Samuel Johnson's Eternal Return

by Martin Riker

  Then he stopped talking, and he must have been going a good two hours without a break, long enough at least that when he finally stopped it was as if the lights came back on (to continue this movie analogy), and they were both startled, bewildered back into real life. Phyllis cleared the dishes, then cleaned them while Orson walked the dog. Later, they lay silent and fidgety beside each other in bed, pretending to sleep, until the very first light appeared, and they both got up early. Phyllis kept busy through breakfast, then off to work. Orson fussed all morning around the trailer, and shortly after lunch he locked up and walked to one of the truck stops, where he arranged a ride back to Pittsburgh. It happened without warning or ceremony, and in my excitement at the sudden turn of events, I did not spend much time considering what it meant for Orson or what might be transpiring in his mind. Climbing the turnpike on-ramp, we took our last look back at Breezewood, and it was, for me, as if our three-month hiatus there had never even taken place, so gloriously remote did it suddenly appear, so instantly distant.

  Which is also, incidentally, how I felt about my entire time with Orson, many pages ago when I first started describing it for you. I felt—as I have always felt gazing back upon my past—as if I were inspecting a scrapbook of someone else’s memories, distant and strange. But telling this story, my time with Orson—this has gone on longer than expected. Inhabiting these memories deeply enough to write them down has proven emotionally exhausting, and by this point I am ready to be done.

  But I will rally myself one last time for the finale.

  The trip back was, for me, unbearable with anticipation. Once in the city (I assured myself) Orson would fall back to his old ways—the old old ways, the drinking and carousing—would fall back with a vengeance, and I would be ready, had been ready now for a very long time. I would call Blossom’s number and say, “This is Samuel for Phil!” I would name a place to meet, and while realistically I could not expect Phil to be prepared for me, at least he would know I was back in Pittsburgh. Unless Phil himself was not back? It was possible that Blossom had gone off somewhere . . . But no, I told myself, Phil would be back, he would, and would make arrangements—he was good at these things. In the meantime, I would wait. I would plan and prepare. There were things I needed to do. What things? Well, there had to be something I could do. I would figure out what that something was. I would find steps and take them. And Phil would come. He would come. Everything would work out.

  As for Orson, he remained, of course, a necessary precondition to my plans, and as we pulled into Pittsburgh and he headed to the office (not his house, as I’d expected, but to the office downtown, where he hardly ever went), I began to pay more attention to him and to wonder what was going on in his mind. And when we entered the office to find it abandoned, with chairs and desks but not a single paper pile or even garbage in the trash—at that point, I became very keen to know what Orson was thinking and how it might affect my own expectations. Given the scene before us, it seemed likely he was thinking about his past, some vast range of previousness I’d never seen or known about that had shaped his behavior during all the time I’d spent with him. Also about the company, the employees, the years invested, the anger accumulated. And when, after ten minutes of standing there, Orson moved to the window, where he stared out for several hours, until the light outside began to dim and the empty office filled with dark contours (because he hadn’t turned on the lights), during this time my anxiety only grew, until finally I began to have a bad feeling. A premonition, or sense of foreboding. It was the feeling of knowing, or of feeling as if I knew, that the situation I had been stuck in would soon be ending, and everything would change, but not in the way that I wanted. In some ruinous way, some way even more torturously pointless than everything that had happened so far . . .

  That was just a feeling, however.

  At dusk, he wandered out into the world. He circled the streets of downtown for perhaps an hour, then faced uptown and walked without turning. He walked and walked. We ended up, around eight o’clock, at a jazz club in the Hill District. It was a place Orson used to occasionally lurk but where he hadn’t been in a long time, a venue particularly popular with the black community. In fact on this particular night, there were no other white people there. A few customers hung around the bar, and an unusually tall woman sat reading a book beside the stage, where a tenor trio (saxophone, piano, bass) blew through some Ellington standards. Orson headed to the bar and began ordering boilermakers, staring intently at his reflection in the bar mirror.

