragic.
APRIL 20
Jay and I watched an early Peter Sellers movie. He had stopped with the James Mason movies just when I was trying to find a way to tell him how sick I was getting of watching the James Mason movies. Evidently James Mason made hundreds of movies, and they were not all Lolita. The idea of seeing each one of them might have worked as a stupid conceit in a novel, or as a bit of film-school-teacher shtick, but in realty, in praxis, such obsessions grow increasingly tedious. The experience does not increase in meaning by its devotion to thematic repetition, or mere accumulation. The stubborn concentration does not make your appreciation of James Mason deeper. Instead it increases one’s intolerance and irritation. You grow to hate all James Mason movies, even the good ones.
Jay must have sensed my growing ambivalence, and today he switched to Peter Sellers without making any mention of or reference to the change. We watched The Ladykillers, which Jay found uproariously funny. We ate sushi as we watched. We drank Sapporo beer and the combination made our mouths taste funny. Later, we avoided kissing.
He still brought me Thomas Kinkade Painter of Light™ gifts. This obsession wasn’t negotiable. They stacked up in my garage.
Also April 20
When Jay got up to use the bathroom, I checked my email. I knew from Ada’s blog posts that she was moving forward with her documentary about Nik. I had been enthused and then began ignoring and nearly discouraging it for some reason.
hey ma,
guess what? i’m thinking I would come out and film in the next month. I know that is sooner than i said, but I have some investors to get me started—i will explain when i see you. dad will get me a ticket with his miles. Of course i would stay with you if i could, but you are so far away from everything. i will stay at Mike’s house by Runyon Canyon—you know i want to film some of the movie there. I haven’t talked to nik about the details of this yet. Did you get a chance to mention it to him and see what he thinks? do you mind? I would need to interview you, too, is that okay?
I’m totally excited!
xoxoxoxo
a.
I clicked on MARK AS UNREAD and watched it become bold new mail again. I would answer it in the morning. I would have to talk to Nik. Nik didn’t use email. He had my old computer and printer, but he didn’t subscribe to the internet. He was stubborn this way. Last Christmas, Ada set up a MySpace page for Nik. One of Nik’s signature Fakes songs played as soon as the page opened, “Sugar Caves.” The details of the page were a continuation of the Chronicles fiction, or at least Ada’s approximation of it. Nik seemed touched, but he quickly pointed out the inaccuracies. (He was a stickler for precision in his fictions. No continuity issues, no sloppiness. He would later hand her a typed list of errata to add as a sidebar to the page.)
“You could, you know, extend your whole project onto the internet. You know, it would be perfect for that, it would make it totally multidimensional, update it. You could even put up MP3s of all the music, reach a new audience. I could help you, you know.”
Nik stared at her laptop. He read aloud, “‘Thirty-plus solo records, with the additional recordings of the two main bands plus the side bands.’” He chuckled.
“I think it looks great,” I said. But actually it was weird seeing Nik in the real world like this—the real world of the internet. I felt anxious about it, too exposed somehow.
Ada smiled and clicked on the next song, the Demonics’ “Somersault.”
“You would have to do a separate Demonics page, a Fakes page, a Nik Worth page, even pages for some of the side projects like the Pearl Poets and Lozenge. And then link them all together,” Nik said. Lozenge was Nik’s short-lived one-man electro-boogie band.
“Exactly!” Ada said. “I could do that if you want.”
Nik smiled at her. “Naw, not for me.”
“Why?”
“Don’t look so sad. It is just that I’m a paper-and-paste guy.”
“A glitter-and-glue guy,” I said.
“Yeah, that too.”
I wasn’t sure if Nik would want to have a documentary made about him. But who knows, maybe he would jump at it. He had made lots of films and videos over the years. (First with our mother’s Super 8 camera. Then a Betamovie camcorder I bought him for Christmas 1985. More recently a Sony MiniDV for his birthday.) He made music videos and a couple of clips where he interviewed himself. Ada could use all of that if she wanted. I didn’t even know if she knew all the stuff that Nik had made over the years. I didn’t even know it all.
Ada emailed me to tell me Nik had agreed to be interviewed. He agreed to open his archives to her. Whatever she wanted.
APRIL 24
It was eighty-one degrees and the midday sun seared me through the thin skin of my clothing. Despite my dark glasses, the blinding shine made phantom sunspots appear whenever I blinked. I helped her into the passenger seat and the oppressively stale and baked air of my car.
“Give it a minute.” The car was on, the AC was on high, but it still only felt like the air pushed up to you and sat there, hot and thick. I knew that somewhere there were new cars that could do this air transition much better. But my mother didn’t seem to notice. She sat and looked straight ahead. I drove out of the driveway of her apartment complex and toward the highway. We were on our way to Ralphs supermarket. Leslie, the home aide assigned to my mother, went shopping for her. But sometimes I went, and I took her with me. It was something to do, an activity. Usually we went to Wal-Mart, other times we went to Ralphs.
I pushed the cart. I had a small list. It felt nice and cool as we went down the aisle, and we were in no rush. She picked out cookies. And then some Pop-Tarts.
“Ma, you know you can’t have too many sweets. You know, diabetes.” She looked at me and sighed. She put the Pop-Tarts back, shoving them on the wrong shelf.
When I was a kid, I used to do exactly the same thing when I went shopping with my mother. I would try to slip sweets into our basket. We had so much food in our cart that sometimes it would work, and she wouldn’t notice even at the checkout. She wouldn’t notice until she unpacked it at home. I liked going with her to the supermarket, I used to ride underneath the basket of the shopping cart, sitting with legs straight out in front of me on the little shelf just above the wheels. She would push it for maybe an aisle, and then the wheels would catch and the cart would resist her push. She would tell me to get off and walk, it was too heavy. I would wander off and lose track of her. I didn’t keep her in sight, because I had a system for finding her. I would walk along the end aisle and look up each lane until I found her. Once in a while I would get all the way to the end of the store and not see her. I would become slightly frantic, move quickly from aisle to aisle, and then get ve
ry frantic when I still couldn’t find her. I would run to a checkout girl and get my mother paged.
I was reminded of this childhood panic when I spent too long staring at a box of cereal. I was reading labels, trying to see what she could eat within her diabetes guidelines. I looked up and she was gone. I left the cart and went to the end of the aisle. I looked in each direction—I looked for her, in her powder-blue tracksuit and her short gray hair. I didn’t see her. I moved along, looking up each lane. Still I didn’t see her. I felt myself panicking. I knew that one of the symptoms of dementia is “wandering.” She could wander out into the street and disappear. It happened to old people all the time. They injure themselves, they get lost, they get hit by cars. I started to tear up as I hurried past all the lanes again. She wasn’t that bad yet, she wasn’t totally disoriented yet.
I saw her.
She was at the front of the store, on the other side of the checkout lines. She was standing with a police officer. I ran over, waving my arms at them. I saw that she had handcuffs on. My mother was in handcuffs.
“What is going on?” I said, still tearful, putting my arm around my mother. She looked at me, totally confused.
“Are you her daughter?” said the police officer, who I now saw was simply a security guard.
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