  No, intently is not the right word. Intently is too intense. He stared deadly, as if dead. He stared deadly and drank boilermaker after boilermaker—and as his blood-alcohol level rose, I allowed myself to feel more optimistic. I told myself that my earlier fearful premonition had been groundless, a bit of fanciful paranoia my mind had picked up from too many years with Orson Fitz. And this nervousness I felt? That was my overwhelming anticipation to be off again to my son. Yet it also occurred to me that the image in the mirror was likely the last look I would have at the living, raging Orson; however this ended, by my hand or his, our time together would soon be over. In fact it could not be over quickly enough!

  Until at last he staggered off the barstool and made his way to the tiny stage—which was low, just a couple of feet up from the floor—where he stood and began shouting in a manner completely inappropriate to the mellow music—“Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!”—and rocking back and forth. He bent over to beat the stage front, like a drummer at the red-hot center of a manic swing band, which in his mind is perhaps what he was. The saxophone player blew a loud note squarely into his face to back him off, but Orson leaned into it, shouted into it—“Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!”—so that the saxophone player now stepped back, and the woman seated by the stage shot Orson an alarmed look, and I suddenly knew, with a sunken heart but with utter surety, that the events transpiring were no longer moving me closer to my son, and that the bad thing I’d been imagining was in fact about to transpire. I did not know what the bad thing would be, but already I hated it. Then Orson stepped onto the stage and grabbed the back of the upright piano, which I found out later was brand new and had just been delivered that day, and had wheels that the movers had mistakenly failed to lock, and which Orson, a weak man but raging with the terrible force of existential obscurity, was somehow able to single-handedly pull backwards off the stage, where it landed on top of him, crushing his lungs and leaving the most horrible look on his face, bulging eyes and the whole deal, an unforgettably nightmarish expression, which an eyeblink later I found myself staring down upon over the bell of a tenor saxophone.

  Thus, in befitting absurdity, ends the story of Orson Fitz.

  7.

  “Henry Nelson!”

  In turning my mind upon the next episode of my tale, I imagine a low rumbling sound, like a herd of animals approaching fast but still far off in the distance—I seem to be feeling poetic for some reason—as yet another round of memories travels toward me across the years. To be honest, I am not eager to dive so quickly into another period of my past, having not yet managed to recover from the last one. One memory, however, has already arrived, well in advance of the others: even before her face, her voice—

  “Henry Nelson!”

  There were two things I quickly learned about Henry. First, that he spent afternoons running a shot-and-beer bar (a bare room with chairs and tables that sold shots of whiskey and cans of beer from a refrigerator) in the Homewood neighborhood of Pittsburgh, so was around booze all the time. And second, that he never drank it. He had a “history” with alcohol, and left to his own devices would likely have drunk a great deal of it, allowing me, his body’s new tenant, to mount a new expedition to my son. But the devices he was left to were never his own, in fact he was hardly ever left alone, but was kept always in mind, if not in sight, by Alma.

  Alma who had wrested him from a drunken down-spiraling life. Who had saved him from himself and was not about to hand him back to hims
elf any time soon. Alma who had married him, housed him, and given him a job in her bar. Who took him wherever she went, and went with him wherever he needed to go. She was not a bad person, I should say. She was a good person, in fact, a charitable figure and community leader. Only that, where Henry was concerned, she was quite a bit more anxious, suspicious, and possessive than she ever was toward anyone else.

  Four and a half years—I’ll just tell you—four and a half years is how long I spent in Henry’s world, a world that was technically just a few miles east of Orson’s, but that might as well have been located on a different planet, in a different dimension of time and space. Homewood in the midseventies was a bustling neighborhood of wood houses and brick tenements, wide avenues and alleys. The sidewalks “hopped,” voices filled the streets and shops, and all kinds of music floated out of windows. Everyone was black—which back then was still fairly new to me—and I was unprepared for the sheer amount of friendliness, having come from life with Orson; in fact it was the liveliest place I’d ever been, certainly much livelier than Unityville. I even found myself wondering, when I first arrived with Henry, before I got so used to his life that I forgot it had ever seemed new—I wondered how differently I, Samuel Johnson, might have turned out, how much more personable a person, had I grown up in this livelier place? But the answer soon became obvious. For not everyone in Homewood was equally sociable, and I had landed in the least social of all. Their loner, their mope: Henry was their Samuel Johnson. I would have been Henry Nelson!

  Which perhaps explains why, despite our many differences, Henry’s life felt familiar to me, and I imagined I understood him, at least better than I’d ever understood Orson. And which perhaps also explains why, in the end, I did not get to know Homewood as well as I might have, since all I ever saw was the view from Henry’s fairly adventureless life. And so repetitive was that life, so run together are its particulars in my mind, that the memories I’m left with cannot be actual memories, not individual scenes that occurred in the manner I remember them, but instead must be recycled out of broken-up moments of endlessly repeated events, as the passage of time reduces whole eras to a handful of reconstituted images.

  For example:

  Here’s Henry at work in the bar. It’s a summer midafternoon, and the floor fans blow a sound like swarming into the room, but not much air or coolness, I think, since everyone is sweating. “Everyone” in this case meaning the four or five regulars who sit around the place, chiding each other and joking with each other and talking all afternoon about the heat, whether the heat is typical of this time of year or is actually hotter than usual, or whether hotter than usual is itself typical of this time of year, whether anything other than usual can also be typical, or if that’s foolish, and so on. Henry doesn’t talk much—he never talks much—but pops beer cans and lugs boxes from the basement, runs a wet rag over surfaces, and there’s a feeling of goodwill in the room, a lazy calm despite the noisy heat, until the day winds down, the night comes on, time passes, the morning arrives, and the same day starts all over.

  Here’s Henry on a bench in the hallway outside the multipurpose room in the church basement. It’s the same bench where Alma waits for him during his Monday night AA meetings, but where more often he waits for her to finish up her various committee meetings. A wooden bench with a back. This hallway is strictly municipal, cinder block painted over in a shade between tan and yellow, with floor tiles that vaguely resemble marble but seem more in imitation of a splattered stone that never naturally existed. And though I cannot smell, I imagine this place smells of paint. It is full of tiny echoes, this hallway. Of muffled other-room voices and pockets of dead air and these tiny echoes caused by the slightest movement atop the bench—and there could not be a more boring place to sit in all the world.

  Here’s Alma driving Henry home from a gig.

  “And what would’ve happened, you think, Henry, if I hadn’t been there tonight? With all that gallivanting and alcohol?”

  “Nothing,” says Henry, staring absently into nighttime traffic. In fact this may be the defining characteristic of Henry, if I had to pick a defining characteristic, that although he was constantly surrounded by people, or by person, still he seemed so often in his own head that it was as if he were always alone. Not how Orson was almost constantly alone, or how for the longest time Christopher had tried to be—but alone nonetheless.

  “Nothing?” says Alma.

  “Not nothing?” says Henry, his mind at last entering the conversation.

  “With all that gallivanting and alcohol?”

  “Well,” says Henry, “I do work in a bar.”

  “In my bar,” says Alma.

  “Well,” says Henry, “your bar does serve alcohol.”

  “It serves what I say it serves,” says Alma—and Henry cannot disagree with that; in fact, I do not know why he has given Alma a hard time in the first place. “And I supervise everything in it.”

  “True,” says Henry, who from here on simply agrees.

  “Everything and everyone.”

  “Well, that’s just true.”

  And when they get home, after he’s gone off to his bedroom (they slept in separate rooms because Henry was a terrible snorer, a fact that brought me no small amount of irritation during our time together), after she’s closed up the house and stopped in to say good night, she gives him a kiss and a shy smile, and I think that she is feeling a little sorry about the spat in the car. That she wishes to convey without quite saying so that she knows she can get a little fiery. He is not a hooligan, after all. Not a playboy or a schemer. He is just Henry, her Henry—Henry Nelson. A thought that surely comforts Alma and that she can tell herself with confidence, since she has no way of knowing the truth. She has no way of knowing that below the surface, in a hidden compartment of his existence, Henry is a different person altogether.

  For you see, Henry Nelson had a secret that only he and I knew about. It was not the sort of secret a person gets into trouble over, but he kept it hidden nonetheless, and waited each night until long after Alma had seen him off to bed before he would escape to it. He would lie perfectly still while the neighborhood outside grew calm and the house went quiet. Then he would reach down from the bed (climbing down caused the floor to creak) and slide out the long low box he kept tucked beneath the dresser. An ordinary cardboard shirt box, yet it contained, for Henry, an entirely different life, a life in which he could be the person he wanted to be, remaking his personality to match his self-imagining, under the bedsheet, with a penlight, in a notebook. The Saga of Henry Nelson. Strictly speaking, he had only one chapter of it, which he reread so often that even now, all these years later, I can remember the whole thing by heart.

  And given that, other than Henry and myself, only two other people ever read his one chapter; and given that his writing was not at all bad (I thought) and probably deserves to be read; and given that I was not, in the end, very good to Henry, and regret what happened to him, not that I was entirely responsible, but still . . . Given all of that, I hope it seems reasonable that before I begin the story of what happened to Henry Nelson—because obviously I have such a story—but before we move on to that, I will first set down here from memory the entirety of Henry’s chapter, beginning with what I think must be the most elaborate title in the history of titles. For it was not simply The Saga of Henry Nelson, it was:

  The Saga of Henry Nelson

  or

  a tale a little taller than some

  about a man a little shorter than most,

  who some called a washed-out has-been

  and others a might-have-been never-was,

  how he was born on a porch swing

  and raised in the Hill

  and never got farther than Homewood,

  how he drove all his life in the wrong direction

  because he couldn’t find a place to turn around,

  how he hooked left when he should’ve run right

  and jumped low whe
n he should’ve ducked high,

  how he lost his path, skipped the tracks,

  and landed smack in a cul-de-sac,

  and how despite all his wrongful inclinations

  he one day found himself in the light,

  having learned a few things

  and seen things and known some characters,

  and having now and for a good while since

  thought upon his missteps and prepared his own

  sober, sound advice to young people

  struggling along that same road,

  all this being written down here by that selfsame

  Henry Nelson,

  the least likely man to say a word about himself to anybody,

  who for reasons even he can’t understand

  one day sat and scribbled out what follows

  Chapter 1

  I’m Born and Grow

  One . . . Two . . . Three . . . Hooooo!

  I was born on a porch swing, and if you don’t believe that, you might as well skip the rest and forget it. My mother’d gone to see Fletcher Henderson’s band the night before and got in her head I was to be a great musician, and got also in her head that since rich people are born chewing on silver spoons, and smart people are born doing algebra on their toes and fingers, great musicians must be born swinging. Oh, I remember that day. (I was there, after all.) The swingchains jangle and the whole seat’s shaking and the doctor’s doing the count-off when I jump the beat and shoot out an eighth note early (never quite learned to lay back), quick as a slippery rocket past the old doc’s catcher’s mitt and up over the big wide world of the porch. That’s me traveling light through the troposphere, taking my first fine look at the world: handsome houses . . . nice warm sun . . . great big marshmallowy clouds . . . So this is living? I say to myself. Why, it’s not half bad! I figure to keep on going this way awhile, a crazy naked baby-rocket on a solo flight through the universe, but then something starts yanking from below, something invisible’s got ahold of me. (Nobody’d hipped me to gravity, see?) It’s powerful, it’s unshakable, and before you know I’m falling fast, bouncing off a porch rail and landing in a prickle bush out the sideyard. Henry Nelson, welcome to the world!